What Does Genesis 24:64 Mean?

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." The creation of the woman from the man's rib is the most intimate act of creation since the forming of the man from dust. As the man was formed from the ground by the Creator's own hands, the woman is formed from the man's own substance. The material shared between them is the basis for the declaration: "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." The exclamation is the first human speech in Genesis and from the beginning it is a speech of recognition, delight, and belonging.

The deep sleep into which the man falls while the woman is formed is the creation's most suggestive silence. He does not participate in her creation; he cannot. The corresponding partner he cannot find through his own effort is given to him through a process that occurs while he is completely unconscious. The same pattern governs the covenant's most critical provisions: the covenant heir is not produced by human arrangement (Sarah's womb); the bride is found for the covenant heir by a servant he trusts (Rebekah); the resurrection occurs while the disciples sleep in grief and fear. The gift that is most needed is given while the recipient is most passive.

The man's declaration "bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh" is the first human theological statement: a recognition that the woman shares his substance, his nature, his dignity. Paul in Ephesians 5:28-29 quotes this passage to establish the principle that a husband's love for his wife is love for his own body, since "no one ever hated their own body." Jesus cites Genesis 2 in his teaching on marriage in Matthew 19: "what God has joined together, let no one separate." The first human speech about the woman is the one that Jesus will identify as the foundation of marriage understood as covenant union.