For the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, one of the primary factors in the shaping of each faith’s understanding of gender is their belief in a creator deity who is responsible for the formation of the first human beings, Adam and Eve. Traditional Jewish, Christian, and Islamic views hold that different roles and characteristics are natural to men and women; these roles and characteristics are determined by the different male and female bodies formed by God in the beginning, and the separate regulations and expectations God set out for the sexes that are recorded in Scripture.
The legacy of how these religions have interpreted Genesis 1-3, as well as how the biblical characters of Adam and Eve have appeared in other aspects of culture, mean that they remain important symbolic figures who have had a considerable impact on the way we think about gender and sexuality today. You have already had glimpse of how Genesis 1-3 has impacted on Christian ideas about same-sex marriage. Now let's think about how the same story has shaped the way we think about women and femininity.
Contents
1. Encountering Eve
In my book, Encountering Eve's Afterlives, I explore how and why the Bible's first woman, Eve, has come to be characterised as the first femme fatale and troubling legacy this interpretation of her story has had for women.
When we think about the biblical creation of sexes and genders, it is important for us to understand that there are, in fact, TWO accounts of the creation of humans in Genesis 1-2.
Genesis 1.27 "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them"
Genesis 1.27 can, and often has in recent times, be read in an egalitarian way. If the text is translated to read ‘so God created humankind in his image’, then scripture supports the claim that humanity is made of two parts, the male and the female sex, which are equally in the image of God. So, where do more hierarchical traditional Christian views about men and women, such as those that prevent women from being ordained as priests, or those that characterise women primarily as wives and mothers, come from?
Genesis 1.27 is followed by the equally famous second description of the creation of man and woman, more specifically, Adam and Eve, that we find in Genesis 2-3. In this account, God forms a man from the dust of the earth and his own breath (Genesis 2.7). God notices that it is not good for the creature that he has made to be alone, and decides to make for the man “a helper as his partner” (Genesis 2.18). First, God creates the animals, but when none is found suitable as a partner for Adam, the woman is created from the man’s rib or side (Genesis 2.21-22). There are a number of reasons why this text has been used to support gender hierarchy within Christianity:
- The man appears to be created first.
- Woman appears to be created as “a helper” for the man.
- The woman is created out of the body of the man.
From this interpretation, readers of the Bible might assume women are naturally subordinate to men because in the creation story woman is created after man, for man, out of man. Later elements of the story in Genesis 3 also support this interpretation, particularly in Genesis 3.16, where, having broken God’s commandment not to eat of the tree of knowledge, the woman is punished by being told that her husband will rule over her. This is a hierarchical reading of gender in Genesis 2-3. So, the two creation stories appear to present conflicting ideas of divinely created sex and gender.
One theological response to the apparent inconsistencies between these two stories is a complementarian understanding of the sexes: the belief that men and women are made equally in the image of God, but that they have essentially different gendered social and familial roles to play in the material world. On reading Genesis 2-3 as a whole, men are created by God to be husbands, fathers, and breadwinners, while women are created as wives, mothers and helpers to men. Today, these kinds of gendered social roles for women are often perceived to indicate subordination in public and private life, but complementarians hold this does not diminish their equality in the image of God.
Amongst early Christians, such as the theologian Augustine (c.354-430 CE), it was common to use the biblical text as a means of identifyin and explaining apparently 'natural' differences between men and women, which were, in fact, socially conditioned roles. In Augustine's theological text The Literal Meaning of Genesis, he suggests the reason God made Adam a female companion was so that she might provide him with children. Augustine asserts that if God had intended Adam to have an intellectual partner, he would have made another man. Augustine therefore uses the Genesis creation story to promote the idea of God's wish for a heteronormative, procreative humanity.
Now, if the woman was not made for the man to be his helper in begetting children, in what was she to help him? She was not to till the earth with him, for there was not yet any toil to make help necessary. If there were any such need, a male helper would be better, and the same could be said of the comfort of another's presence if Adam were perhaps weary of solitude. How much more agreeably could two male friends, rather than a man and woman, enjoy com-panionship and conversation in a life shared together
The Literal Meaning of Genesis Book 4, Chapter 3 - translated by John Hammond Taylor
Can you think of any alternative ways that we could interpret Genesis 2-3? Can we only find images of hierarchy or gender difference in this text?
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2. The First Woman Question
While the history of interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve has been dominated by male voices, using the biblical text to define and determine how men and women should relate to one another, the figure of Eve has been an extremely important symbol for women in their struggle for equality.
In my work 'The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement', I explore ways in which female writers through the ages have used the Bible's first woman in their political writings, and I think about the role Eve has to play in the birth of the feminist movement.
One of the key elements that became important for women writers, as early as the fifteenth century, was a desire to tackle the prevalent idea that women had been made inferior to man.
In her work, the Book of the City of Ladies which is one of the earliest proto-feminist texts written in Europe by a woman, Christine de Pisan sets out to challenge the misogyny that surrounded her in 1405 in France. In her famous feminist text, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described Christine as the “first woman to take up her pen in defence of her sex”.
One of the many ways that Christine goes about challenging gender stereotypes of the middle ages is through her re-interpretation of Eve in Genesis 2.
Whilst we’re still on the subject of how the human body was formed, woman was created by the very finest craftsman... What from? Was it coarse matter? No, it was from the finest material that had yet been invented by God. From the body of man himself.
Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies
For Christine, the fact that man was made from the dust of the earth (Genesis 2.7), while woman was made from human flesh that had been formed by God (Genesis 2.21-22), meant that women were equal, if not superior to men. Indeed, here Christine seems to suggest that misogyny was akin to heresy, because it cast doubt of God's ability as the 'very finest craftsman'.
Similar kinds of arguments were made by Christian women through the ages, who simultaneously wished to defend both the Bible's first woman, and their Christian faith.
Feminist theologian Phyllis Trible in her 1978 work, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality sought to develop yet another way of reading Genesis 1-3 that would challenge hierarchal understandings of sex and gender within the text.
In this book, Trible argues that the creature that is created in Genesis 2.7, which is described using the Hebrew word adam, meaning ‘human’ or ‘man’, would have had no biological sex.
The first human created in Genesis 2 is ‘one creature incorporating two sexes’ – in other words, the first human made of the dust from the earth is androgynous.
Trible argues that it is only when the woman is separated from the side of the man — arguably a better translation of the original Hebrew than ‘rib’ — that humanity becomes sexed: male and female. This account of creation addresses two of the key challenges for understanding gender relations in Genesis 2 – the order of creation, and the manner of creation – that were highlighted on the previous page. With Trible’s reading, in Genesis 2.21-22, man and woman come into being simultaneously. Furthermore, woman is not take from the side of man, but man and woman are separated out from one being into two. Perhaps, then, creation according to Genesis 2 is egalitarian after all...
But the figure of Eve has not only been important to religious women in their political struggle. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the feminist movement reached its second-wave, women sought equal rights, equal pay, reproductive rights, and much more.
Add video on protest badges and Spare Rib
Eve remained, from the elite beginnings of feminism in Christine de Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies to the grassroots protest of the Women’s Liberation Movement, a powerful figure in women’s interpretation of the Bible but also in their pursuit of equality and emancipation. She was a symbol of the longevity of female oppression, and when she was free so too was Woman.
Holly Morse 'The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement'
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3. Further Research
Holly Morse, Encountering Eve’s Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2-4 (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs; Oxford: OUP, 2020
Holly Morse, 'The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement', in Yvonne Sherwood with Anna Fisk (eds.), Bible, Feminism and Gender: Remapping the Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Holly Morse, Eve-ry Woman exhibition on the Visual Commentary on Scripture
BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief programme on Eve
BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief programme on Christianity and Gender Identity
These pages were created by me, Dr Holly Morse, researcher and lecturer in the Bible, Gender, and Culture at the University of Manchester. My primary research interest is the biblical figure of Eve, and the way she has been interpreted, used, and abused by readers through the centuries. I've written about this in my book, Encountering Eve’s Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2-4 (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs; Oxford: OUP, 2020).
Credits:
Created with images by falco - "adam and eve church window church" • AlexTino - "apple tree autumn apple" • DenisDoukhan - "snake apple paradise"