The Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther and John Calvin

For Martin Luther and John Calvin, both man and woman were created in the image of God.  Both of these men account for Eve's disobedience differently but have a similar opinion on what the effects of the event in Genesis 3 are on human relations.

Luther attempts to reconcile Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3.  According to him, Moses writes that the 2 sexes were created together to indicate that Eve was also made by God as a partaker of the divine image and of divine similitude and ruled over everything.  This applies to later writing by Peter who declare that women also partake of Jesus' saving grace.  Eve was not inferior to Adam in body or soul.  Yet, he states that there is a difference between the sexes.  Women are inferior but may not be excluded from any glory of the human creature.  Women were created that they should 'everywhere and always be about her husband.'  In the garden, Luther says that the woman allowed herself to be persuaded.  The snake, which he believes to be Satan, attacked the weak part of the human nature, woman.  They were created equally righteous but Adam had some advantage over Eve.  The only evidence he seems to have for this is just the fact that Satan chose her.  He does references what happen after the fall, like Eve's dependance on her husband.  Perhaps the strength of the male sex surpasses the female sex.  Luther notes that Eve didn't mention the punishment as God had stated it ("on whatever day you will eat from it, you will surely die" vs. "lest perchance we shall die.." (she adds perchance)).  The 'deceit of the lying spirit met with success.'  Satan saw this and took advantage of it; according to Luther, the root and source of sin is unbelief and turning away from God.  Eve was engrossed in unbelief both in spirit and in body that she didn't realize she was doing evil.  For Luther, Eve's disobedience is a result of women's innate inferiority to men, despite his claim that men and women were created equal in body and soul, equally righteous.

Luther sees Adam as a typical case of any human being who sins: he blames God and others, and this necessitates the grace through the Gospel.  Eve is not any better than Adam; Eve also blames another (the snake).  "Out of a human sin comes a sin that is clearly demonic, unbelief turns into blasphemy, disobedience into contempt of the creator."  Luther sees Eve's punishment as a source of joy which shocked me at first.  Nevertheless, he does explain all the punishments and pain of bearing children, so he is not calling child-bearing easy.  Although troublesome there is a hope left for a better life strengthened together with those punishments (Eve was not repudiated by God).  He goes on to say that the heathen see women's pains in having child and think its better for a man not to marry.  However, through marriage a man transfers a part of women's punishments upon himself (for he cannot without grief see those things in his wife).  The second part of Eve's punishment is cohabitation: the rule remains with her husband and the life is compelled to obey by God's command.  From this, Luther believes that the wife looks after the household.  Before 'the fall', women were free and equal to men and in no way inferior.  However, because of child bearing (gestation and birth), women now do not go beyond their most personal duties.  Ergo Eve's sin lead to her and all women becoming subjected to their husbands and having no part in rule.  Of course women don't like it and they grumble, but they cannot perform the functions of men, teach, rule, etc.  To Luther, motherhood is an honor.  The effects of Genesis 3 on human relations, according to Luther, is that now women are no longer free but subjected to men and have no part in ruling or teaching, but must maintain the household.

Calvin sees Eve like Luther does.  He believes that Eve was not just created for Adam to procreate.  His reason is that the spiritual and physical intimacy in marriage is a gift.  Calvin notes that Eve was a good creation which also bore God's image.  However, Calvin sees Eve differently in other respects.  He says that Eve tried to resist sinning, unlike Luther.  He notes that she tried to repel him and reject his words.  However, he still does view Eve as somewhat weaker.  He notes that the snake (Satan) chose Eve because he saw her as the weakest part of man.  She did not seduce or coerce Adam into sinning, this belief is grounded in 1 Timothy 2:14 in the New Testament which says that the woman was deceived but not Adam.  He explains that Eve alone was not responsible.

Calvin then examines Eve's punishments: pains in childbirth and subjection.  He believes that Eve was subordinate to Adam from the beginning, all along.  However, it was a liberal and gentle subjection.  After 'the fall' the subordination was more rigorous, Eve became a servant. Yet, they are only subordinate in the political realm and not in the spiritual realm.  This was likely a reinforcement of gender hierarchy.

Both Calvin and Luther believe that women have been somewhat inferior to men since God created them.  However, Luther believes that women were free before 'the fall' and Calvin believes that they were not completely.  And because Eve was weaker, she was the one to sin.  Additionally, they hold similar beliefs about the change in human relations after 'the fall', primarily the punishment on women.  Both see it as a two fold punishment: pain in childbirth and subjection to men.  'The fall' lead to women becoming lower in social hierarchy then men.  They do not look upon women as wicked like some earlier writers but just inferior and unfit to rise above men to teach or lead.

The First Eve and Lilith

Some have argued that in the beginning God created a man Adam and a women Lilith and that Eve was created later.  This idea has been interpreted in many different ways.  The Alphabet of Ben Sira says that Lilith was made from the ground like Adam.  They fought immediately and argued about who should 'lie down', which I have heard means be on the bottom during sex, maybe I'm wrong. When no resolution could be reached Lilith uttered the Holy name and flew away.  God sent three angels after her and they caught up to her, threatening to drown her in the Dead Sea (near where the Egyptians pursuing the Israelites were destined to die).  She said that she knew God's only purpose for her was to give 8 day old male babies and 12 day old female babies fatal diseases.  The angels didn't leave her alone until she swore not to possess a baby if she saw the angels or their names in her amulet.  This story seems to serve as an etiology for an evil spirit that causes infant deaths.  He also seems to be trying to reconcile the creation story in Genesis 1 and the story in Genesis 2-3.

In"The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology", Judith Plaskow believes that the heroine of the Lilith story is sisterhood.  She reinterprets the story by telling "a new story within the framework of an old one".  Her interpretation is this:

Adam and Lilith were both made from ground and were completely equal.  Adam didn't like this situation and sought to change it.  He order Lilith to wait on him and often left her to do her daily tasks in the garden, but she wouldn't stand for it.  She uttered God's name and flew away.  God sent angels after Lilith but she refused to return and so God made another women for Adam.  Adam and Eve had a good thing going, Adam was happy and Eve was content in her role as wife and helper of Adam (she sensed some capacities within herself that remained undeveloped).  She was disturbed by Adam and God's closeness ('both being men').  After a while this made God uncomfortable too.  He was unsettled about the power Adam had gotten after Lilith left.  Lilith was alone and attempted to rejoin the couple in the garden.  Adam built walls around the garden and even got Eve to help.  He told her stories about the demon Lilith who threatens women in child birth and steal children from their cradles.  Lilith stormed the gate of the garden, battled Adam and lost.  She got away but Eve got a glimpse of her and saw she was a woman like her.  Afterwards Eve began to think about the limits of her own life and after a few months she left the garden.  She founds Lilith and they begin talking.  They began to meet regularly to talk and a bond of sisterhood grew between them.  Adam got worried and suspicious and so did God.  They both became afraid of the possibilities of Eve and Lilith's sisterhood.  Here the story ends and I suppose it goes on with Genesis 3.

Both of these interpretations completely leave out Genesis 3.  They both go above and beyond the real text and attempt to fill in the blanks left in it.  They also seem to be trying to get meanings from the text that are not there.

Medieval Philosophy II: Maimonides and Nachmanides

Nahmanides' comments on the nature of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in his Commentary on the Torah.  He writes that commentators say that the tree produced sexual desire.  He, however, disagrees.  He believes that before Adam and Eve ate the fruit they and all the rest of creation did everything that should be done naturally.  For example, Adam and Eve only had sex wot beget children.  After eating the fruit, the tree gave them a will and desire to chose between a thing and its opposite, whether to do for good or evil.  In other words,  the knowledge of good and evil is a will to pick between doing a good thing or a bad thing.  He notes that in Hebrew 'knowledge' is equivalent to 'will', and so this makes sense.  After eating the fruit, the choice to have sex or not was available and it depended on the will to do good or evil. 

Maimonides sees it differently.  Like Nahmanides, he looks back at the original Hebrew, but much more so than Nahmanides.  According to Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed, Elohim can mean not only God, but also angels, judges, or rulers.  And so, he believe that Gen 3:5 "ye shall be like Elohim" really means "ye shall be like princes".  He writes that an objector would say that man's sin of attaining knowledge good and evil was of benefit to him because discerning between good and evil is one of man's best faculties.  However, this does not follow logically.  Why would a punishment for disobeying be something which would make men glorious?  

Maimonides argues that man was made in God's image and had rational thought, as he was given commands by God to follow and no brute can understand commands.  Adam could distinguish true and false perfectly and completely, not right and wrong because they are under the category of moral truths.  Adam was innocent, guided only by reflection and reason.  He was not able to follow or understand the principles of apparent truth like impropriety.  He did not have the 'knowledge' of right and wrong (aka good and evil).  After disobeying God he began to give way to his 'desires'.  When he attained knowledge of apparent truth he was absorbed in the study of what is and isn't proper.  Maimonides notes that Genesis say that "their eyes were opened and they KNEW that they were naked", not 'saw'.  Once he could understand and decide what was wrong, his 'aim' or 'face' turned from God and reason.  He altered his intentions and sought what was forbidden and so he was exiled.  And in this way, the punishment fits the crime.  He sought after forbidden food and now to attain farmed food (which he had never had before) he had to work very hard for it.  He understood what he lost (his reason which had ruled him before).  In Maimonides, the knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge of morality, the realization that there is more to do in existence then what nature commands and that there is a choice between the two.

I have been assuming that the knowledge of good and evil is the understanding that humans can do evil.  I will illustrate with this example.  When a little child realizes that you don't always have to be honest, that you can lie and get away with it, they may not have started with bad intentions, but they have learned to do something which most people would consider wrong.  They learn later that lying is wrong.  If I took the story for what it is without tying it into a religious context, I would say that knowledge of good and evil is the realization that some things are wrong and some are right.  Who knows that Adam and Eve did in the garden? Maybe they did things that would be considered right, wrong or neither to us today.  The text doesn't say.  But after eating the fruit, they did realize that there is a right and wrong.  Perhaps they were ashamed that they had done things in the garden that they afterwards considered wrong.  If I approach the text in a sacral setting, I would agree with Maimonides.  I would say that Adam and Eve acted as nature dictated in the garden.  Doing nothing that was "good" or "evil" because they had no idea what that meant.  After eating the fruit, they did, they understood morality and that there is a choice to act morally or not.  

I am not sure how to approach the question "what indications are given in Gen 2-3?" because I don't know if that refers to my view or Maimonides' and Nahmanides'.  So I will say this:The text  gives no indication that Adam and Eve were 'innocent' or that they did anything at all between Eve's creation and her encounter with the snake.  What we know of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is this: God says it causes death and forbid it, and he also says that he has the knowledge so now man is on his level. "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."  The tree was also in the middle of the garden and Eve thought it looked pleasing to the eye and good for food.  Beside this and the comments made of it by Eve and snake, the texts mentions nothing else about the tree's power.  And so, we know just know that it gives 'the knowledge of good and evil', whatever that means.  Is it the knowledge of what actions are right and wrong or that there are concepts known as good and evil?

Medieval Philosophy 1: Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas structures his articles very orderly and logically.  He first poses a question and then gives possibly objections and their reasonings.  He then gives his answer and replies to the objections.

Demonization of Women

Philo said that when Adam and Eve first came together, their acts of desire "also gave rise to bodily pleasure, which is the starting point of wicked deeds and violations of the Law, on its account they exchange the life of immortality and well-being for the life of mortality and misfortune."  He also comments that Eve's punishment was a necessity.  The blame is shared equally by Adam and Eve according to Philo.  But he also states that sex is the cause of wickedness.

According to the Testament of Rueben 5:1-6:3, women are evil and are out to get men.  They seek to entice men with their looks, and those they cannot entice with appearance do so by stratagem.  It also notes that women are more susceptible to do evil them men, like Eve was susceptible to the snake's temptation.  It seems almost a paramoid view of women and sounds just like Adam making excuses, saying it isn't his fault but hers.  So many times in history and literature we see men blaming the women.  They say that women sexually tempted them by looking too pretty or by deliberately doing things that are sexually enticing.  The best example of this in my opinion is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  That is what I thought of when I read this passage.  This author interrupted Genesis 2 and 3 like this: women have weaker wills and can easily be tempted and they can use their scheming powers of seduction to cause men to 'sin' like Eve did to Adam.  Ergo, women should be modest and not tempt men.

According to Tertullian, every woman is an Eve, easily tempted and bearers of the blame of everything from distorting God's image of man to forcing Christ to die on the cross.  He believes that women should continue to be blamed and punished for Eve's act.  She should abstain from looking pretty.  His interpretation of Genesis 2-3: women are to blame for all evil and should be punished and kept from doing so again by not being given a chance to tempt men to do wrong again.  And they must therefore dress and act modestly.

(I would just like to point out how blatantly inaccurate this is.  Excuse this paragraph please, because I will probably sound like a feminist.  But, I work with an organization that reaches out to help prostitutes in Baltimore and for the longest time I believed that a prostitute was a woman who either wanted to be there or needed the money, were thin and dressed skimpily to get customers.  But I have learned that most of these women are girls or even middle aged women who come in all shapes and sizes, are forced to do this and most don't dress skimpily.  Nevertheless, they get customers.  Although I do think women should dress in order to be sexually alluring, I have come to the conclusion that how women dress has less to do with tempting men than I previously thought.  It's not all the women's fault.  If a man wants to have sex, a woman does not have to be dressed immodestly to allure him.  I think women should not dress immodestly because inn my opinion, men can be tempted sexually by women, but not necessarily.  Women can seduce and scheme but we are not always doing that.  Even women who dress modestly and mind their own business get raped, is that her fault?)

The Malleus Maleficarum took all of this to a whole new level.  Basing its teaching on the lessons learned from the Garden of Eden story, the book declares that women more easily give into the temptations of the devil, to whom they go to for sexual pleasure.  The book also declares that women plot with the devil to overthrow men and remove them from their positions as leaders of the human race.  They also seek to despoil men's sexuality by casting spells on men to sexually arouse them and cause them to be tempted to sin and experience lust.  They also cast spells to make them fail to perform sexually.  The Malleus Maleficarum sees women as more than cause of mankind's fallen state but as active workers of evil and the very root of evil itself.  Philo himself claims that sexuality lead to wickedness and The Malleus Maleficarum projects that wickedness on women, whom the author(s) believe(s) prompt it.