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 1â3, 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 bookâs last chapter) contemporary opinion ranges widely on what Genesis 1â3 says about men and women.
The Story/ies of Creation
Genesis 1:1â2:4a contains a story of creation. In six days, the heavens, the earth, and all living creatures are created from a watery chaos. Following the animalsâ creation on the sixth day, Elohim (God) creates humankind in Elohimâs own image. The first man and woman are created simultaneously and jointly receive Elohimâs command to be fruitful, to multiply, and to subdue and have dominion over the earth. Their creation, Elohim remarks, is âvery good.â 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 lifeâwater and someone to till the soilâare 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 characterâthe 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 charactersâsnake, woman, and manâreceive 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 1â2. On the basis of style, theology, content, and divine names, the German pastor H. B. Witter suggested that Genesis 1â3 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 1â3 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, 6thâ5th c. BCE). According to this theory, Genesis 1â3 contained a doublet, that is, two accounts of the same event. Genesis 2:4bâ3:24 was from the Yahwist source and dated c. 900s BCE (during the reigns of David or Solomon), while Genesis 1:1â2:43 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 1â3: Contradictory Visions of Gender
Many who read the accounts in Genesis 1â3 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 2â3 as âstrongly sexistâ3 with Genesis 1 functioning as its corrective. Drawing on Ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, she argues that stories similar to Genesis 2â3 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. 1:1â2:4a) did not perceive goddess worship as a threat, P âdeliberately took issue with Genesis 2:4bâ3â by stressing the âsimultaneous creation of male and female (Gen. 1:27).â5 Thus P could declare that humankindâs creation was âvery goodâ (Gen. 1:31) and, as Gardner emphasizes, âthat included the woman!â6
Whereas Gardner views P as a corrective to J, other scholars suggest that J corrects P. According to Phyllis Bird,7 for example, Pâs image of woman in Genesis 1 is not as egalitarian as scholars like Gardner assume.8 P is not, as some might hope, an âequal-rights theologian.â9 While the P account addresses sexuality in its biological aspects, it is the J account that emphasizes the psychosocial aspects of sexual relationships:
Genesis 2â3 supplements the anthropology of Genesis 1, but also âcorrectsâ 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 2â3 opens the way for a consideration of sex and sexuality in history.10
Thus for Bird, Genesis 2 contains an ideal image of gender relationsâan image that becomes perverted in Genesis 3. Genesis 1, however, is neither for nor against womenâs equality.11
Not all scholars believe that the differences between Genesis 1 and 2â3 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 âessentially resistant to consistent linear formulation.â13 The tension between stories is not an accident of compositional merging, but the product of intentional artistic crafting. This literary tension mirrors the âbewildering complex realityâ of human relationships.14
Genesis 1â3: A Unified Vision of Women
The above positions of Gardner, Bird, and Alter all assume that Genesis 1â3 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 âadam. She views the separation of woman and man in Genesis 2:23 as analogous to humankindâs simultaneous creation described in Genesis 1:27. For Reisenberger, Genesis 2 recapitulates Genesis 1, with both maintaining âthe equality of the sexes.â17
While Bird and Reisenberger conclude that Genesis 1â3 envisions mutuality and egalitarianism as the goal of gender relations, others would argue that subordination and hierarchy are the essential vision of Genesis 1â3.
Raymond C. Ortlund, for example, argues that Genesis 1â3 presents a unified vision of male âheadshipâ as well as âmale-female equality.â18 After admitting that neither expression (âheadshipâ or âequalityâ) is found in Genesis 1, Ortlund suggests that Godâs use of the term âmanâ in Genesis 1:27 (âGod created man in his imageâ) âwh...