A Jewish View on Gender Differences | Men and Women: "God created the man in His image; in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them. (Genesis 1:27-28)
Why “them”? This was before the creation of Eve!
The Jewish Oral Tradition provides us with a fascinating insight into this grammatical oddity. The first human, it tells us, was really an androgynous being, both male and female in one body, sophisticated and self-sufficient.
But if God had created such a complete human being, why the later separation into two parts, into Adam and Eve?
The answer given is that God did not want this first human creation to be alone, for it would then possess an illusion of self-sufficiency. Note that there is no word for “independence” in classical Hebrew. (What we use now, atzma’ut, is of modern vintage.) The concept of independence doesn’t exist in Jewish tradition. Aside from God, nothing and no one is really independent. Since we are supposed to ingrain into ourselves that God is the source of everything, self-sufficiency would have been a spiritual defeat."
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