What Does Genesis 2:22 Mean?

The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. The final statement of the creation account is also the introduction to the fall narrative: the condition that characterizes the unfallen world is transparency without shame. Two people, fully exposed to one another and to God, with nothing hidden, nothing to hide, and no impulse toward concealment. This is the world before the fall: not a world without knowledge but a world without the specific knowledge that creates shame.

Shame enters immediately in chapter 3: after eating, "the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together" (3:7). The progression from "naked and not ashamed" to "naked and ashamed" is the measure of the fall's effect on human self-awareness and relational openness. What was transparent becomes hidden; what was un-self-conscious becomes the object of acute self-awareness and protective concealment.

The nakedness-without-shame is a three-dimensional reality: the man and woman are open to each other, open to God, and at peace within themselves. The redemptive project of the biblical story is the restoration of this three-fold openness. The new creation aims at a reality in which concealment is no longer needed, shame is fully dealt with, and the nakedness of full exposure before God and one another is experienced as it was first given, without shame, without hiding, without the fig-leaf strategies of the fallen world.