The following article was inspired by my post, “Curse of Adam“, with most scripture references sourced from Word-of-Yah.org using the The Scriptures 2009 (TS2009) translation.…
(Special thanks to my sister in Yeshua Mashiyach, Flora, for pointing out the root connection between ‘marriage’ and ‘ba’al’, among other considerations, and to my family at Kingdom of Heaven Assembly for many edifying discussions that helped shape this work.)
In the beginning, matrimony was never a hierarchy of master and possession. It was a covenant of shared substance. When YHWH brings the woman to the man in Genesis 2, the man’s response is not a claim of ownership — it’s a recognition of identity: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman [אשׁה, ishshah], because she was taken out of Man [אישׁ, ish]” (Genesis 2:23). The two words are not separate categories of “owner” and “owned” — ishshah is the feminine form of ish. The text is built on a grammar of sameness, and it ends not with a transaction but with union: “they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Scripture soon supplies the very word for how that union is enacted: יָדַע, yada, “to know.” “Adam knew [yada] Chawwah [Eve] his wife, and she conceived” (Genesis 4:1). Yada is not a euphemism reaching for a word the language lacked — it is the ordinary Hebrew term for knowing a person or a fact, applied here, without embarrassment, to the most intimate act two people share. The vocabulary makes no distinction between the physical and the personal way a modern reader might expect one; to know a spouse in this grammar is at once to be joined in body and disclosed in self, one word carrying both. That word will carry the same weight forward, later in Scripture, into how YHWH describes being known by His own people.
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