Advocates of a non-literal or primarily allegorical reading contend that Genesis 2:4–25 (and 2:23 in particular) was composed first and foremost to teach meaning through symbol, not to narrate an event in space-time. Within that broad claim, several strands often appear:

1. Social-ethical allegory. The verse is read as a parable of human solidarity: “bone of my bones” becomes a metaphor for the interdependence of society or the covenant people, not a statement about the first woman’s origin. The movement to “one flesh” (2:24) is taken as a symbolic charter for social cohesion and loyalty, rather than a historical explanation for marriage.^1,2,3
2. Archetypal/psychological reading. Drawing on depth psychology (clinical and theoretical approaches focused on the unconscious, mental activity that shapes feelings, motives, and behavior), some treat Adam and the woman as archetypes (e.g., reason and intuition, self and other, conscious and unconscious). On this view, “taken out of man” dramatizes internal differentiation within the human psyche; the exclamation expresses the integration of complementary traits rather than the recognition of another historical person.⁴
3. Wisdom or liturgical didacticism. Others place the passage in an instructional or worship setting: a crafted story used in Israel’s pedagogy to commend prudence, fidelity, and household order. The elevated poem (“This is now bone of my bones…”) functions like a memorized refrain for communal recitation, signaling its intent as catechesis, not chronicle.⁵
4. Etiology without event. Some classify the unit as a pure etiological tale: it provides a story-shaped rationale for practices (“a man shall leave his father and his mother…,” 2:24) with no historical claim implied—the “because” of 2:23 is explanatory fiction that grounds custom in meaning rather than in a past occurrence.⁶
5. Compositional artistry over reportage. Finally, literary critics note the embedded poem, heavy paronomasia (ʾîš/ʾiššāh), and carefully staged presentation (2:22) as marks of artifice. These features, they argue, signal crafted symbolism; the text’s “truth” lies in theology and poetics, not in factual recounting.⁷

Proponents of these interpretations point to the chapter’s heightened style and lack of modern historical markers, the prevalence of symbolic naming and etiologies in Genesis, the use of figurative readings in some Second Temple and early Christian writers, and modern genre theory that distinguishes mythic or sapiential narrative from historiography. In sum, the allegory-only position sees 2:23 as literary symbol about unity and complementarity, not a record of the first human pair.

An accurate reading of this passage recognizes thatScripture’s symbolism here is not a substitute for history but rises from it. The verse is a crafted poem embedded in a prose narrative that presents concrete sequence, agents, and divine action.

Genre Signals of Historical Narrative

Genesis 2:4 opens with a tôledôt (“These are the generations…”) frame; the passage proceeds with wayyiqtol narrative⁸ (“And the LORD God formed… planted… took… brought…”) marking real-time sequence and causation. Named actors, temporal progression, and causal logic (“because she was taken out of man”) function as historical discourse markers, not free-floating symbols.^9,10,11

Geographical and Social Concreteness

The wider unit situates Eden with geographical detail (2:10–14) and closes with an etiology for marriage practice (2:24). In Scripture, etiologies commonly interpret real events and their abiding significance; they need not imply fabrication.¹²

Poetry Inside Prose Memorializes Events

Biblical writers frequently weave short poems into prose narratives at moments of high significance. This literary pattern—often called prosimetrum—does not signal unreality; it functions to mark, interpret, and memorialize decisive acts of God. In Genesis 2:23, the narrative’s sequential verbs (“formed… brought…”) crest in a compact poem. The shift to verse serves as a rhetorical spotlight: the first human words are preserved in elevated diction precisely because they crystallize the meaning of what has just occurred.¹³

1) Salience and signal. Verse inside narrative flags a turning point. As in Exodus 15 (after the sea crossing), Judges 5 (after Sisera’s defeat), 2 Samuel 1 (after Saul and Jonathan’s death), and Jonah 2 (from the fish), the narrator pauses the story to let a memorable, recitable text fix the event’s theological sense in the community’s mind. The poem becomes the “headline” by which the episode is remembered and rehearsed.

2) Interpretation, not mere ornament. Embedded poems are interpretive keys, not decorative add-ons. They compress doctrine into art: Exodus 15 interprets deliverance as Yahweh’s kingship; Judges 5 frames victory as covenant faithfulness. Likewise, Adam’s verse interprets the presentation of the woman as correspondence and unity—a theological reading of God’s act—rather than leaving the scene as bare reportage.¹⁴

3) Commemoration and transmission. Poetry’s parallelism and rhythm aid public memory. Israel’s history is repeatedly taught and re-taught through songs, laments, and oracles embedded in story (e.g., Deuteronomy 32; 1 Samuel 2). Genesis 2:23 functions similarly: the first couple’s bond is given a liturgical form that can be voiced, learned, and carried forward as the rationale for “one flesh” (2:24).

4) Performative recognition. Many embedded poems are performative speech-acts—blessings, oaths, laments, or confessions—that both say and do something in the story world (e.g., Noah’s oracle in Gen 9:25–27). Adam’s poem is a recognition formula: by publicly naming the woman “Woman,” he acknowledges identity and relation in a way that stabilizes communal practice (marriage) that follows.¹⁵

Poetry within prose does what monuments do in space: it fixes memory in form. Adam’s exclamation is elevated speech about a real act of God, crafted to ensure that the meaning of that act—created correspondence ordered to one-flesh union—would be sung, cited, and lived. The verse’s beauty is an index of its weight, not a warrant to dissolve its historicity.

Symbolism vs. Allegorization

Symbolism in Scripture adds significance to what God has actually done; it layers meaning onto real persons and events. Allegorization, by contrast, treats the narrative chiefly as a cipher and replaces the historical sense with an abstract idea. Genesis 2:23 is rich with symbol, but its symbols arise from—and depend on—the concrete act of God forming the woman and presenting her to the man. The verse’s beauty is not an escape from history; it is theology sung over history.

Genesis 2:23 employs symbol without erasing fact. The paronomasia ʾîš/ʾiššāh (“man/woman”) communicates correspondence-in-distinction through sound and sense,¹⁶ yet it does so about two real human beings. The kinship idiom, “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” is a known Hebrew formula that conveys shared nature and covenantal nearness; its force presupposes an actual counterpart, not a psychological archetype. Even the causal clause—“because she was taken out of man”—grounds the poetry in event, explaining both her designation and their unity in terms of what God has actually done.

The New Testament confirms that biblical writers draw typology, not free-floating allegory, from Genesis 2–3. Typology presumes real history and then shows how earlier persons and events prefigure later ones. Thus, Paul can call Adam “the figure of him that was to come” (Romans 5:14) and contrast the “first man Adam” with the “last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45–49); he can also argue from the order of creation: “For Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). Likewise, when Paul cites “they two shall be one flesh,” he unveils a “great mystery” that concerns Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31–32). In every case, theological meaning rests on the reality of Adam and Eve and the fact of their union.

Reading symbols responsibly requires several guardrails. The literal sense supplies the referent: symbols interpret what the text asserts happened; they do not void it. The canon provides control: later Scripture cites Genesis 2:23–24 as normative for doctrine and ethics, not as pliable metaphor (cf. Matthew 19:4–6). Ethical entailment also matters: the symbol issues in concrete practice—“one flesh” (Gen 2:24)—which signals that we are dealing with creational reality, not an illustrative fable.¹⁷ Even the literary fit of the passage supports this: the verse’s poetic features function as a theological gloss on a narrated act, not as a signal that the act is fictive.

This distinction carries real doctrinal weight. If Genesis 2:23 is reduced to allegory, the creational grounding for human nature, sexual differentiation, and marriage evaporates. Read as symbol-laden history, it provides a durable foundation: a real man and a real woman, joined by God’s design, whose union both is what it says—“one flesh”—and signifies what it points to: Christ and His Bride.

Canonical Appeal Assumes a Real Past

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles treat Genesis 2:23–24 not as pliable metaphor but as the foundational record of how God ordered human life “from the beginning.” When questioned about marriage and divorce, Jesus explicitly joins Genesis 1:27 to 2:24: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female… For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh… What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:4–6; cf. Mark 10:6–9). His ethic depends on the reality of what God actually did in creation; the authority of His conclusion turns on the event’s historicity, not on a free-floating ideal about human solidarity.

Paul’s appeals are of the same kind. In 1 Timothy 2:13–14, he reasons from sequence and occurrence—“For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression”—arguments that only carry weight if formation and deception refer to real events. In 1 Corinthians 11:8–12 he again draws on Genesis: “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man… Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.” Here origin (“of”) and interdependence (“in the Lord”) are held together; practice in the churches is grounded in what happened at creation, not in later social constructs.

The soteriological fabric of the canon is also woven to a historical Adam. “By one man sin entered into the world” (Romans 5:12), and “Adam… is the figure of him that was to come” (Romans 5:14). Likewise, “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). These contrasts between the first man and Christ the last Adam assume that Adam was not a literary cipher but a historical head whose act had real covenantal consequence. If Adam is only allegory, Paul’s federal argument collapses; if his creation and relationship to the woman are merely symbolic, the typology loses its anchor.

The wider canonical witness further binds Genesis 2 to real time and space. Luke’s genealogy reaches back to “Adam, which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38), and Jude speaks of “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam” (Jude 14), treating Adam as a chronological marker within history. The Old Testament’s own genealogies (e.g., 1 Chronicles 1) integrate the primeval pair into Israel’s remembered past, not into a mythic preface. In Ephesians 5:31–32, Paul cites Genesis 2:24 to explain both marriage and the “great mystery” of Christ and the Church; the typology draws meaning from the creation ordinance precisely because it is an ordinance instituted by God in reality.

Taken together, these canonical appeals show a consistent apostolic method: doctrine and ethics flow from what God has done in creation. Jesus’s marriage ethic, Paul’s ecclesial practice, and the gospel’s Adam–Christ typology all presuppose that Genesis 2:23–24 reports a real past. To reduce the passage to allegory is to saw off the branch on which the New Testament sits; to receive it as history enriched with theology is to honor the way Scripture itself argues.

In conclusion, Genesis 2:23 is not ornament for a fable but lyric etched into history, poetry pressed into service to confess what God actually did. Its elevated form fixes in memory the gift of correspondence God established, naming reality rather than inventing it. Far from diluting the verse’s force, the beauty intensifies its claim: creation yields a truth to be received in worship and obeyed in life. In this single utterance, Scripture weds literary splendor to concrete event, so that doctrine rests on deed and confession rises from fact.

1. Walter Brueggemann, “Of the Same Flesh and Bone (Gn 2,23a),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1970): 532–42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43715092 (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎
2. Bruce Rosenstock, “Kinship, Incest, and Slavery: A Thematic Constellation in the Triteuchal Political Theology of the Divine Name,” Harvard Theological Review 116, no. 1 (2023): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816023000019 (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎
3. Gordon P. Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant: A Study of Biblical Law and Ethics Governing Marriage Developed from the Perspective of Malachi (Leiden: Brill, 1994). ↩︎
4. Helen Efthimiadis-Keith, “Genesis 2:18–25 from a Jungian and Feminist-Deconstructionist Point of View,” Old Testament Essays 23, no. 1 (2010): 44–65, https://scielo.org.za/pdf/ote/v23n1/03.pdf (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎
5. John L. McKenzie, “The Literary Characteristics of Genesis 2–3,” Theological Studies 18 (1957): 541–72, https://theologicalstudies.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/McKenzie-Literary-Characteristics-Gen-2%E2%80%933.pdf. ↩︎
6. Michaela Bauks, “Rhetorical Features and Characteristics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Genesis, ed. Bill T. Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). ↩︎
7. McKenzie, “Literary Characteristics,” 557–60. ↩︎
8. Wayyiqtol narrative refers to a stretch of Biblical Hebrew prose in which the storyline is carried by a chain of wayyiqtol verbs, i.e., the conjunction waw attached to a prefix-conjugation (yiqtol) form with characteristic gemination/lengthening (e.g., wayyōmer “and he said,” wayyēlek “and he went”). These clauses mark past-time, event-advancing sequence (the narrative “main line”), typically following a scene-setting clause (e.g., wayhî + time or a nominal/qatal clause). Non-wayyiqtol forms (qatal, yiqtol, participles, weqatal) usually supply background, asides, habituals, or projections, so a “wayyiqtol narrative” is simply a passage dominated by this sequential past form. ↩︎
9. Jason S. DeRouchie, “The Blessing-Commission, the Promised Offspring, and the Toledot Structure of Genesis,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 56, no. 2 (2013): 219–47, https://jasonderouchie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2013-JETS-56.2-The-Blessing-Commission-the-Promised-Offspring-and-the-Toledot-Structure-of-Genesis-DeRouchie.pdf. ↩︎
10. Bo Isaksson, “Biblical Hebrew Short Yiqṭol and the ‘Consecutive Tenses,’” in New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, ed. Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan, Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures 7 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 228–33, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0250.09. ↩︎
11. Richard S. Hess, “Hypotaxis,” in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 2–4, https://ancienthebrewgrammar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/holmstedt_hypotaxishebrew_ehll2013.pdf. ↩︎
12. Brevard S. Childs, “The Etiological Tale Re-Examined,” Vetus Testamentum 24, no. 4 (1974): 387–97, https://doi.org/10.2307/1517173 (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎
13. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 1 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987). ↩︎
14. Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983), 99–117, https://archive.org/details/poeticsinterpret0000berl (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎
15. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). ↩︎
16. NET Bible (New English Translation), translator’s note on Gen 2:23, (Dallas: Biblical Studies Press, 2005), https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2%3A23&version=NET (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎
17. William A. Heth, “The Meaning of Divorce in Matthew 19:3–9,” Churchman 98, no. 2 (1984): 136–49, https://www.churchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Cman_098_2_Heth.pdf (accessed August 17, 2025). ↩︎