Denise Lardner Carmody (Essay Date 1988)

SOURCE: Carmody, Denise Lardner. "Genesis 2:23-24." In Biblical Woman: Contemporary Reflections on Scriptural Texts, pp. 9-14. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1988.

In the following essay, Carmody approaches the book of Genesis from an analytical perspective informed by contemporary feminism.

Then the man said, "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." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.

The scholarly consensus is that this text occurs in a stratum of the J, or Yahwist (J from the German Jahwist), tradition. J is the oldest of the traditions woven into Genesis, probably having roots as early as the tenth century B.C.E. It is earthy...