Revisiting Eve

by Dr. Anne Lapidus Lerner

At some point in our lives – for most of us a fairly early point – each of us learned the story. For most of us, what stuck is the well-known story of the creation of the first woman from the rib of the first man. But that is not the whole story. And yet, even as we read and reread the opening chapters of Genesis, the initial impression remains. This graphic description is compelling, and because it is so powerful it colors the way in which we perceive the roles of women and men and the relations between them.

The creation of the first woman actually is told three times in Genesis. One of those tellings is, indeed, the familiar rib story (Genesis 2:21-23), but the others (Genesis 1:28 and 5:1-2) recount the creation of a being, referred to as adam, that is both male and female. These less memorable, or at least less remembered, stories change our perception of the woman who is created, making her part of God’s initial plan rather than a latecomer. Does that also push us to contemplate a different role for contemporary women? Does it help us to see ourselves without a hierarchical configuration?

But let us go further. The word translated as rib in virtually all English Bibles from the first to the most recent, is tsela. Tsela appears 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, but only in its two occurrences in Genesis 2 could it possibly mean rib. The other 38 times it means either a “side” or a “side room.” There is actually little reason to think that it means rib in Genesis 2. Even if we hold fast to the Genesis 2 version, the shift from rib to side changes a great deal of our thinking about the implications of the creation of woman. A whole side, after all, must have been intended for that purpose as a foundation for this new creature. It is only after the separation of woman, named ishah (woman) by God, that the ish (man) is differentiated.

The simultaneous creation of man and woman has been on the rabbis’ minds for centuries. When in the midrash R. Shmu’el bar Nahman suggests that the adam, first created as a double-faced creature, was sawed apart in order to separate it into a male and a female creature, others interrupt to say that the woman was created from a rib. He retorts that the word tsela means a side-wall in Exodus 26:20 (Bereisheit Rabbah 8:1). Contemporary writers often devise their own metaphors for the creation of the woman. For example, Kim Chernin opens her poem “The Call” with the question: “Was I summoned? / Or did I rise / from my own emergency?” In other words, was the creation of the first woman at the behest of someone else – human or divine – or was it intrinsic to her own need to emerge? Each of these different readings of the biblical texts opens up questions of gender role and hierarchy.

But Eve’s story does not end with her creation. In fact, her trajectory moves from her creation through the events in the garden to its apogee at the beginning of Genesis 4 before declining through Genesis 5 and then disappearing. The first woman often has been maligned as a sexual seductress who tempts her male counterpart into disobeying God, but there is little justification for that in the biblical text. She is the one who is convinced by the serpent to consider eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. But the decision to eat is entirely hers, because she is the one who sees “that the tree was good for eating and that it was a lust for the eyes and [that] the tree was desirable for becoming wise and she took of its fruit and ate and gave also to her man with her and he ate” (Genesis 3:6). She carefully observes the tree and discovers its good qualities before moving decisively through a rapid series of verbs to eating. The man, perhaps trusting her, perhaps unthinking, eats what he is given. Who is the dominant character here? Which one speaks more words? Who considers action before taking it? It is clearly the woman who is the independent thinker.

Eve’s peak experience comes when, after the expulsion from the garden, she conceives, bears, and names Cain (Genesis 4:1). The man’s job is finished when he “knows” his woman; the remaining four verbs are hers. In naming Cain she seems to claim God, not the adam, as her partner as she exclaims: “I have created a man together with the Lord” (Genesis 4:1). The adam’s omission from her triumphant claim shifts human creation to the female domain with some divine assistance. But the first two human births are succeeded rapidly by the report of the differences between the brothers and culminates in the murder of Abel and Cain’s wandering exile. According to the biblical chronology, 130 years intervene before the next birth. When Seth, whose descendant Noah became the progenitor of all humans, finally is born, it is again Eve who names him, with a speech explaining that “God has put [for] me an other seed in the place of Abel for Cain had killed him” (Genesis 4:25). Bringing together God and all her sons, Eve once more ignores her man’s role in the creation of this child. Eve clearly sees herself as God’s partner and as the source of new human life. Though she never reaches the point of becoming the “mother of all living,” as the adam claims when naming her Havvah (Eve), she does become the source of all humans (Genesis 3:20).

Eve fades from the scene after the birth of Seth. She actually is erased from the account of the birth of Seth in its second telling in Genesis 5:3, where his naming is attributed to Adam in whose “likeness and image” Seth is created. Her function, the function that is so often the focus of the lives of biblical women, childbearing, is finished. The subsequent births of sons and daughters mentioned in Genesis 5:4 are ascribed to Adam, not Eve.

Eve may disappear from the biblical text, but she remains a strong presence, an independent woman who is a knowledge-seeker in the eyes of contemporary poets. While Eve was often perceived as a dependent character by some feminists, she can be redeemed by a close reading of the biblical text, aided by the perspectives of rabbinic and modern rewriters of her story, who help us see the varied possibilities inherent in the story. The stories of Eve are neither monolithic nor prescriptive. They push us to think about the richness of the text and the varied ways in which it speaks to readers throughout history. In fact, were it not for Eve’s reaching for knowledge, there would be no history, only the boring tale of the first man and woman living eternally off the fruits of Eden – and who would there be to read it?