Chapter 10
The Opened Side
How do you come by a bride who does not yet exist?
For Adam there was no one. All of creation had passed by, and no creature was a fit for him. So God did something no one could have devised. He caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man — no ordinary slumber, but a God-sent unconsciousness in which the man lay like one dead. And while he lay there, God opened his side, took something from it, and from it built a woman (Genesis 2:21-22).
No second lump of clay, separately molded. Not someone made beside him, like the animals. Someone taken from him, built up out of his own opened side. And when he woke and saw her, he rejoiced: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (2:23).
Here lies the deepest secret of the Bride: she is not made beside the Bridegroom. She is taken out of Him.
The second sleep, the second side
Leap now, across all the ages, to a hill outside Jerusalem.
The last Adam hangs on the cross. He has just "given up the spirit" (John 19:30) — the sleep of death has descended upon Him, deeper than it ever fell on Adam. And then a soldier comes, and to be sure of the death: "one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out" (19:34).
The side of the first man, opened in his sleep, to build a bride. The side of the last Man, opened in His death, to bring forth a Bride. The church is not founded somewhere in a meeting; she is born from the opened side of her dead Bridegroom. The old church fathers already saw it, and shuddered: as Eve came forth from the sleeping Adam, so the church comes forth from the pierced Christ.
And John adds one detail that takes your breath away. Right after the spear-thrust he writes: "Not one of His bones shall be broken" (19:36). To the Bridegroom from whose side the Bride is taken, not a single bone is broken — while the first bride was precisely called "bone of his bones." The line runs from Eden to Golgotha, drawn taut, without a single missed note.
Paul dares to say it out loud
And in case you think this is too beautiful to be really meant that way — Paul builds the bridge himself, in so many words.
He quotes Genesis 2 — "the two shall become one flesh" — and says right after it: "This mystery is great; I apply it to Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:31-32). And a few lines earlier: "we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones" (5:30) — a direct echo of Adam's "bone of my bones" that cannot be coincidence.
So the Bride exists because the Bridegroom let Himself be opened. No opened side, no Bride. The cross is not only the place where your guilt was paid. It is the birthplace of the Bride.
You do not come to Him from the outside. You come forth out of Him. Bone of His bones.
In Depth — Three words in the opened side
The three key words of Genesis 2:21-22 together carry the whole image. Whoever reads them only in translation hears the music, but misses the bass notes.
Tardemah — "deep sleep". Not the sleep from which you wake in the morning, but a God-sent, overwhelming unconsciousness in which a person lies passive, outside himself, near death. It is a rare word, and its other great occurrence is telling: it falls upon Abraham, on the evening God makes the covenant with him. "When the sun was about to go down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and behold, a great and dreadful darkness overcame him" (Genesis 15:12) — and in that sleep God, as a smoking oven and a burning torch, passes alone between the pieces and binds Himself to His promise. Twice the same pattern: the man falls down as though dead, and while he lies there helpless, God accomplishes something irreversible. A covenant. A bride. It stamps the whole line: the Bride does not come forth from what the bridegroom does, but from what he undergoes while God works. And at the cross it returns in full earnest — there the "sleep" is no longer an image, but death itself.
Tsela — usually translated "rib", but that is a narrowing. The word means more broadly "side" or "flank". And as soon as you find it elsewhere in the Bible, you see why that matters: precisely the same word stands for the side of the tabernacle — "for the other side of the tabernacle, the north side, twenty boards" (Exodus 26:20) — and for the side of the altar (27:7). It is building-language, temple-language. The woman thus comes not from an incidental little bone, but from the whole flank of the man, from his side as a sanctuary has a side. The old expositors attached their well-known remark to it, and it is still apt: she is taken not from his head to rule over him, not from his foot to be trampled, but from his side — close to his heart, to stand beside him.
Banah — "build". This is the word most translations read past, and it is perhaps the most beautiful of the three. The man was "formed" from the dust (2:7) — the word of the potter who kneads clay. But the woman was not formed; she was built, as though she were a structure, a house raised up out of the man. And that one word spans an arch right through the Bible. For when Peter describes the church, he reaches for exactly that image: "you also, as living stones, are being built up into a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5). And Paul says it of that same church: in Christ the whole structure is fitted together and grows "into a holy temple in the Lord", in which you too are "built together for a dwelling place of God" (Ephesians 2:21-22). The very first bride was a structure out of the bridegroom. The last Bride is too — a living temple, raised up out of the opened side of Christ. The word does not change between Eden and the church; the image is the same from beginning to end.
Three words, one movement. A God-sent sleep of death, an opened side, a bride who is not formed but built. And when you lay them side by side like this, the second half of the story already sounds before it is told.
In Depth — From Adam's side to the pierced side
The step from Eden to Golgotha is not made out of piety. It is made because John's text sets it up itself, word for word, and because Paul slides the interpretation underneath.
Begin with the order in John 19. The spear-thrust does not come just anywhere in the story. It comes after Jesus "has given up the spirit" (19:30) — thus while He already lies in the sleep of death, exactly as Adam already lay in his deep sleep when God opened his side. Only then does the soldier thrust, "and immediately blood and water came out" (19:34). The bridegroom does not work; he undergoes. The Bride is brought forth from an opened side while her man is motionless. The same pattern, twice, with thousands of years in between.
Then the bone. John hammers, in the middle of this scene, on one line: "For these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled: Not one of His bones shall be broken" (19:36) — a word that originally applied to the Passover lamb, which had to remain unblemished (Exodus 12:46). The soldiers did break the legs of the two men beside Him, but not Jesus', because He had already died. And here the echo strikes you: from the first bridegroom a bone was taken out of his side, so that the bride could be called "bone of my bones" (Genesis 2:23) — and to the last Bridegroom no bone is broken, while His side is opened to bring forth the Bride. The one story says: a bone went out. The other says: no bone remained broken. Two sides of the same coin, struck on the same opened side.
But the strongest proof that this is no pious notion is supplied by Paul. In Ephesians 5 he first reasons about marriage with a logic that only holds if the woman comes from the body of the man: "He who loves his own wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church" (5:28-29). Then he says that one sentence that fixes everything: "we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones" (5:30) — you hear Adam straight through it: "flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones". Next he quotes Genesis 2 literally — "a man shall leave his father and mother [...] and the two shall become one flesh" — and adds in so many words: "This mystery is great; I apply it to Christ and the church" (5:31-32). The word he uses is mystērion, the same "mystery" that forms the connecting thread of this book. The bridge from the first bride to the Bride is therefore laid not by this book, but by the apostle. That is the difference between a beautiful thought and a text that bears the weight.
Moreover, it is no angle of a single lone voice. The early church read it broadly this way, for centuries. Augustine said it in one image: the second Adam bowed His head and slept on the cross, so that from what flowed from His side a bride might be formed for Him. Similar words you find in Chrysostom, in Methodius, in Tertullian, in Quodvultdeus — a broad choir that heard in the blood and water from the side the birth of the Bride. Some of them drew the line further still, to baptism and the Lord's Supper as the streams from that side. That is a thinner layer, more vulnerable than the rest, and you need not go along with it. But the image itself — the Bride brought forth from the opened side of the sleeping, dead Bridegroom — stands firm, for Paul has put his signature beneath it.
One boundary belongs here, named out loud, for it is a magnificent image and magnificent images easily get out of hand. "Bone of my bones" and "the two one flesh" draw the deepest unity there is — unity of life, of origin, of belonging. But it is no fusion of being. Eve came out of Adam and was from the first moment a person of her own beside him, not Adam himself. So it is with the Bride: she is taken out of the Bridegroom, shares in His life, belongs to Him as nothing else does — and remains a creature. The unity is communion, sharing, belonging; no merging into God in which the difference between Creator and creature evaporates. The Bride does not become the Bridegroom. She becomes, forever, the Bride. And precisely that — that she comes out of Him and yet stands over against Him, close to His heart but herself — is what makes her a Bride rather than a mirror image. Of all the bridal images in Scripture this one reaches the deepest, and at the same time it preserves the distance in which love is at all possible.
A deep sleep. An opened side. A bride, built out of the man while he lay as though dead. So it began in Eden — and so it began again on a hill outside the city, when the last Adam gave up the spirit and a spear opened His side. You do not come to Him from the outside. You come forth out of Him.