Portrait of Woman in Genesis 2- 3

Introduction The Yahwistic Creation account and that of the Fall is the story of Eve ( (Gen 3:6 WTT) heb. meaning living, life giver, from the Hebrew root, to live), the 1st woman in the bible creation story (Gen. 2-3). This text has been interpreted differently throughout history. Mostly it has been used to show the domination of male over female. Thus the need to read the text using feminist hermeneutics was felt. Feminists have tried through the ages to depict the nature of woman to be equal with man. This spawned the egalitarian readings of Genesis by egalitarian interpretation of first and second chapters of Genesis.1 Traditional View of Women based on this text Many Church elders such as Augustine and Tertullian have blamed the woman as the one who gave way to sin in the world. Augustine said that the woman by herself was not the image of God. Thomas Aquinas believed that female gender as the weaker sex depends on the other sex for direction. Cassuto identifies serpent and woman, maintaining that the cunning of the serpent is "in reality" the cunning of the woman. He impugns her further by declaring that "for the very reason that a woman's imagination surpasses a man's, it was the woman who was enticed first." Though more gentle in his assessment, von Rad avers that "in the history of Yahweh-religion it has always been the women who have shown an inclination for obscure astrological cults" (a claim which he does not document). Consequently, he holds that the woman "confronts the obscure allurements and mysteries that beset our limited life more directly than the man does," and then he calls her a "temptress." Paul Ricoeur says that woman "represents the point of weakness," as the entire story "gives evidence of a very masculine resentment." McKenzie links the "moral weakness" of the woman with her "sexual attraction and holds that the latter ruined both the woman and the man.2 But in APE Hermas Vision in the Ante Nicene Fathers there is a mention of woman as the Church. And for her sake was the world made." (HV2 4:1 APE). Also in APE Hermas Mandate (HMD 1:8 APE) concerning divorce it is said that man and woman are to be treated exactly in the same way. Thus the Apostolic Fathers were not misogynists. Main points of contention Amongst feminists, Genesis 2-3 has acquired the reputation of being the primary Old Testament foundation for the depreciation of women and their debarment from positions of leadership in the Church. Genesis 2 - Woman in Creation3 1. There is a deduction which says that woman is secondary to man which the feminists refute. The scholars like Trible hold that in Genesis 2 the term adam is at first undifferentiated, i.e. the earth creature is not first man, is not sexual, not androgynous. Only after 2.22 is the term getting a sexual dimension. If woman is said to have been created after the animals, there is no hint that she is thereby inferior to them. 2. It is sometimes implied that Hebrew issa (woman) is a supernumerary addition to is (man). 3. Adams rib is used to denote male superiority. 4. Mans alleged naming of the woman 5. I will make a helper fit for him. Augustine said that the woman, by herself, is not the image of God. Aquinas believes that woman was made only for procreation.
1Lynne 2

Bundesen, The Feminine Spirit, (U.S.A.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 24. http://academic.udayton.edu/michaelbarnes/103-W05/RG4.htm accessed on 31st July, 2012 10:45 a.m. 3 Mary Hayter, The New Eve in Christ, (Michigan: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1987), 96.

But all such arguments which show mans domination over woman is misusing the text. Genesis 3 - Woman in the Fall4 1. It has been argued that the whole female sex was shown to be weak and fickle, the whole female race transgressed. It is, according to one scholar, an emulation of the fallen Adam, who blamed the woman rather than confess his own guilt. 2. The interpretation of Tertullian was such that it was through Eve, that sin entered the world. But according to the J perspective, it is more of a social, collective act. 3. As woman was the first to fall into temptation, it was argued that woman is generally simple-minded, gullible and untrustworthy. Adam was a willing accomplice. Thus this cannot be used as evidence to prove the weakness of the female sex. The Genesis Creation and Fall passages are misused if they are called upon as biblical examples of the depreciation of sexuality or of womanhood. Through Feminist Eyes The Gen. 2-3 story appears to sanction patriarchal notions of female domination. Feminist biblical studies, as part of the first wave of feminist interest in biblical exegesis, like contemporary theology, seeks to remove negative theological overlay to recapture positive aspects of Eve.5 In 1973, Phyllis Trible offered a paper at Andover Newton Theological Seminary that has changed the biblical scholarship and readings of the second and third chapters of Genesis. Trible says about Eden, The woman is both the theologian and the translator. And by contrast, The man is not dominant; he is not a decision-maker. The fact remains that the original texts have been examined and yield a picture of God that does not remain in the hands of the exclusively male translators, and that women may continue to read the texts for themselves and compare and contrast them to their own lives to see to what extent the texts and interpretations of them have an influence on their personal experiences, their mental and physical health. Continuing in Eden, a narrative device is introduced in Genesis 3:1. A talking serpent comes and introduces an element of doubt by asking the woman, Did God really say, You must not eat from any tree in the garden?6 We see that Satans strategy of Temptation is very clever. He allows strategy to confuse reality. He approaches the Woman with a theological discussion about God. He makes another statement which allows Eve to correct him but in doing so he makes her aware of a restriction. God is keeping something from her. He casts doubt on the character of God. Doubting God makes it easy to take and eat. Eves attention is riveted to the tree, not to the garden full of goodness, not Gods gracious fellowship and provision.7 The talking serpent trivializes this, telling the woman that she is wrong. It says that she will not die. She will be like God and know good and evil. Trivialized and seduced to death, the woman eats. She eats and gives some to her husband. He eats. The woman is not wise, but she is to be ashamed-perhaps the consequence of holding two conflicting ideas in conscious thought at the same time. The Lord God asks the man if he has eaten the fruit. The man answers to the question from God. He first points to the responsibility to Lord God, then to the woman, and last to himself. The woman sticks to reporting the facts. The serpent deceived me, and I ate (Gen. 3:13) Lord God curses the serpent and puts hatred between the serpent and the seed of the woman. This hatred is seen throughout the Bible. It culminates in Revelation 12 in which this clash reaches its end.8

Ibid, 102. Carol Meyers, ed., Women in Scripture, (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 80. 6 Lynne Bundesen, The Feminine Spirit, (U.S.A.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 26 7 Womens Devotional Bible (NIV), (U.S.A.: Zondervan, 1990), 5. 8 Ibid., 27.
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In Genesis 2-3 there is intimacy between God and man; then sin turns that intimacy to alienation. There is intimacy between man and woman; then sin causes intimacy to become alienation.9 The effect of transgression caused sin which led to disruption in their relationship with God. But in each case the broken intimacy, alienation, and punishment are not allowed to go beyond God's intended extent. The contention that "sin has corrupted both the willing submission of the wife and the loving headship of the husband is unquestionably true. But it is a natural consequence of sin, not a result of God's judgment on the woman in Gen 3:16. Just as the sin-corrupted headship of the husband is not a part of the divine judgment upon the man but a consequence of sin, so the sincorrupted submission of the wife is not a part of the judgment; it is the result of sin.10 The Yahwists View The author of the older account of creation (Gen. 2), the Yahwistic narrator, probably writing in the 10th century B.C., is a learned man sufficiently detached from the culture of his age to use its symbols discerningly and to the best advantage as vehicles for a quite amazing weight of doctrine (Gen. 2: 18-25). The aspect of the human couple which he most stresses is depicting the original perfect man and woman is the mutual affection of the two partners, who have the same nature and equal dignity.11 By juxtaposing the account of creation (Gen. 2) and that of the original sin (Gen. 3), he excludes both a dualistic conception which would justify its view of sexuality as an evil by pointing to the concomitant disorder and suffering and a conception with no basis in reality which would deny the disorder and encourage hopes of a facile liberation from suffering. No shame changes to the feeling of shame. It is bound up with sexuality which is a token of lost innocence, of the wound inflicted on the power of loving, of the disorder introduced by inflaming of passions, of the shadow fallen between two partners. For the first time they know loneliness: they are not truly one, Adam throws blame on Eve, Eve on the serpent.12 The message of the Yahwist counters the conspicuous androcentrism of his account with explicit narrative qualification: although the woman is taken from the man, he cleaves to her, acknowledging her power over him; although he is destined to become her master that domination is presented as the consequence of sin, not as design in creation.13 The Yahwistic writer shows a reality of the ideal couple distanced with God their Creator because of the sin which comes in between them. The view of original Sin is not the sin of an abstract man who offends the creator in the solitude of his individual conscience. It is the shared sin of the prototype couple: for Man does not exist except as man and woman. The mutual love of the man and woman is vitiated at its roots by their common commission of sin; and the consequences of their sin rebound on their love.14 Illusory dream of becoming like Gods gives place to cruel awareness of their sinful condition.15 This is the harsh reality. Other Readings

http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/OTeSources/01-Genesis/Text/ArticlesBooks/Busenitz-Gen3-GTJ.pdf accessed on 7/31/2012 10:35 AM 10 Ibid. 11 T. A. Joseph S G, Human Sexuality, A Gift and a challenge: Genesis Perspective, Kristhu Jyothi 5/4 (December, 1989): 29. 12 Ibid., 32. 13 Phyllis A. Bird, Sexual Differentiation and Divine Image in the Genesis Creation Texts in The Image of God edited by Kari Elisabeth Borresen, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 5-28. 14 Joseph, op.cit, 31. 15 Ibid.
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Using masculist interpretation, John Goldingay shows how man is dependent on the woman. He says, Men discover who they are by setting themselves against women. It is when the man sees the woman that he knows who he is. In Gen. 1, authority is designed to be shared, by men and women. In Gen. 3, man has ambiguity about it. There is great fulfilment to be gained from the exercise of responsibility, of power, and much good that can come from it, but there is also stress and temptation attached to it, and potential for evil. 16 Critical evaluation of feminist reading In the background of the feminists the world over considering Christianity and Judaism as being patriarchal and rejecting it as being anti-woman, scholars like Trible try to re-read the scripture and do not reject them. She tries to prove that by speculating women to be superior than men, there have been tendencies in the past which held such anti-feminist views on the basis of mere speculation. Trible's Protestant feminist theology is an instance of a kind of liberation theology, a theology that is somewhat "secular", in that it is concerned with changing this world rather than just getting to the next world.17 1. A theme that runs through Trible's analysis is the equality of the man and the woman, even the sameness of the man and woman. 2. She is trying to show how a person can bend the text to take on meanings that the interpreter prefers. So she shows how a woman could make the woman look good and the man bad. 3. Trible does not promote a theory favoured by some that the story in Gen. 2 & 3 is what anthropologists and others refer to as "coming of age" stories. Such stories typically portray a point at which a person loses childish innocence by discovering the darker side of life, by making a decision with tragic consequences.18 Conclusion By egalitarian reading of the text, the portrait of woman which emerges in Genesis 2-3 shows an account of not only woman falling in sin but humanity falling in sin. The feminist reading uses a very selective approach of reading the text with such a lens that the passages can be even read in such a way so as to show the woman to be superior. The way the text is read determines its meaning. But when such meanings are used for the subjugation of a particular gender or caste or group, it is sin. All are created in the image of God both men and women.

John Goldingay, Hosea 1-3, Gen. 1-4 and Masculist interpretation, Horizons in Biblical Theology 17/ 1, (June, 1995): 38-39. 17 http://academic.udayton.edu/michaelbarnes/103-W05/RG4.htm accessed on 31st July, 2012 10:45 a.m. 18 Ibid
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Bibliography
Faculty- Gordon. July 26, 2012. http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/OTeSources/01-Genesis/Text/ArticlesBooks/Busenitz-Gen3-GTJ.pdf (accessed July 31, 2012). Adam & Eve Durer. http://academic.udayton.edu/michaelbarnes/103-W05/RG4.htm (accessed July 31, 2012). Bundesen, Lynne. The Feminine Spirit. U.S.A.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Carol Meyers, ed. Women in Scripture. Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2000. Goldingay, John. "Hosea 1-3, Gen. 1-4 and Masculist interpretation." Horizons in Biblical Theology 17/ 1, June 1995: 38-39. Hayter, Mary. The New Eve in Christ. Michigan: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1987. Joseph SG, T. A. "Human Sexuality, A Gift and a challenge: Genesis Perspective." Kristhu Jyothi 5/4, December 1989: 27-33. Phyllis A. Bird. "Sexual Differentiation and Divine Image in the Genesis Creation Texts." In The Image of God, by Kari Elisabeth Borresen, 5-28. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Womens Devotional Bible (NIV). U.S.A.: Zondervan, 1990.

Portrait of Woman in Genesis 2-3