TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS
SEASON SIX EPISODE ONE
WOMEN OF THE BIBLE: EVE
When we think of the Biblical Eve, are our thoughts positive or negative? Is she a dupe – or is she heroic? Either way, we have strong feelings about her that we will explore today. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is a new series on Torah for Christians: Women in the Bible. It’s all about Eve. Welcome to the Garden Party.
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Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr.
If we are talking about women of the Bible, we must of course begin with Eve. In Genesis, Chapter 2, we read that God created Eve from Adam’s rib as an ezer-k’negdo. Ezer-k’negdo is a problematic term to translate into English. Ezer means to help. K’negdo means opposite of him. As individual words, we understand them. Together, it’s tough. The Midrashic, descriptive definition is that Eve was created to help Adam when did right but to correct him, to act as a counter, when he erred, and hopefully keep him from making too many errors along the way.
Before we examine Eve’s actions though, we need to spend a bit of time discussing the Garden of Eden itself, the place in which Adam and Eve were created and lived in blissful ignorance. Eden was bounded by four rivers, two of which are known to us with certainty, the Tigris and Euphrates.
The others, Pishon and Gichon, refer allegorically to the Nile and, yes, the Gichon, whatever that means. Eden perhaps was an island, sitting between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq. Thousands of years ago, Iraq was ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of what would become the Hebrew civilization. As an island, we can imagine Adam and Eve living by themselves, in a world reminiscent of that famous Brooke Shileds ‘80’s movie, The Blue Lagoon.
Here is my take on the Garden of Eden and the role of the first couple in it. God created Adam to take care of the Garden, which was created after God created Adam. According to another Midrash, God charged Adam with naming all the plants and animals. At the same time, God admonished Adam not to destroy Eden because, as God said, once Adam destroyed something, it was gone forever. Seems like a good moral for our time as well.
Yet, Adam knew that he was superior to the animals. He probably looked around, saw that there were male animals and female animals – and when the male and female of a species frolicked, they had a pretty good time together. Adam had no female counterpart and so was lonely – and perhaps a bit randy as well.
I tell my congregants that when God created Adam and Eve, God created teenagers. We’ll come back to that idea in a minute, but the teenage psyche plays a huge role in what happens to Eve while she is traipsing around in the garden.
When God created Eve, God told the first couple not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, lest they die. Being a teenager, she could not wait to check out those trees and perhaps take a bite from each of them. If God said no, they had to be special.
Enter the serpent. When we talk about the serpent, many Christians, including many of my students, equate the Serpent with Satan. In Christian thought, Satan is the great tempter, the force in the universe that brings evil into the world. Dante’s The Inferno has stamped this idea of Satan into our consciousness, no matter our faith.
But as Jews, we don’t share this belief. We read Dante but we don’t buy into the theology behind it. For Jews, Satan is, pardon the pun, God’s Devil’s Advocate. Satan appears in Jewish thought and literature, but he is not the avatar of evil. We Jews read Isaiah, who said that God created good and fashioned evil. In other words, evil is a part of Divine creation, a force to be controlled, not destroyed. An embodied Satan has nothing to do with this.
If the serpent is not Satan, then what is it? The Torah says that “the serpent was more arum than any other animal.” In this verse, the word arum means clever. For some unwritten reason, the serpent was devilish, not Satanic. Perhaps a better translation would be impish or even devious. He obviously tricked Eve into eating the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But I’m not sure that he is solely to blame; Eve was tempted as soon as God said no.
There is a theory in folk psychology that if you want a teenager to do something, the best way to make that happen is to tell that teenager not to do it. In other words, if you say to your teenager, “Don’t go to that movie,” I will bet that your teenager will sneak off to that movie as soon as possible – or watch it in his bedroom on his laptop, wearing headphones so you think he’s asleep, after you have gone to bed.
The serpent was delighted to confront Eve when she came near the forbidden Tree. She told the serpent that if they ate of the tree – or even touched it – they would die. Perhaps inadvertently, Eve added the clause “or touch it” to God’s proscription. This gave the serpent an opportunity to convince Eve that God would not kill them. Instead, the serpent said that if they ate the forbidden fruit, “their eyes would be opened.” They would be like gods who know good and bad. Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Before we move on, let’s talk about that fruit. First of all, this fruit was not an apple. It could not have been an apple. Apple trees require a frost for their buds to germinate and to my knowledge, there has never been a frost in southern Iraq. Some scholars have speculated that Eve ate a tomato, but we’ll never know for sure. All we know is that it could not have been an apple.
She then gave her husband a bite of the fruit and he ate as well. Then, the Torah says, “Their eyes of both of them were opened…” There’s more, of course, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
What does it mean that their eyes were opened? First, Adam and Eve gained a knowledge of good and evil. Morality entered the world when they ate that fruit. Instead of being like toddlers, who do not know the difference between right and wrong, Adam and Eve suddenly realize that they were fully formed human beings, who had agency and then acted upon that agency.
The first thing that Adam and Eve realized is that they were naked – and that this was wrong. Why did they think it was wrong? They were the only humans on earth; why couldn’t they run around naked in the Garden?
It has to do, I believe, with human sexuality. Being naked aroused their sexual desires; fashioning garments made of fig leaves was meant to tone down their urges. We’ll see at the end of the story that their teenage sexual desires led to an interesting result.
When Adam told God that they had made fig leaf loincloths because they were naked, in Hebrew the word is arum, the same word used to describe the serpent, God erupted in anger when God realized that they had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. When God realized that Adam and Eve had achieved agency, God had to change the planned course of human history. Far from keeping an innocent couple in a luscious garden, where all their needs were satisfied, God was forced to punish them, by making them toil for a living – and to make Eve subservient to Adam. God also decreed that Eve, and all women to follow, would suffer tremendous pain in childbirth. They would also have to leave the garden, forever, and eventually die. The Garden of Eden was forever cut off from human contact. In other words, Adam and Eve were kicked off the island.
Nevertheless, God fashioned animal skin clothing for the two prior to expelling them from the garden. Often this passage is forgotten in the larger arc of the story, but it does show that ultimately, God showed the two of them a measure of compassion.
Now we come to the question of original sin. Simply put, original sin is not a Jewish concept. As I understand it, original sin refers to sex; Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden because they had sexual intercourse. And that sex was a sin.
I’ll agree that Adam and Eve had sex in the Garden of Eden. After all, they were naked teenagers who had just discovered their sexuality after they ate the forbidden fruit. But for Jews, the sin not having sex; the sin was disobeying God.
At the beginning of Genesis, Chapter Four, we read in English that, “The man knew his wife Eve, and conceived and bore Cain.” In the Bible, the term “knew” refers to sex. But here, the verb form is different from what is usually seen. The great Jewish medieval commentator Rashi notices this and states, quite properly, that the use of this strange verb construction meant that Adam and Eve engaged in sexual activity prior to leaving the Garden of Eden, prior to eating the fruit, prior to being punished. Eve might even have been pregnant when they were expelled! This was not a sin; sex was a normal part of the human experience.
In summation, we must ask ourselves the question: Is Eve a heroic character in the Torah? In my opinion, she is. While the serpent certainly tempted her, Eve realized, perhaps at that time, that utopia was boring. She was the first to realize that human must struggle to flourish, that life is not to be handed to us on a silver platter and that we must work for a living. Serving God is not about living in Paradise; it is about creating a paradise, a Heaven on Earth, through our faith in God but also through our faith in ourselves. So yes, Eve is a hero and one that we must emulate every day of our lives. She is the first in a long line of misunderstood Jewish heroines, not the first of a long line of female biblical villains.
I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Next week, we will learn about the next in our long line of Biblical Jewish heroines, Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Her story is incredibly complex; we will try to answer the question of why she is considered a matriarch of Judaism and whether that is due to her illustrious husband or due to her own acts. As I said, it’s a complex story.
I look forward to our next episode. If you can’t wait, please go to www.torahforchristians.net to listen to previous episodes of Torah for Christians. In conclusion, let me just say, as I do after every episode, Hinei .. L’hitraot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this has been Torah for Christians.