What Does Genesis 2:20 Mean?

"This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." The man's response to the woman is the first human speech in the Bible directed at another human being, and it erupts as poetry. The "at last" (Hebrew: zot hapa'am, literally "this time" or "now at last") carries the weight of the completed search. Every animal was insufficient; this one corresponds. The recognition is immediate, certain, and expressed in a form higher than naming: it is proclamation.

"Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" is covenant language, the formula used in the ancient Near Eastern world to ratify bonds of kinship and solidarity. David uses it when the tribes come to Hebron (2 Samuel 5:1). The man is specifically identifying her biological origin; he is declaring a covenant recognition: she is his kin at the deepest level, the one whose substance is his own substance, the one with whom he is bound in the way that flesh and bone are bound to their owner.

The naming that follows, "she shall be called Woman (ishah), because she was taken out of Man (ish)", is different in character from the naming of the animals. The animals are named as creatures categorized; the woman is named for her relationship to the man. The name announces correspondence, not classification. She is ishah not as a species label but as a relational name: what she is cannot be stated except in relation to him. The first human identity statement is relational through and through.