What Does Genesis 1:29 Mean?

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." This is the first etiological statement in scripture, a statement that explains the origin of a practice. The leaving-and-cleaving pattern of human marriage is grounded in the created origin of the woman from the man's body. Because the woman came from the man, marriage is the rejoining of what was made from one into two and is now becoming one again, "one flesh" recapitulating the original union of substance from which the woman came.

The statement is remarkable in its patriarchal context: it is the man who leaves his father and mother, not the woman. In the cultural world of the ancient Near East, women left their families to join their husbands. The reversal here, the man leaves, points to the theological priority of the marriage bond over the family of origin. The covenant bond of marriage supersedes the biological bond of birth; the new family created by marriage has a priority that even the nuclear family of origin does not match.

Paul quotes this verse in Ephesians 5:31 in the context of the relationship between Christ and the church. The one-flesh union of husband and wife is, for Paul, a "mystery" that points to the greater union of Christ with his people. The marriage narrated in Genesis 2 is not only the foundation of human family life; it is a type embedded at the beginning of the story for the purposes of the ending of the story, the marriage supper of the Lamb of Revelation 19, the final rejoining that the original union signifies.