help, or one who helps: aid given to someone who cannot manage alone, and by far most often the aid God himself supplies.
This word names both the help and the helper, and the Bible uses it for both. Its weight comes from who usually does the helping. Of its roughly twenty-one appearances, around seventeen point to God as the one who helps, and the settings are anything but gentle: he is paired again and again with words like shield, deliverer, and sword, the rescuer a person leans on when the danger is real and the person cannot save themselves. So the help in view is strong, active, often life-saving help, not the small assistance of an errand-runner.
The same word can also name a human ally, especially a military one, and here the Bible is often skeptical: Egypt is called a help that fails, and a doomed king's fighting men are a help about to scatter. The point is not that the word means something different in these places; it is that human helpers prove unequal to what only God's help can do.
Famously, the word also names the woman God makes for the man in the garden, the only place it describes a wife. Because the very same word so often describes God, it cannot mean a lowly servant or assistant; that connotation comes from the English word helper and from the old, distorted form helpmate, not from the Hebrew. What the word claims is that she is the one indispensable counterpart who answers the man's aloneness, the kind of strong presence the rest of the Bible asks God himself to be.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether this word, used of the woman in Genesis 2, implies that she is subordinate to the man.
- majorityNo subordination is encoded in the word itself. Because the same word so often describes God as helper, it cannot by itself mark an inferior; the phrase means a counterpart corresponding to the man, and any claim of male leadership must rest on other features of the narrative rather than on this word.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary (1984); Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis Chapters 1-17, NICOT (1990); Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (1989)
- minorityThe word, taken alone, would suggest the woman is the stronger member of the pair, and the qualifying phrase corresponding to him serves to limit that to parity.; Raanan Eichler, "Gender Equality at Creation," TheTorah.com (2015)
- minorityTo help is, in the act, to take a secondary position assisting a task that is already someone else's; the egalitarian readings sentimentalize a narrative that is fundamentally focused on the man.; David J. A. Clines, "What Does Eve Do to Help?" JSOTSup 94 (1990)