Biblical Women Unbound: Counter-Tales

EVE

EVE GENESIS 1:29-31 God said, {lSee I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, andevery tree that has seed-bearing fruit; theyshall be yours for food. And to all the animals on land, to all the birds ofthe sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath oflife, [1give} all the green plants for food." And it was so. And God sawall that He had made, and found it very good. GENESIS 3:2-6 The woman replied to the serpent, IIWe may eat ofthe fruit ofthe other trees ofthe garden. It is only about fruit Ofthe tree in the middle ofthe garden that God said, 'You shall not eat ofit or touch it, lest you die.I /I And the serpent said to the woman, lIyou are notgoing to die, .but God knows that as soon as you eat ofit your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad./I When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source ofwisdom, she took ofits fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate. .31 • Eve COMMENTARY Eve! The disobedience! The serpent! The apple! The sinl The corruption of Adam! The expulsion from the Garden of Eden! Was ever any scandal more sermonized and written about? Was ever more hatred heaped on a woman's head than on poor Eve's? "Your fault, yours! You lost us that beautiful paradise! The garden where God walked and talked with us! The lovely wholeness and at-oneness that now forever elude usl And you gave us instead our neurotic fantasies, bad marriages, ungrateful children, and in the end sickness and death!" This fandful Bible tale, with roots in mythologies of countless other'andent peoples, would be to us now no more than a charming folk tale, naive expression of weary humanity's longing for the safety and certitude of nirvana, paradise, if it were not for the fact that we know it to be the matrix of centuries of persecution of women. Eve as Everywoman,source of the world's corruption. Equally fandful is a midrashic fantasy of Lilith, the female who balked at the very moment of her creation when she refused to accept Adam's idea of a proper mating position: Adam uppermost, Lilith below. "Why can't I be the one on top?" Lilith wanted to know. In punishment for the hubris of upward aspiration, Ulith was cast down into the role of demonic fallen one, ensnaring men with lascivious wiles, forever seeking human victims in her rebellion against God. • 32. Eve and Commentary If we omit the demon aspect, there is a·good deal of Lilith's mode of clear-eyed questioning In even the most submissive picture of Eve. "Why can't I eat a piece of fruit from a tree that looks as healthy as every other tree in the Garden where God said everything is good? Where's the logic of that?" Eve fell and tore the world down with her. Such is the traditional Judea-Christian view. Elaine Pagels, in her Adam and Eve and the Serpent, says that Augustine is responsible for putting the definitive brand of seductress and sinner on the female, through Eve. Eve is the birth canal through which evil is born. Sexual sin is very high on Augustine's list of accusations against Eve (it is very high on his list of accusations against himself in his Confessions, too). As we know from Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the midrashic rabbis were there before him, claiming that the serpent had Intercourse with Eve before Adam did, and working out an etymology for her name, Hava, meaning serpent. Eve was Adam's serpent. In Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, sexual Jealousy is the key to Eve's disobedience. The angels are jealous of the new man and woman, as is Satan, and Eve is jealous of a possible other woman. Rabbi Eliezer makes of the forbidden tree in the Garden a kind of Bluebeard's Castle. Suppose, he says, a woman is given all her husband's wealth except "this house, which is full of scorpions." A man visits and says that in fact she'll find...