Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

The Subject and the Other

Karalina Matskevich

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567686183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Karalina Matskevich examines the structures that map out the construction of gendered and national identities in Genesis 2–3 and 12–36. Matskevich shows how the dominant 'Subject' – the androcentric ha'adam and the ethnocentric Israel – is perceived in relation to and over against the 'Other', represented respectively as female and foreign. Using the tools of narratology, semiotics and psychoanalysis, Matskevich highlights the contradiction inherent in the project of dominance, through which the Subject seeks to suppress the transforming power of difference it relies on for its signification. Thus, in Genesis 2-3 ha'adam can only emerge as a complex Subject in possession of knowledge with the help of woman, the transforming Other to whom the narrator (and Yahweh) attributes both the agency and the blame. Similarly, the narratives of Genesis 12–36 show a conflicted attitude to places of alterity: Egypt, the fertile and seductive space that threatens annihilation, and Haran, the 'mother's land', a complex metaphor for the feminine. The construction of identity in these narratives largely relies on the symbolic fecundity of the Other.

Chapter 1

The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

Defining the Problem

A story of origins dealing with the creation of humankind and the institution of gender, the garden narrative in Genesis 2–3 has influenced social and religious perceptions of women and femininity in Western culture more than any other biblical text. Throughout the history of biblical reception, the creation of woman out of man and her subsequent role in human disobedience to God’s will gave rise to many misconceptions, providing a particular framework for the interpretation of woman’s position and identity. One of the most striking examples of such misconceptions is the statement on the subordination of women in 1 Tim. 2.11-14, which to a large extent has shaped the traditional Christian exegesis of the narrative.¹ Regarded in both Jewish and Christian interpretation as derivative in substance and subordinate in status with respect to man, the woman of the garden narrative has also been branded as a morally flawed being, responsible for the fall of man, the loss of paradise and for bringing painful toil and death into the range of human experience.²

Feminist scholarship has demonstrated various approaches to the construction of gender in Genesis 2–3. The first wave of feminist critics with Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, while rejecting the Bible’s ideological assumptions, agreed in essence with the traditional interpretations of the garden narrative, which for them was designed ‘in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female’.³ Later literary readings refused to take the text as a monolithic document of patriarchy. Phyllis Trible in her close literary analysis of Genesis 2–3 has argued that most misogynous ideas associated with the garden narrative are more a product of its later interpretation than of the biblical text itself.⁴ Trible claims Genesis 2 presents an egalitarian model of gender, which becomes corrupted by dominance and hierarchy only after the ‘fall’, in consequence of human disobedience.⁵ Following Trible, a number of scholars pointed to the inner tensions, gaps and inconsistencies of Genesis 2–3, stressing the complexity of the story and its unequivocal perspective on gender and hierarchy.⁶

Resisting the text as irredeemably patriarchal or affirming the positive elements in its portrayal of female subjectivity, most early feminist interpretations of Genesis 2–3 did not question the negative character of its central transformation. However, the transfer of knowledge to the humans is far from being unequivocal and lends itself to a range of interpretations. How one understands woman’s role depends largely on whether one regards the human ascent to knowledge as primarily an act of disobedience and a fall from grace or as a stage in the process of human maturation where gender is a fundamental feature of the evolving subject.⁷

Traditionally, the second creation account has been read as a story about the human ‘fall’ and its consequences, telling how the first human beings, by disobeying God, bring disharmony and chaos into the initially perfect universe.⁸ In the new world order, the relationships between the earth, the human and the animal worlds as well as between the sexes are affected by dominance, and human existence becomes marred with pain, toil and eventual death. At the centre of these negative and dramatic changes stands a human action, performed against God’s explicit order.

What many feminist studies share with this traditional view is seeing Yahweh as a monolithic subject – the sole creator, lawgiver and judge of the human beings and the epitome of authority and power. In relation to such a God, woman plays a counter, rebellious role, transgressing his command and bringing about man’s fall from grace. But is Yahweh himself free from ambiguity? After all, the very fact of disobedience undermines his absolute authority and destabilizes his hierarchical position. In examining the construction of gender in Genesis 2–3 one needs to look not only at the places man and woman occupy in the story, but also, crucially, at the role played by Yahweh as a character. Reflecting on the need to apply the same critical methodologies to the biblical text as to any other literary composition, Exum has recently stated that for feminist criticism to succeed as an academic enterprise, ‘the god-character should be subjected to the same judicial analysis and critical evaluation as all the other characters’.⁹

Turning one’s attention to Yahweh reveals the inconsistency of his behaviour and poses a new set of questions. Why should Yahweh, the creator of the harmonious world of Genesis 2, set out issuing prohibitions and punishing his creatures for disobedience? If he wants to protect hā’ādām from death, why does he plant the tree of knowledge, associated with death, in full view of the human being? Since all the trees in the garden are functional in satisfying the needs of hā’ādām (‘every tree pleasant to the sight and good to eat’, Gen. 2.9), what is the function of the only tree the fruit of which is not to be eaten? The tree of knowledge represents the symbolic boundaries of the garden, points to its finality, and yet, remarkably, Yahweh places it, spatially, in the centre of the garden and, symbolically, at the centre of his discourse. Does Yahweh have any purpose for it other than to lead the humans out of the garden? And does the garden itself have any purpose other than to produce this tree and, with it, create the possibility for the human beings to choose and to act?

Various scholars have observed the ambiguity of God’s actions in Genesis 2–3 and explored his possible ulterior motives in prohibiting knowledge. For James Barr, both eternal life and knowledge are exclusively divine attributes, and the texts of Gen. 2.17 and 3.22 show Yahweh’s reluctance to share those attributes with his creatures.¹⁰ Jobling and Terje Stordalen, on the other hand, place the divine-human confrontation in the context of a spatial opposition between inside and outside, the garden and the land. Thus, Jobling considers that Yahweh places hā’ādām in his private garden in order to stop the human from tilling the whole earth.¹¹ Along similar lines, Stordalen argues that the overall programme of Genesis 2–3 – to provide a human being to till the land – contradicts Yahweh’s primary concern as a private landowner to have hā’ādām ‘to till and keep the garden’. From this point of view, God forbids the knowledge of good and bad because it can show the humans the way out of the garden.¹² For Barr as well as for Jobling and Stordalen, the function of Yahweh’s order is preventative.

In his detailed study of Genesis 2–3, Tryggve Mettinger advances a different view that draws attention to the crucial role that Yahweh plays in the human transgression. Mettinger defines the subject of the Eden narrative as ‘the divine test of obedience to the commandment’.¹³ He holds that by forbidding the tree of knowledge, God provokes the human beings or tests them in a similar way as he does in Gen. 22.1-19 and Job 1–2. In so doing, he aims ultimately to assert his authority. Similarly, Walter Brueggemann understands Yahweh’s prohibition as an exercise of authority.¹⁴ Seeing the prohibition as provocative raises in its turn the question of the ambiguity of Yahweh as a moral subject. Norman Whybray pays particular attention to the lack of consistency and moral integrity in Yahweh’s actions in the garden narrative, putting it alongside a number of biblical texts, including Gen. 18.22-33, Job 1–2, Exod. 32.7-14 and Num. 11, 14.11-25.¹⁵

All the above approaches share their emphasis on Yahweh’s motivation. The way one interprets the main transformations of the narrative – the institution of gender, the acquisition of knowledge and the expulsion from paradise – depends on how one understands Yahweh’s intentions; in other words, whether by prohibiting knowledge he seeks to protect the humans from death and keep them in the garden or, alternatively, to provoke their disobedience. This, in its turn, determines whether we interpret the main transformation as a fall from grace or as part of the divine design for human beings. But, perhaps, these possibilities do not have to be mutually exclusive. Could Yahweh’s subjectivity be composed of contradictory strands, making his intentions more complex than those suggested in the above models? To prove that would shift the story’s underlying tension from the divine-human conflict to the tension between Yahweh’s own conflicting perspectives. Uncovering this tension by means of narrative and structural analysis might lead to a different understanding of the garden narrative and of the way it constructs subjectivity and gender.

The Overture: To Eat or Not to Eat

The narrative starts with a description of the earth, lifeless and uncultivated, with no rain to water it and no human to till it (Gen. 2.5). This situation of lack defines a need that guides Yahweh’s first creative action: in Gen. 2.7 he forms a human, hā’ādām, from the dust of the earth, hā’ ^a dāmah. With a breath of life from Yahweh, hā’ādām becomes nepeš ḥayyāh, a living being. At this stage, hā’ādām is a generic term referring, in the words of Mieke Bal, to an earth-creature with ‘no name, no sex, and no activity’.¹⁶

The use of the Hebrew word hā’ādām requires clarification. It has been widely recognized as a non-gendered term that is used collectively for ‘humanity’ and individually for ‘human being’.¹⁷ In Genesis 2–3, however, this generic term refers to the protagonist, who in the course of the narrative evolves from an ungendered human being (Gen. 2.7-21) to a male character, juxtaposed to woman (hā’ādām w ^e ’ištô, Gen. 2.25; 3.8, 21). As the continued use of the name hā’ādām suggests, the boundaries between the two stages are not definitive and allow a degree of ambiguity in interpret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3
• Chapter 2 The Subject and the Land in the Abraham Cycle (Gen. 11.27–25.18)
• Chapter 3 The Mothers and the Mother’s Land in the Jacob Narrative (Gen. 25.19–37.1)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Biblical References
• Copyright