NOTES for Gen 2:20-25
An interesting situation arises with the names, or perhaps descriptions, since the corresponding Hebrew word permits both translations, that the human being gives to the animals around him as he searches for a helper “corresponding to him”. The description itself is significant: the Hebrew expression literally means “a helper standing face to face”, as an equal, as someone with whom one can converse. It is unsurprising that no one equal to the human being is found in the animal world. Yet it is here that the human being makes ample use of his ability to give names. There is nothing surprising about this: to give a name or to name a thing meant, first of all, to determine its place in the human world and also to extend over it the authority that an owner has over what belongs to him. Naturally, none of those with whom the human being establishes such a relationship can become the helper he seeks, for what is needed here is a relationship between equals, in which questions about who is master and who belongs to whom automatically lose their meaning. And the human being gives no name to the one whom he sees as his equal, the woman God gives him as wife. Even the term “woman, wife” comes from the same root as “human being” or “man”: the two receive one name that unites them. Thus the human being finds another human being, a helper “standing opposite him”, someone whom he will treat not as a thing, not as an object, even an animate one, but as his neighbour. Without this, a human being cannot become truly human.