Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Poetry (review)

Genesis 3:6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.

For years, a primary goal of my teaching and writing has been to show the ways in which modern Jewish and particularly modern Hebrew literary works can be read as an additional layer of interpretation of the Bible and of classical Jewish sources. In all my courses I insist that modern Jewish literary texts, despite their tendency to read rather brazenly against the grain of tradition, be considered part of our larger spiritual canon.

You can imagine my Evesque delight—a sense of forbidden and yet empirically derived pleasure, like that attributed to Eve in the verse quoted above—at seeing this approach to studying literature with and as Torah exemplified and elaborated so elegantly in Anne Lapidus Lerner’s Eternally Eve. In this study, Lerner undertakes a set of extended close re-readings of the biblical verses relating to Eve in Genesis 1–5, as well as of rabbinic midrashim and modern (twentieth-century) poetry drawing upon these verses. The study’s title derives from the curious omission, in the biblical text, of any record of Eve’s death:

Eve never dies, she slips away, leaving no mark except in the Western imagination where her story seems always to be with us, fascinating in its many facets and drawing the attention of generations of interpreters, scholars, and rewriters. (p. 13)

In her clever re-reading of what might be otherwise be perceived as a misogynistic omission, Lerner turns the absence of Eve’s recorded death into a metaphor for the ways in which the stories of the biblical first woman live on in our imaginations and compel such an endless array of suggestive re-readings.

Calling the pleasure of reading this book “forbidden” is my way of pointing both to its countertraditional aspects and to its unconventional scholarly method. Lerner herself declares that her study “privileges less traveled interpretive routes” (p. 3). Her thoughtful and informed readings bypass some classic works of feminist criticism that undertook to (re-)read the story of Eve in order to expose the misogyny of the narrative and debunk the authority of biblical religion, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Women’s Bible (1895–1898), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1968) and Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy (1986). When faced with a choice between a reading that sees Eve as authorizing and prescribing gender inequality or one that opens up alternative, egalitarian possibilities, Lerner typically chooses, or at least highlights, the latter, pursuing what Phyllis Trible has termed a “depatriarchalized”¹ reading of the Bible. This is not to say that she ignores the disturbing elements of the text. Lerner is an honest reader, albeit committed to the task of stripping away encrusted translations and associations, thereby exposing new interpretive terrain.

From the outset, Lerner insists that the biblical texts on Eve cannot be forced into rigid uniformity. She elects to retranslate the biblical as well as the later materials, so as “to encourage rethinking.” Thus, she persistently refuses to translate adam (human, man, Adam) except when it is unequivocally a proper noun, endeavoring thereby to preserve the ambiguity and plurality that surrounds the creation of the first human in Genesis 1. Regarding the prior creation of adam in the Genesis 2 account, she avers, noting the yet earlier creation of the creeping, crawling things as well as the tendency of God in Genesis to prefer latter-born to firstborn sons, that “[be]ing first . . . does not necessarily imply primacy in importance” (p. 73). Countering the common assertion that Eve, as foremother of female perfidy, misleads and brings death to her man, Lerner observes that Eve, in taking the fruit,

tests the threat...