Genesis 2:21,22

‘So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept, and he took one of his sides and closed up its place with flesh. And the side that he had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.'

The deep sleep, when God will do something exceptional and a mystery is about to be revealed, is paralleled elsewhere (compare Genesis 15:12) although the parallel is not exact as Abraham was conscious. The stress is on the fact that the creation of the woman is a mystery.

Note that the word translated ‘rib' in most versions, is almost without exception translated ‘side' in the Old Testament. It was later tradition that inaccurately turned it into a rib. The description, which avoids detail, is of some remarkable process by which the woman devolved out of the man. The process and the method are not revealed.

The writer is always careful to avoid the excesses of mythology. This is ancient philosophy. What he is trying to demonstrate is not the method of her production but that the woman is seen to be man's equal, for she is one half of him, his ‘other half''. So the woman is both his helper and his equal. In New Testament terms the man is the head of the woman as Christ is the head of the church, and we cannot avoid here in Genesis the idea that the man has some kind of extra status, for he is the one made by God to act on God's behalf on earth, and she is the helper. But the woman is his close helper, and equal in all except that status.