A few weeks back I wrote about why the word “Calvary” isn’t actually in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

Here I want to look at another example of a nonsense word that gets used pretty frequently, again because of a misreading of the KJV’s archaic/awkward English. People, especially from conservative Protestant traditions, sometimes refer to a man’s helpmeet, with reference to the wife (Eve) that God created for Adam. The problem is that the word doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Genesis 2:18 explains why God decides to create Woman. It says something like,

Then Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper that is suitable for him.”

This last phrase, “a helper that is suitable for him,” consists of two Hebrew words: ‘êzer ke-negdô. The first word means simply help or helper. The second word is actually a prepositional phrase, which would literally mean something like, “like that which corresponds to him.”

It’s pretty obvious that the text is trying to say that the Woman corresponded to the Man, or that she was appropriate for him (see Gen 2:20, which uses the same phrase ‘êzer ke-negdô), whereas the animals (2:18) were not. In other words, Eve was another human.

This is where the English of the KJV gets confusing. The KJV translators never used the words suitable or fitting, but they occasionally used the word meet, which had a similar meaning (see, e.g., Ex 8:26; Deut 3:18; Jud 5:30). As it turns out, the word is not particularly fitting or helpful for the modern reader, as Gen 2:18-20 demonstrates.

The KJV translates Gen 2:18,

And the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”

A relative pronoun could have helped avoid misunderstanding (“I will make him a help that is meet for him”), but as the text stands it is easy to see why people have misread the phrase. The phrase “an help meet for him” doesn’t really make sense to modern readers, and so people have tended to combine help with meet to make a single term. Presumbably most people just assume that it’s an archaic word that people knew back when the KJV was translated, which of course is partly ironic because the original readers of the KJV (published in 1611) apparently would have understood it as two separate words.

Part of the blame for the misunderstanding goes back to the 17th century, where we have an author named John Dryden who used the two words as a hyphenated phrase (“help-meet”) to describe his wife in 1673. (These are the kinds of things you can find out in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Today, Webster’s simply lists it as a single word, helpmeet, which it notes is a combination of the noun and the adjective.

I probably shouldn’t talk about blame for the word, since in theory, any word is legitimate if it’s useful. If a man wants to refer to his wife using biblical language, helpmeet seems to get the job done.

But then, maybe it doesn’t work so well. My favorite part of all this is that the English language now also has the word helpmate. It’s possible that this word came about on its own, since its first known attestation (1715) refers to helpers in general rather that to a wife in particular. But in my copy of Webster’s, it’s listed simply as another way of writing helpmeet.

The convergence of these two words makes perfect sense considering that for the average person who hears the word helpmeet, the meaning of help is very clear, but the attached word meet doesn’t make any sense. So, people adjust the word (through an intuitive kind of folk etymology) to something that does make sense, and mate obviously fits when referring to one’s wife.

So, is it meet for us to judge a word like this? My tendency is to say yes: I think it should be phased out of use. Even though the word is useful for alluding quickly to Genesis, language should help us communicate clearly, and the alternative use of the word helpmate shows that for most people, this word is confusing. People who don’t know what meet originally meant in the KJV are likely to have a vague sense that it should be mate instead, and people who do know what it meant aren’t likely to use it at all.