Ish and Ishah: God’s Pattern for Marriage
-By D’vorah Berkowitz-
There is a Creator, and we are created. It would be wisdom for us the creation to understand that we are from the Creator Himself. We invite you, the reader, to begin your explorations of who you are within your marriage from within this first foundational thought.
To discover marriage as the Creator created it to be, we must discover the male and the female that we are. We must ask some very important questions. To ask these questions, we begin with the text of the creation of ish (איש) and isha (אשה), the man and the woman.
The Lord God formed ha adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became nephesh chayya. (Genesis 2:7)
This Hebrew term that tells us the creation that we are, what does it mean?
— nephesh is a life in the wholeness of that life, chayya alive/living.[1] The term is very important to understand for us to then explore the creation that we are.
To understand who we are as husband and wife, we begin by understanding the creation that the Creator created us male and female to be husband and wife. Our Creator is telling us that He created ha adam (the man) to be a life living exactly as that life is created to live—living according to created design in the wholeness of that design.
Then we read that He put ha adam to sleep to bring his “face-to-face companion” out from his own body (Genesis 2:21-24). The Creator positions the two “face to face” and declares them to be echad—declares them to be a true “no separation” (echad).[2]
What does our Creator mean in telling ish and isha that they are a true “no separation”? Do we have the courage to explore this reality? What will it mean for how I allow God to take me on such a journey together with my wife or with my husband? How tightly do I hold onto my own imaginations of how I define myself?
“I will make for him a helper as one who is ezer knegdo” (עזר כנגדו). “I will make for him a helper as one who is in front of him.” (Genesis 2:18)
To say that this helper is opposite him is a position of “in front of him” which is then a position of face to face. The isha was inside ha adam and now isha will be face to face with the ish. They share one life and by creation are a true “no separation”. When the ish opened his eyes and saw her for the first time in Genesis 2:23, he said, “…עצם מעצמי” “bone of my bones” or “essence of my essence.”
Furthermore, “Then Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ishah, for she was taken out of ish.” The word “woman (ishah, אשה) is the female version of man, איש. The woman is made from the very essence of man. They then share the same created essence. She is “essence of my essence”. The phrase עצם מעצמי (“essence of my essence”) carries the meaning of “same”. When the ish sees (truly sees) his isha, she is a mirror for him.
Let us carry this concept a little further. He is her source (rosh, ראש) and she is his mirror.[3] The two of them together are positioned face to face by our Father, our Creator. In this reality we can explore all that is the same in who we are as ish and isha. In living that reality, we discover what male is and what female is that is same created essence. And in living that reality, we will begin to discover what the Creator created that is unique to male and what is unique to female and how that blends together in a true “no separation” to share one life.
When a man and a woman join together in marriage, Genesis 2:24 tells us what happens. A more literal translation or this verse would be: “For this reason an ish [man] leaves his father and his mother and cleaves with ishto [his wife] and they become basar echad [one flesh].” From this passage we can see that they return to being one body, one life — the way they were when God created man and took woman from him. When husband and wife know this — deeply and truly know this — their experience together is very different from couples who do not yet know this reality of truth.
The barrage of problems that married couples face and experience comes from not knowing the truth about who they are—not knowing the creation that they are. Once we know the creation that we are by the mouth of our Creator Himself (His Word) then together we can take the journey of being transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2) according to the truths of being the ish and isha that our Creator created. With renewed minds together we will find ourselves free to live as we were created to live in the marriage that He created marriage to be.
“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
Marriage counseling that teaches how to deal with symptoms will leave the couple still dealing with feelings that are coming from created essence and not know where what they are experiencing is coming from. Why? Because the couple does not know their own created essence. We are a creation created to live from our created essence—living according to created design in the wholeness of that design. In this, we find ourselves experiencing what it is to be fully alive!
Every little boy and every little girl will grow up in the society in which they are born. Each society has its definitions of what it is to be male and what it is to be female. What happens when these definitions do not match our created essence, but our minds are formed believing these definitions put forth by our society? What will we then experience? What will we then experience as a couple? These questions certainly spark much discussion for the Body of Messiah to consider. There is much for the Body of Messiah to begin to discuss within this question. If a couple has never explored from God’s Word what our Creator says about the male that He created and the female that He created, then what we grew up with will be what we assume. What we believe will then create the environment of our marriage and the environment of our marriage becomes the environment that our children will grow up in. Is the environment of our home the same as the beliefs of the society that we live in? Or are we permitting the home environment to be conformed to the Word of God? Moreover, what about the environment of our believing community?
Let us return now to descriptions we can glean from Beresheet about the ish and ishah relationship. As we do so, we can see another concept that needs consideration is the reality that we are created for delight. We see this in Genesis 2:8 where we read,
“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden [b’eden] in the east, and there He placed the man whom He had formed,”
ויטע יהוה אלהים גן בעדן מקדם וישם שם את האדם אשר יצר
While this is a good translation, it is not the only rendering possible. Let us look at this verse a little closer. First, instead of transliterating the Hebrew word “Eden,” we can translate it as “delight.” The preposition ב before ‘eden shows us that it is either a place, “in delight” or a means, “by delight.”[4] Second, rather than rendering the Hebrew word “kedem” (קדם) as “east”, as many translations do, we should translate it as “before the first.”[5] With a preposition mem (מ) before it we see a time indicator: “before the first, from the very beginning.” Of course, as we know, only God Himself existed from that time.
Let us put Genesis 2:8 together like this:
The Lord God planted a garden in delight or by delight from the very first, from the very beginning. It is there that God put the man whom He had created in real time and space in history.
Do we see what this is saying? Adam and then Eve were created in complete delight with their Creator.
Our Creator is telling us that there is an environment of delight and complete unity with the Creator for us and we are created for such an environment. We are also a creation of five senses. These five senses put us into our environment and bring our environment literally to within us. It is very important for a couple to find out what is known of how the five senses work by the Creator’s design within the wholeness of nephesh chayyah within the Garden He created—the environment that we are created for is delight for all five senses, and we share that delight in a face-to-face relationship, both of us equally in the delight that we share within the environment that we share.
As a couple, sit and think together about the environment in which we are created to exist. Together we create our home and together we are the environment of our home. Each of us is an environment for the other and for our children. Together we are our children’s environment. The environment that we are will come from the mind that we have. The mind that we have comes from what we expose ourselves to and what we think about.
Research being done today is showing how much environment affects us. The new field of epigenetics is changing how we understand heredity. Heredity is classically known as depending on genetics, and our genetic code which is transferred from parent to offspring through reproductive cells. But now it is known that there is also acquired heredity, which is the inheritance of traits acquired during life upon exposure to the environment and life experiences. This form of inheritance depends on the epigenome, which are factors around the DNA sequence that regulate DNA activity.
The DNA within the nucleus of each cell carries the blueprint of tov, but it is the environment to which every cell will conform. If you change the environment, you produce cells that will respond to the changes. It is not the nucleus or the DNA of the cell that causes the change, but the cell wall that responds to your environment. This is because we are nephesh chayah, a life in wholeness. The health of our wholeness includes who we are on a cellular level. The environment that we are for one another creates changes in our DNA, because for each cell, the cell wall responds to our environment. We suggest that we take a careful look within the questions that we need to ask ourselves. Our whole-being health and that of our children depends upon it by the design of The Creator Himself.
Because the environment that we create is so closely linked to the thoughts of our mind, it would be wisdom to learn what we can about the created design of the neural networks that make up the mind that we live from.
We have created a place to explore the design of our Creator in how He created the brain to serve the creation He created us to be. More about this can be found in Sitting Room 2 of the MBT Academy (Modular Biblical Training Academy) designed as a place on the internet to explore Timeless Torah Truths. (www.TorahTruths.com)
There is so much to talk about within The Body of Messiah, based upon what our Creator tells us in Beresheet. We are created for delight and to be a delight—to Him and to one another! We are a creation created to be an environment of delight for our children to flourish within and to be free to be the creation they are in all their brilliance. Home environments and other environments of our children make all the difference in each child being free to grow within the brilliance and creativity with which they were born. There is so much to explore about this also!
Genesis chapter 1 presents to us the Days of Creation. At the completion of each part of creation, the Creator looks at what He created, and it is exactly what He intended. Therefore, He then says: “It is Tov” (טוב). By this first use of the word tov, we understand the way that God uses the word “tov”. When something is what it is created to be, it is tov. When something is not what it is created to be, it is then not tov. Now, notice in the text that when God creates ha’adam (the man), He does not yet say it is tov. But, when ha’adam is inhabiting his environment the way he is created to inhabit it, the Creator says it is tov! (Genesis 1:21)
We are created to be a delight and created for delight (Genesis 2:8). We are created for the delight of purity—everything God created in the purity of that creation. For those of us who are born again, we are now a new creation! When we find the purity of anything, it will match our newly birthed created essence, and we will experience delight. Therefore, in exploring what God created marriage to be, we must seek to know our purity within our five senses. This happens only in a mind of purity. Most of us will enter marriage with any level of a mind filled with impurity. The true delight we are created to live is found only in the purity of the pure. All manner of delight, as God created delight, exists within purity! Each couple can explore the delight that exists within purity. Children who grow up within the life of their parents living such delight will know a more accurate face of the Creator.
What does all of this tell us about our Creator and His intentions in Creation?
God had a good reason to give the biblical book of love poems the name “Song of Songs”. The Song of all Songs is made up of approximately 27 love poems, and the majority of these love poems are in the voice of the woman in her love for her “ish” (איש). Let us not miss our Creator’s intention for the home environment of intimacy and delight in face-to-face relationships—for each family willing to discover His intention. In our cultures, have we missed the truth about what is meaningful in life? Have we missed the role of environment in humanity reaching full potential in the many faceted brilliances inherent within who all of us are as the creation of such a Creator?
Our Creator wrote His Word in ways to lead us to ask questions—questions that lead us to discoveries which we are created to find. Will we choose to explore God’s Word learning how to let it say what it says? The male that He created is male. But do we know what that male is? The female that God created is female. But do we know what that female is? Or do we only know the definitions we have from whatever culture in which we grew up? Are we aware of the culture that we are in today and to which one we are conforming? How will we explore marriage as the delight that He created marriage to be if we do not yet know what the male He created is and do not yet know what the female that He created is. What if we do not even know the new-creation humanity that we are? Do we know that the finished work of Messiah on the tree actually restored us to being the original humanity that He created through new birth?
2 Corinthians 5:17 says,
“Therefore, if anyone is in Messiah, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
Do we know that the finished work of Messiah on the tree also returned us to inside God? As a couple, do we explore our relationship based upon who we are now as restored humanity and returned together living from inside our Creator? Do we know in our moment-by-moment living that we are seated now in Heavenly realms to walk here together from there? Or do we live daily life from the mind of who we once were and are no longer—a mind conformed to a world we once lived in but should not conform to? If we are not being transformed together by the renewing of our mind, we will face marital problems like anyone else.
We are inviting you, the reader, to explore your questions about marriage from a new starting point:
He is nephesh chayya — a life living
She is nephesh chayya — a life living
In marriage we become ish and ishah (man and woman), and basar echad (one flesh sharing one life) living in “face-to-face” relationship.
This is the essence that the Creator created in us. Until we seek to know this life together as a couple, we will still experience a sense of something very deep missing.
[1] nefesh (נפש) — Historical linguistic fact: Before the 300’s bce, nephesh (נפש) was never translated soul. It was after the Greeks forced assimilation in Israel that the word nephesh eventually was translated soul. The concept of a soul has its origin of compartmentalizing body soul and spirit from within the Hellenistic world view verses the Hebrew knowing oneself as a living being, as a life breathing the breath of God.
[2] In Hebrew we have 2 words for one: yachid (יחיד) and echad (אחד). While there is some overlap of meaning, yachid is usually a singular one and echad is often a composite unity to be understood as a true one.
[3] Rosh (ראש) means source, such as the source of a body of water. In English we say “head waters” to refer to where the source of the water is.
[4] Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (halot), 105.
[5] See, for example the entry for ose from several Hebrew lexicons, such as Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament by Jenni and Westermann), 1182.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
D’vorah studied Social Work at West Chester State University and Philadelphia Biblical University in America, and then attended Rodef Torah School of Jewish Studies. Presently, she is a Learning Environment Consultant and CEO of Table Talk Torah Truths which provides practical aids to living God’s Word in practical, life-changing ways. She is also an instructor with Torah Resources International. She and her husband have been working Internationally for over 21 years and have written over 10 books. They moved to Israel 30 years ago and have four grown children and seven grandchildren.