So Adam and Eve are created to have dominion.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

All very simple and straight forward.

Only later do we learn that it required a passage through deep sleep to get to that point.

Adam and Eve were not created together. Adam was not given Eve immediately even though the above passage makes clear that he was not complete, and that humanity was not even fully yet in the image of God without her with him.

Adam is created and put in a garden where he is found to be “not good” because he is alone just the way God made him.

Then he is given the task of naming the animals (the cattle are already sanctuary creatures but God has to bring beasts and birds from the wild lands). Adam fulfills his task and names the animals. He learns none is right for him.

So then what? He can’t make a wife, obviously. God can make a wife. He could do so instantaneously. He could extract tissue from Adam painlessly and cause Eve appear right next to him.

But he doesn’t.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

The next time we will read about a deep sleep is when God makes a covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15). That gives us some idea why marriage is a covenant (as the prophet Malachi says) even though the word is not used in this passage.

But here is the point: all of this was required to get us to the place in Genesis 1 where God spoke to the Man and Woman together. Only now are Adam and Eve ready to be given their Dominion Mandate, their Great Commission. Only after a near death experience and a raising to new life is Humanity given all authority over the earth and sent out to disciple the nations (compare Matthew 28.19-20).

PS. Note that it has been awhile since I last contributed to this series.