Language and Marriage
The next section reads:
Yahweh God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him." Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature became its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Yahweh God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called 'woman,' because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.
There are two topics here: language and marriage.
We have noted already that the Bible links the receiving of God's spirit with intellectual ability. It is obvious that the principal difference between mankind and other primates, and the failure of other types of hominids to survive at all, has to do with the intellect. And the possession of language is crucial to the transference of skills from one generation to the next. So it is fascinating that the first recorded acts of Adam were to create the names of those living beings he saw around him. He found he had been given language. It is also worth noting that the earliest archaeological evidence for the writing down of words and numbers comes from the cuneiform markings on clay tablets found in Mesopotamia. The earliest discoveries are usually dated at around 3200 B.C.. Language is key to intellectual progress, and the development of writing from cuneiform markings to the alphabets we are familiar with today is a fascinating study.
The Adam legend next introduces marriage as the cornerstone of human society. We may understand the forming of Eve from Adam's rib as symbolic, but the message is clear: marriage is divinely instituted. The Bible is clear on this, and the most obvious endorsement of this is that when defining morality (in what we usually call the Ten Commandments) the preservation of the family is paramount: parents must be honoured; adultery is forbidden.
I am going to preserve one sentence effectively unchanged in the proposed retelling of this passage:
We were given the gift of language and marriage. That is why a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will come together physically as a single unit.