The Thing About Eve

Last night, Instagram showed me a reel by @roseistheart:

btw, the b*blical Adam & Eve story was taken from the ancient Sumerian myth, the tale of Enki & Ninhursag around 2000 BCE.

the man eats the forbidden fruit and was told NOT to by the goddess.

they flipped it around when adding it to abr*hamic books to push a patriarchal agenda, turning powerful goddesses & sacred serpents into villains, and a goddess who HEALED his rib into a woman made from his rib instead.

Eve wasn’t the problem or secondary. she was the *superior* main character.

Rose links to a World History Encyclopedia article about the goddess Ninhursag which goes into more detail about her myth with the god Enki and its confluence with the myth found in Genesis 2–3. The former is a very interesting one. If I may paraphrase the article: Enki fucks Ninhursag who gives birth to Ninsar; then Enki fucks Ninsar who gives birth to Ninkurra; then Enki fucks Ninkurra who gives birth to Uttu; then Enki fucks Uttu—except this time, Ninhursag is tired of Enki’s shit, so she scoops Enki’s semen out from her great-great-granddaughter (and his… daughter/great-great-granddaughter) and has her plant it in the earth, sprouting eight trees. Enki comes along and is convinced by his cosmic vizier Isimud to eat the fruit of all the trees, which frustrates Ninhursag enough to give him the evil eye and curse him to death. But then she feels pity as Enki slowly dies, places him at her vulva, and asks him to tell her where it hurts; each time he tells her, she absorbs that pain and gives birth to a goddess, and they do this eight times (once for each of the trees). The connection to Genesis 2–3 is on its face, being centered on one or more taboo trees, but also linguistic: Samuel Noah Cramer is quoted as pointing out that the name of one of the goddesses, Ninti, is a pun on the words for “rib” and “make live”, which fits her having been born from healing Enki’s rib and being a goddess of life; similarly, Eve’s name means basically “life-giver”, and she was formed from Adam’s rib, but the pun is lost in Hebrew—which seems to suggest that Eve is on some level an adaptation of Ninti (and perhaps, as Rose suggests, of Ninhursag as well).

But I’m trying to put my finger on why Rose’s reading seems a little reductive. The myth in Genesis 2–3 certainly has some patriarchal reification but it also interacts with other texts (including Genesis 1!) and has, in my opinion, a different and stranger agenda that can’t be chalked up to mythic self-fellatio. I don’t expect this to be a well-structured thing, but I do want to check every nook and cranny in my mental library to investigate a question that’s actually been bothering me for months: not for a lack of information, but too much. What are we supposed to take from Genesis 2–3? Why does it seem to comment on more than one myth about women, but none about creation? And then, why was this novel creation narrative inserted alongside another broader creation narrative (whose literary meaning is far clearer in my view)?

Pandora: Greek Detour

I wrote my undergraduate thesis in part about the Pandora myth, as told to us apparently by the epic didactic poet Hesiod. But here’s where we get to a pet peeve of mine. They’ll tell you that the Pandora myth was recorded in Hesiod’s two famous works, the Theogony and Works & Days, but that’s not true. The woman in the Theogony is nameless, and she is created by Hephaestus and Athena to be a beautiful instrument (barely a person, more of a clay sculpture) of Zeus’ cunning against men by giving them something attractive which does nothing but suck all their resources dry. That’s right: no jar, no box. She is compared to the drone bees which hang out at the hive all day while the worker bees do everything for them (apparently) like idiots. She is nothing but the prototypical bitch wife, except she is not even a bitch. Just sits there and looks pretty.

But Works & Days, oh boy. There we get Pandora, a creation of all the gods, not only an instrument of Zeus’ will but having a “female dog’s mind” (translate as you will) of her own and the chutzpah to act on it. It’s this Pandora who opens her jar—yes, her jar—to unleash disease and misfortune upon men while trapping in her jar their bios (meaning ‘livelihood’) by the name of elpis (‘hope’ or ‘expectation’), forcing them to marry women and endlessly toil on the field in order to survive and (more importantly) fulfill their cosmic role as men. Pandora here is more than the progenitor of women and even makes women themselves more than just women, which the Theogony defines as useless pretty things. Pandora is in Lacanian terms the Other, the big obstacle which stands in all men’s way from reclaiming through constant strife their manliness; every woman becomes an instance of Pandora, a pretty little jar holding some bios, forcing men to deal with them. But it’s not just women: the Earth itself incarnates Pandora and functions as One Big Wife shared by all men who push the plow or whatever they do. But why?

Ding ding ding! Pandora is an archaic Earth goddess who predates Works & Days, and her jar is a symbol of the Earth, out of which not only are living things born, but also to which they return after they die (celebrated during an Athenian day of the day, whose logic the myth in Works & Days subverts by making the spirits malicious givers of disease and age). There’s little chance that the same guy wrote the Theogony and Works & Days. More likely, the author of Works & Days remixed the myth of the first woman from the Theogony to be about how the Earth goddess is actually a fucking bitch and was created by the Olympian pantheon to slow-cook men in their misery (note the inversion, where the gods create her rather than her birthing the gods—the former being narrated in the Theogony!—but I only realized that now and not four years ago). Works & Days is a hit-piece against that archaic Earth Goddess, and it’s obvious unless you just aren’t familiar with the same motifs as its contemporary readers. This is my working model for how a patriarchal myth-maker would subvert earlier traditions centered on some Earth goddess, and Genesis 2–3 is simply too weird to fit squarely in that mold.

Back to Genesis

My friend Dwiz shared with me a 1970 article by John A. Bailey called “Initiation and the Primal Woman in Gilgamesh and Genesis 2–3” where he argues that Eve shares a similar role to the temple prostitute in the Gilgamesh Epic (do I need italics for that? does it have a proper name?) who domesticates the beast-man Enkidu by fucking him for six days and seven nights until the wild animals reject Enkidu and flee from him because they perceive him as having become unlike them, which causes him to lose a piece of his past identity, but also gain new wisdom. He sits sadly at the feet of the prostitute who tells him: “Thou art wise, Enkidu, art become like a god!” And then she tells him to go meet Gilgamesh in the big city to find a friend with someone as big and bombastic as him. The prostitute like Eve in Genesis 2–3 is the catalyst for the male character to inadvertently depart from his stupid animal nature by tripping and falling into semi-godhood—except that rather than it having been triggered by sexual transgression, it was by transgression of knowledge itself (which Bailey argues is an intentional deviation from the prostitute myth), and the woman rather than gatekeeping knowledge is the first to acquire it.

Let’s say a Hebrew author reads the Gilgamesh Epic, and then reads the myth about Enki and Ninhursag, and like Hesiod decides to somehow combine the two to make the Earth goddess out to be a deceptive whore (don’t trust a ho, never trust a ho…). Would that be basis enough to explain a text like Genesis 2–3? I think it’s weirder than that. Though Eve is physically derived from Adam, she is highly esteemed (Bailey points this out) and given more symbolic weight than Adam, as if she and not him were the pinnacle of creation—which has an interesting confluence with the harlot in the Gilgamesh Epic probably being a temple prostitute, and with Genesis 1 basically describing all creation as a temple with male and female serving as images (idols!) of Gxd. Even though Genesis 2–3 superficially demotes woman from her equal status with man in the first chapter, it problematizes the very demotion itself: Eve is the crown of creation; she is the first to attain godhood; and, by the way, she is the one to force Yhvh’s hand to prove he lied about the fruit (nope, the serpent did not lie!). I’m not trying to glaze Eve or make Genesis 2–3 out to be a feminist masterpiece of ancient literature. I’m trying to point out how weird it is.

And it gets worse. I read Paul and the Resurrection of Israel by Jason A. Staples, which is an interesting book about how Paul saw Jews as ex-Israelites and the church as a new Israel, whose evidence of it functioning as such is by Gentiles becoming Israelites. Thus, if Jews became like Gentiles by their historical apostasies against Gxd, and if Gentles are able to become Israelites, then Jews have an opening to rejoin Gxd and restore Israel as a sort of politeia (see my review of Pamela Eisenbaum’s book). That was all interesting, but Staples leaves something unsaid not only about Paul but also about the Torah’s own logic. In his epistle to the Romans, Paul locates Israel as a repetition of Adam in that both were given “the law” and both broke it despite knowing better, but that it’s fine because the gospel is a remedy against “the law”. So, what was “the law” for Adam? Was it the command not to eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil in the garden? I keep telling you it gets worse. The law is itself knowledge of good and evil. The fruit is almost a red herring compared to the injunction not to eat it, which itself makes Adam and Eve conscious of the knowledge they apparently don’t have yet—and then, with Eve taking the lead, they act on it.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Genesis 2:15–7 (NRSVue)

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall certainly perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess."

Deuteronomy 30:15–8 (NRSVue)

You know what happens next. Or, maybe not. They keep breaking the law and eventually get thrown out by the Babylonian Empire, and it was there in captivity that the Torah was written to unify the diaspora and rationalize their situation since they no longer inhabited the land of Yhvh—but they don’t die, or at least, not strictly speaking. Exact same thing for Adam and Eve, and sometimes the former is discussed as perhaps a microcosm of Israel in where he lives and in his relationship to Gxd, but I’ve not seen anyone go as far as to say that Gxd entraps Israel in the same way he entraps Adam. I use this language because the modus operandi of Gxd throughout the Torah and even the Hebrew Bible is entrapment, or more broadly mischief (see Jacob and the Divine Trickster by John Edward Anderson and God’s Monsters by Esther Hamori), so to consider Gxd’s relationship to Israel and Adam in this way is much less surprising when considering the portrait of Gxd’s character overall. It’s almost as if Gxd gives Adam and Israel a law he knows they’ll break in order to subject them to his mercy and power—which, again, is said much more often for Adam than I’ve ever seen it said for Israel. Also compare with Paul:

Now we know that, whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For no human will be justified before him by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin [!]. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of Gxd has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, the righteousness of Gxd through the [loyalty] of Jesus Christ for all who believe.

Romans 3:21–6 (NRSVue; πίστις retranslated as “loyalty”)

But what about Eve? Is she, like Pandora, an instrument of deception leveraged against Adam for the crime of hubris? Not really; in fact, I don’t think what happens in the text can be described as hubris at all. The humans don’t aspire to more than they are: rather, they realize by challenging the law who they really are. Eve initiates this realization and although no one in the story is blameless—she herself is punished with painful childbirth, which is the point at which the text’s patriarchal leanings are most obvious—that includes the vain and mischievous Yhvh Gxd who constructs such a situation for them. It’s mental. Am I crazy? But the consistent bend to Gxd’s mischief in the Hebrew Bible is that it’s in service to a higher commitment; and, again, Eve is not a pure instrument but the crown of all creation up to her. Unlike Pandora, furthermore, even though Eve seems to actualize Gxd’s project of mischief, it’s because she herself acts literally according to the letter of the law (even elaborating upon it: you should not touch, rather than you should not eat) and then acts critically towards it.

How does this relate in turn to Eve’s literary predecessors? I think it’s a general pattern in the early chapters of Genesis to humiliate the Semitic pantheon(s) by reducing all kinds of divinities to natural phenomena being acted upon by Gxd’s commands (later reinterpreted along the lines of the Hellenistic logos as either cosmic craftsman or natural law, the latter being favored by the authors of the New Testament). So I don’t think Eve’s demotion from goddess to woman, then, necessarily reflects a specific beef against the archaic archetype of the Earth goddess. Not to mention, like the temple prostitute in the Gilgamesh Epic, Eve initiates man’s (Adam’s) initiation into (or realization of) godhood, but it is specifically because she is the first to attain (or realize) it. Adam comes across almost buffoonish, like he doesn’t fully comprehend his situation. It must take a second pair of eyes. Eve might have been demoted to a mere human, but it’s through this demotion that she realizes a more interesting divinity centered on her very humanity.

Conclusion

So what are we to make of Eve and the larger Genesis 2–3 narrative? Whatever we do, we can’t rely on the popular reading which supposes that she and Adam were acting on either stupidity or hubris. Paul has a formula in his letters where he tries to subvert expectations around relationships by inverting the power dynamic: e.g., a husband should serve his wife (reflecting how Christ serves the church), or being on top doesn’t preclude you from sexual immorality (contra the Roman social norm that it’s only gay if you’re bottoming). On one hand, Paul does reify the relationships in ways which do translate functionally back into a law, but the spirit of Paul is to find how the expectations can and should be subverted. I think there’s a similar logic at play in Genesis 2–3, where on one hand the first becomes last, but then the last becomes first.

I'm not fully satisfied with this, though. Still a weird story.