side: the lateral part, flank, or side-extension of a thing
This word names the side of something, and almost all of its uses are concrete and structural. Far more often than anything else it is a building term:
- the long side of a wall or frame
- the side-pieces of a sacred object
- the leaves of a door
- the rooms built against the outside of a temple
Out in the open country it can name the side of a hill, its slope or flank. The single famous exception is the creation of the woman in Genesis, where the older tradition reads it as a rib but most scholars today read the same plain sense, a side taken from the man.
The senses below are not different words but one idea, the side of a thing, seen in different settings. What ties them together is position rather than shape: whatever the side belongs to, this word points to its lateral part, the part along its edge or flank. So a tabernacle frame, a hillside, a wing of side-rooms, and the part taken from the man in Genesis are all, in the same plain way, the side of something.
Because the settings differ so much, English Bibles reach for a different word almost every time (side, rib, plank, board, leaf, chamber, slope), which can make one Hebrew word look like several. It is not. The reader is best served by holding on to the single underlying picture of a side and letting the context fill in what kind.
Nuances
Whether the word here means the man's rib (one bone) or his side (a whole flank), and what is being described.
- minorityA rib: a single bone, taken from the man's chest. This is the traditional reading, carried by the Latin and most English Bibles, and still used in print by several major commentators even where they grant that the word usually means side.; Vulgate, Genesis 2:21 (costa); G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC); V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis 1-17 (NICOT)
- majorityA side: a whole flank rather than a single bone, fitting the word's ordinary meaning across the rest of the Bible and the building verb used in the next verse. This is now the broad view among critical scholars and the standard lexicons.; H.-J. Fabry, TDOT vol. 12, s.v.; Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve
- minoritySpecifically the penis bone, present in other mammals but absent in humans, so the account explains why men lack it. A provocative recent proposal that mainline Genesis scholarship has not adopted; critics object that the verse says one of his sides, a plural that does not fit a single unpaired bone.; Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (Yale, 2013); Hector Avalos, A Penis Bone in Genesis 2:21? (Bible and Interpretation, 2020)