Eve and Adam

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender

Kristen E. Kvam,Linda S. Schearing,Valarie H. Ziegler

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Jahr: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780253109033
• Thema: Théologie et religion
• Thema: Critique et interprétation bibliques

"The editors have performed a great service in making widely available a documentary history of the interpretation of the Eve and Adam story." —Publishers Weekly

"This fascinating volume examines Genesis 1-3 and the different ways that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpreters have used these passages to define and enforce gender roles.... a 'must'... " —Choice

"Wonderful! A marvelous introduction to the ways in which the three major Western religious traditions are both like, and unlike one another." —Ellen Umansky, Fairfield University

No other text has affected women in the western world as much as the story of Eve and Adam. This remarkable anthology surveys more than 2, 000 years of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim commentary and debate on the biblical story that continues to raise fundamental questions about what it means to be a man or to be a woman. The selections range widely from early postbiblical interpretations in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha to the Qur'an, from Thomas Aquinas to medieval Jewish commentaries, from Christian texts to 19th-century antebellum slavery writings, and on to pieces written especially for this volume.

CHAPTER ONE

Hebrew Bible Accounts

INTRODUCTION

For two millennia now the Judeo-Christian tradition has placed man a little lower than the angels and woman a little higher than the demons.¹

No other text has affected women in the Western world as much as that found in the opening chapters of Genesis. The biblical story of the first man and woman became for many readers a blueprint for relationships between all men and women. Yet in spite of the wide-ranging influence of Genesis 1–3, there is surprisingly little agreement among readers concerning what these chapters actually say about such relationships. Do they present a message of subordination or one of mutuality? Or do they contain two messages in tension with one another? As you will see from the scholars surveyed in this introduction (and from those whose writings are included in this book’s last chapter) contemporary opinion ranges widely on what Genesis 1–3 says about men and women.

The Story/ies of Creation

Genesis 1:1–2:4a contains a story of creation. In six days, the heavens, the earth, and all living creatures are created from a watery chaos. Following the animals’ creation on the sixth day, Elohim (God) creates humankind in Elohim’s own image. The first man and woman are created simultaneously and jointly receive Elohim’s command to be fruitful, to multiply, and to subdue and have dominion over the earth. Their creation, Elohim remarks, is “very good.” On the seventh day, Elohim rests.

In Genesis 2:4b, however, the creative process begins again, this time with an arid wasteland devoid of life. The missing prerequisites for life—water and someone to till the soil—are provided by Yahweh Elohim (LORD God), and thus human and plant life appear. After an unspecified period of time the story unfolds to reveal a garden to inhabit, creatures to name and befriend, productive work to do, and a specific prohibition to obey. Yet all is not complete. Putting the human creature to sleep, Yahweh Elohim removes a body part and fashions it into a second creature. The chapter closes with a man and woman who are naked and happily unashamed of it. But it is the chapter, not the story, that ends on this idyllic note.

In chapter 3 we meet a new character—the wily serpent. The dialogue between this smooth-talking snake and the woman concludes with both woman and man sampling the forbidden fruit. Fear, shame, and some strategically placed foliage immediately follow. When confronted by Yahweh Elohim, both man and woman place the blame for their actions elsewhere: the man blames the deity and the woman, and the woman blames the snake. Ultimately all three characters—snake, woman, and man—receive punishments from Yahweh Elohim. The story concludes with the woman being named, the couple being clothed, and the man and woman being expelled from the garden. Their expulsion is finalized by sword-wielding cherubim who now guard its entrance.

In 1711, one reader commented upon the discrepancies within Genesis 1–2. On the basis of style, theology, content, and divine names, the German pastor H. B. Witter suggested that Genesis 1–3 contained not one, but two creation stories. By the end of the nineteenth century, after much challenge and refinement, the suggestion that sources lay behind Genesis 1–3 had blossomed into a full-blown hypothesis concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch. Called the Four Source or JEDP theory, it suggested that the Torah/Pentateuch was composed of four documents: J (Yahwist, 10th c. BCE), E (Elohist, 8th c. BCE), D (Deuteronomy, 7th c. BCE), and P (Priestly, 6th–5th c. BCE). According to this theory, Genesis 1–3 contained a doublet, that is, two accounts of the same event. Genesis 2:4b–3:24 was from the Yahwist source and dated c. 900s BCE (during the reigns of David or Solomon), while Genesis 1:1–2:43 came from a much later period (the exile or postexilic period, c. 500s-400s BCE) and reflected the concerns of its priestly writers.

Recent challenges concerning the dating, provenance, and existence of J, E, D, and P have called into question much of the Documentary Hypothesis. Literary critics, for example, argue that doublets, a traditional criteria for the existence of sources, have a literary function and represent artistic crafting. Others suggest that the attempt to get behind the text to hypothetical sources is futile and should be abandoned in favor of analyzing the text itself.

Genesis 1–3: Contradictory Visions of Gender

Many who read the accounts in Genesis 1–3 conclude that within these chapters lie two stories with two different messages concerning gender. They disagree, however, as to what these messages are and how they relate to one another.

Anne Gardner,² for example, describes Genesis 2–3 as “strongly sexist”³ with Genesis 1 functioning as its corrective. Drawing on Ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, she argues that stories similar to Genesis 2–3 contain male culprits, not female ones. By making woman the villain, the Yahwist significantly changed the story pattern commonly found in the surrounding cultures. This was done, Gardner argues, to turn the story into a polemic against goddess worship.⁴ Since P (Gen. 1:1–2:4a) did not perceive goddess worship as a threat, P “deliberately took issue with Genesis 2:4b–3” by stressing the “simultaneous creation of male and female (Gen. 1:27).”⁵ Thus P could declare that humankind’s creation was “very good” (Gen. 1:31) and, as Gardner emphasizes, “that included the woman!”⁶

Whereas Gardner views P as a corrective to J, other scholars suggest that J corrects P. According to Phyllis Bird,⁷ for example, P’s image of woman in Genesis 1 is not as egalitarian as scholars like Gardner assume.⁸ P is not, as some might hope, an “equal-rights theologian.”⁹ While the P account addresses sexuality in its biological aspects, it is the J account that emphasizes the psychosocial aspects of sexual relationships:

Genesis 2–3 supplements the anthropology of Genesis 1, but also “corrects” and challenges it by maintaining that the meaning of human sexual distinction cannot be limited to a biological definition of origin or function. Sexuality is a social endowment essential to community and to personal fulfillment, but as such it is also subject to perversion and abuse. Genesis 2–3 opens the way for a consideration of sex and sexuality in history.¹⁰

Thus for Bird, Genesis 2 contains an ideal image of gender relations—an image that becomes perverted in Genesis 3. Genesis 1, however, is neither for nor against women’s equality.¹¹

Not all scholars believe that the differences between Genesis 1 and 2–3 represent an effort to correct. Literary critic Robert Alter,¹² for example, agrees that the two accounts are essentially contradictory (the first being egalitarian and the second hierarchical), but this is because the subject matter itself is contradictory and “essentially resistant to consistent linear formulation.”¹³ The tension between stories is not an accident of compositional merging, but the product of intentional artistic crafting. This literary tension mirrors the “bewildering complex reality” of human relationships.¹⁴

Genesis 1–3: A Unified Vision of Women

The above positions of Gardner, Bird, and Alter all assume that Genesis 1–3 contains different, even contradictory, visions of woman. Other scholars, however, disagree with this conclusion and insist that these chapters present a unified image. The contours of this image, however, remain controversial. In her earlier writings, for example, Phyllis Bird suggested that P and J were of like minds when it came to women:

While the two creation accounts of Genesis differ markedly in language, style, date and traditions employed, their basic statements about woman are essentially the same: woman is, along with man, the direct and intentional creation of God and the crown of his creation. Man and woman were made for each other.¹⁵

Azalea Reisenberger¹⁶ reaches the same conclusion as Bird albeit by a different route. Reisenberger, informed by the rabbinic tradition of Adam as hermaphrodite, suggests that woman came from the side (not the rib) of the ’adam. She views the separation of woman and man in Genesis 2:23 as analogous to humankind’s simultaneous creation described in Genesis 1:27. For Reisenberger, Genesis 2 recapitulates Genesis 1, with both maintaining “the equality of the sexes.”¹⁷

While Bird and Reisenberger conclude that Genesis 1–3 envisions mutuality and egalitarianism as the goal of gender relations, others would argue that subordination and hierarchy are the essential vision of Genesis 1–3.

Raymond C. Ortlund, for example, argues that Genesis 1–3 presents a unified vision of male “headship” as well as “male-female equality.”¹⁸ After admitting that neither expression (“headship” or “equality”) is found in Genesis 1, Ortlund suggests that God’s use of the term “man” in Genesis 1:27 (“God created man in his image”) “wh...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments and Permissions
• General Introduction
• Chapter One: Hebrew Bible Accounts
• Chapter Two: Jewish Postbiblical Interpretations (200s BCE–200 CE)
• Chapter Three: Rabbinic Interpretations (200–600s CE)
• Chapter Four: Early Christian Interpretations (50–450 CE)
• Chapter Five: Medieval Readings: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian (600–1500 CE)
• Chapter Six: Interpretations from the Protestant Reformation (1517–1700 CE)
• Chapter Seven: Social Applications in the United States (1800s CE)
• Chapter Eight: Twentieth-Century Readings: The Debates Continue
• Appendix: The Preadamite Theory and the Christian Identity Movement: Race, Hierarchy, and Genesis 1–3 at the Turn of the Millennium
• Index