The Old "Help-Meet" Rubbish

This entry is a combination book review and Bible study.

I recently had the misfortune to read Debi Pearl's book Created to be His Help Meet. I had read bits of it before, excerpts, and also skimmed the whole thing; but recently I had the opportunity to read the entire book in-depth.

What a waste of four hours of my life. Honestly, I'll never get those four hours back, which would have been more successfully utilized in clipping my budgies' wings, or perhaps watching paint dry.

Extreme, I know... but so was this book. The general gist of it was that God created women to be a lowly servant to the man, and that we women can only find our true fulfillment in Christ by relinquish our own desires, skills, gifts, etc. and just living for our husbands. The author puts blame the woman for most of the problems in a marriage, and even goes so far as to say things like, "Have you done this? Well, shame on you!"

As if most women need even MORE things to feel shame over!

Most of all, her advice to women in abusive relationships is at best questionable, and at worst downright dangerous. Let me say it right here, plainly so that no one misses it:

If a woman is abused by her husband, it is always, always, ALWAYS, HIS fault and not hers.

There is NOTHING she can do that would "make" him abuse her.

If a husband abuses his wife, it is ALWAYS his conscious choice to... and it has NOTHING to do with whether or not she is "submissive" enough!

If you are in this situation, please get help and get out!

There, now that I've got that out of the way, I wanted to address the mis-translation that this whole book is based on. It is taken from the King James Version of the Bible, which I understand the Pearls use exclusively. The trouble with the good ol' KJV is that King James was Anglican, and he wanted to make SURE that this new translation of the Bible would make his subjects into good, obedient little Anglicans. So he made sure they put a distinctly Anglican spin onto it, including using cultural understandings of certain things, rather than going by what the scripture truly says.

The word that so many versions translate as "Help meet," "help mate," "helper," etc. is the Hebrew word "ezer." As it turns out, far from meaning "lowly helper" with a connotation of "servant," ezer has two root words which mean, respectively, "to rescue" and "to be strong."

So when God created Eve for Adam, he wasn't actually creating a servant. He was creating a "strong rescuer."

Not only that, but the other word that is part of that phrase -- the "mate" part of "help mate" is the Hebrew word "kenegdo" which is a word used only once in the Bible. Its meaning? Corresponding to, or opposite of. Used in other ancient Hebrew texts, it simply means "equal."

So we can learn from this that God created woman to be a strong rescuer of the man, and to be his opposite and complete equal. To correspond to him, to be parallel to him, and to complete him.

This was God's original purpose and intent for women. This was the way he created humans, for the male and female together to reflect His image... and then he said it was "very good." NLT even translates it as "excellent in every way."

And then they both had to sin and mess it all up -- and as part of their punishment (or possibly just a prediction; it is unclear in scripture), God tells the woman that her husband will dominate her.

Interesting, isn't it? that male supremacy entered the world when sin did!

Patriarchy was never God's original plan -- it's all the idea of sinful men who want to control and dominate. And sinful women, who want to be controlled and dominated, because they think this will please their husbands. Neither is scriptural, and neither is the way God intended a husband-wife partnership to be.

No matter what Debi Pearl says, her whole book is based upon a faulty interpretation of its most basic premise. With that in mind, I found very little in the rest of the book that was correct or useful either.


(The information about the Hebrew translations was taken from this article, and from the Net Bible. Check 'em out for yourself!)