Genesis 2:21 - Exposition

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept. This was clearly not a sleep of weariness or fatigue, in consequence of arduous labors undergone, but a supernatural slumber, which, however, may have been superinduced upon the natural condition of repose. Lightfoot, following the LXX . who translate tardemah (deep sleep) by ecstasy , ε ̓ ì κστασις , imagines that the whole scene of Eve's creation was presented to Adam's imagination in a Divinely-inspired dream, which has at least the countenance of Job 4:13 Such a supposition, however, is not required to account for Adam's recognition of his bride. There is more of aptness in the observation of Lange, that in the deep sleep of Adam we have an echo of the area-tire evenings that preceded the Divine activity. "Everything out of which some new thing is to come sinks down before the event into such a deep sleep, is the farseeing and comprehensive remark of Ziegler. And he took one of his ribs ( tsela = something bent, from tesala , to incline; hence a rib), and closed up the flesh (literally, flesh) instead thereof . Whether Adam was created with a superfluous rib, or his body was mutilated by the abstraction of a rib, is a question for the curious. In the first, Calvin finds nothing "which is not in accordance with Divine providence," while he favors the latter conjecture, and thinks that Adam got a rich compensation—" quum se integrum vidit in uxore, qui prius tantum dimidius erat ." Luther inclines to think that Adam's language in verse 23 implies that not the bare rib, but the rib with the accompanying flesh, was extracted.