The Two Traditions

Woman in Christian Tradition
by George H.Tavard, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, pp. 3-26.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

At the roots of the theological tradition about women, the legends of the Hebrews contain rich material which may be called, as far as we are concerned, original. It is original for us because it is the oldest data at our disposal within the sequence of the Hebrew-Christian revelation. But it is not original in an absolute sense. The stories of Genesis express contradictory, or at least divergent, attitudes which themselves testify to a long period of reflection on the male-female relationship as it was experienced in the near East (including in this the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, that is, the geographic universe of the Hebrews and their ancestors). In the prescientific exegesis, these accounts were taken as forming a whole, unified by inclusion in a collection that came eventually to be regarded by the Jews as inspired. More recent approaches to the first books of the Bible divide them into their components, as far as these may be discerned today. In either case, these books escape purely objective analysis. One cannot be certain what they meant in the mind of their authors (or transmitters, or redactors), because we know too little about the times, places, and circumstances of their elaboration. If it goes further than mere philological analysis, reading the first chapters of Genesis becomes an interpretation. Interpretation should of course take account, as far as possible, of all that is known about the historical background, yet it cannot avoid being made in the light of hermeneutic principles that came into being long after the writing of the texts. An interpretation is always made from within a doctrinal tradition, even if the doctrinal element is reduced to a minimum, as is usually the case with literary analysis.

Our reading of the first chapters of Genesis will therefore bring to light a theological or hermeneutical circle; it will be partly guided by the contents of the next chapters of our inquiry. The Old Covenant and the New are complementary; and as read in the Christian tradition, they are so intertwined that the Christian reading of the Old Testament need not necessarily draw the meaning it had for the rabbis, for the prophets, for the kings and the priests of the two Kingdoms. And if Moses was acquainted with some legends about the origins of mankind, we make no claim to know what he thought of them. But this, of course, need not be our problem.

Our problem is to unfold an interpretation of Genesis which makes sense when related, on the one hand, to the text as we have it and, on the other, to the continuing concerns of the Christian tradition as lived in the past and as experienced in the present. The texts of the Old or, for that matter, of the New Testament must not be approached as proofs or arguments in favor of some theological position; and they should not be used simply to illustrate opinions and statements unrelated to their meaning and context. They must be read as links (the first links as far as our direct knowledge goes, but coming themselves at the end of a long prehistory that can only be implied and guessed at) in a chain of unfinished spiritual discovery. And since this discovery, in the matter that concerns us in this book, is focused on anthropology, the chain in question is also a sequence of anthropological experiences. Behind all that we will read or say there looms the question: what is man? Whether they derive from the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Fathers of the Church, or more recent theologians, the texts formulate partial answers to this question. It is not for us at this time to pronounce these answers tentative or definitive. This may be decided later, if at all. Meanwhile, we ought to be concerned first of all with theological consistency, for even though the texts may be at odds with one another, interpretation needs to be consistent. Since hermeneutics tries to discern an intelligible pattern, it must be itself intelligible, even when the data take the form of a mosaic of unrelated insights. The task of the interpreter is to suggest relationships that the texts themselves do not clearly show. As those relationships largely depend on the total picture that he wishes to convey, the sense of the earliest texts may not fully appear until much later in his investigation. Thus there will be no cause for surprise that our interpretation of the biblical data will remain tentative and will need to be tested by the later links in the anthropological tradition that will be uncovered in the course of this book.

So we are led to the first chapters of Genesis and to the account of the creation of woman as both the starting point of our story and the first outline of our theological understanding of womanhood.(1)

We will begin with Genesis 2:18-25 on the assumption, granted by contemporary scholars, that this represents an older strand than the creation account of chapter 1.(2)

Yahweh God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.’ So from the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he would call them; each one was to bear the name that man would give it. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts. But no helpmate suitable for man was found for him. So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he slept, he took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh. Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man. The man exclaimed: ‘This at last is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh! This is to be called woman, for this was taken from man.’ This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body. Now both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no shame in front of each other. (2:18-24)

In this text, the creation of woman is contrasted with that of the animals. These are made and brought by God to Adam, with the twofold purpose of being named by him, who thereby affirms his understanding of and his authority over them, and of providing him with companionship. The point is linked to a polemical criticism of Canaanite or Egyptian cults of animals. Animals should not be worshipped, since they suffer from a double inferiority in relation to man: it is from him that they obtained their names and they are unable to fulfill his expectations. Be that as it may, the chief lesson of the text refers to woman’s relationship to man. The creation of woman is also essentially related to Adam, since Adam’s solitude provides the occasion for her creation. Is she to be understood as an afterthought, as a being whose place could conceivably have been filled by animals, as one who, being created like the animals to remedy Adam’s loneliness, stands little higher than they? This would hardly be compatible with the whole tone of this section of Genesis, in which Yahweh is shown as knowing exactly what he is doing and as doing everything for a purpose. The God of this creation story is not a hesitant potter who tries one thing after another with the hope of finally achieving success. He is indeed the Almighty, whose actions contain lessons of paramount importance. Instead of seeing the creation (or, as the text says, the modelling) of woman as the lowest in a series of creation attempts that begins on a triumphant note with the making of Adam and follows a descending scale to that of Eden, of plants, of rivers, of animals, and finally of woman, we should look at it as a creation that grows from Adam to woman, with the intermediate creations serving to establish the stage for the higher creation that is achieved with the modelling of woman.

The creation of Adam is told in these terms:

At the time when Yahweh made earth and heaven there was yet no wild bush on the earth nor had any wild plant yet sprung up, for Yahweh God had not sent rain on the earth, nor was there any man to till the soil. However, a flood was rising from the earth and watering the surface of the soil. Yahweh God fashioned man out of dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being. (2:5-7)

Who is Adam? If the word means man, it designates him by what can only be a nickname: the one from soil (adamah). For Adam is created from the dust of the soil before anything else appears, before even the soil has been made into a garden. He comes from the stuff of the earth, before even rain falls from heaven, at a time when the dust is slimy from the water rising up from inside the earth. The first name of man, Adam, is a name of humility. It is significant that woman is not directly related to it, but to another name of man, Ish, by which she is called Ishah. In other words, the appearance of woman facing man implies the revelation of a new name destined to replace, or at least to accompany, that of Adam. From his origin in the earth, man had received a name translating the lowliness of his condition. For the name, in Hebrew philosophy, unveils the true meaning of the reality it designates. From his companionship with woman, man obtains his name of glory, that which expresses his condition as a being-in-relationship.

Another point deserves to be noted concerning the name Adam. In the Hebrew language it is a collective rather than a singular word: that is, it fits man as mankind rather than man as individual; It denotes a quality, that of being from dust, which belongs to all those who will eventually be called men. It has no connotation of sex. The sex-name of man is his other name, Ish, by which he relates to woman, Ishah.

We are thus invited to read the second chapter of Genesis as picturing mankind struggling to get out of a self-contradiction, being collective and yet reduced to one. Adam is plural, but still alone. He cannot yet be several; he is not yet a society. The passage deals with Adam’s attempt to form a society, to pass beyond his undifferentiated state as mankind to a stage of differentiation. “It is not good that Adam should be alone.” This is not a matter of moral goodness, but of basic, ontic reality. In contrast to the first chapter of Genesis, in which God, looking at the work done during the day, always says, “This is good,” God here looks at Adam and says, “It is not good.” This of course need not mean that Yahweh has fumbled: it implies that the work is unfinished. God looks at his work when it is half done and pronounces the verdict that the work should be brought to completion. Paradise and plants have already been made. Now the animals. Adam invents their names, but finds no companion among them; he can establish no society with them. They answer his call, but nothing else happens. Adam himself is not transformed and completed by his experience. He does not find “a helpmate suitable to himself” or, as the Septuagint has it, “a helpmate similar to himself.” For society requires distinction within unity, and man enjoys no basic unity with animals.

This failure to form a society with animals is of tremendous importance for the differentiation of Adam into Ish and Ishah, of mankind into male and female, arises from it. It is God’s answer to mankind’s original dilemma: how to be a society when you are one. Had Adam chosen - if it had been possible for him so to choose—one animal as his companion, he would have made himself an animal, to live at a purely animal level. He then would have fallen into a sin which would be quite different from the original sin recognized by the Christian tradition: the original sin of beastliness, of siding with the beast over against the spirit. By refusing society with animals, Adam committed himself to the spiritual element in mankind. He was dust from the soil, and he had received the breath of life. He now desires something higher. This choice sets the final stage for the creation of woman. Mankind yearns to be a society to express this spiritual capacity and longing in itself; and yet it cannot enter interpersonal relationships with equals, since it has no equals and has not yet been built into a person.

Woman, Ishah, is therefore made. But there is a fundamental difference between the creation of Adam out of the soil and that of woman: Yahweh “fashioned” Adam, but he “built” the rib (taken from Adam in his sleep) into woman. This upbuilding of woman is clearer in the Septuagint than in Hebrew, as usually understood: He “took one of his ribs, and closed up its place with flesh” (RSV, Hebrew), or he “enclosed it in flesh” (Jerusalem Bible, LXX).(3) The first version speaks of the surgery undertaken on Adam, an interesting but secondary point; the second shows the beginning of the upbuilding of the rib into woman. Whatever text is correct, the ultimate meaning remains: as far as mankind as a whole is concerned, there is only one creation, that of Adam. The next step does not come as a second process of creation, but as a step within the total process or as a further development of what began with the fashioning of Adam. We should therefore understand woman not as an addition to the mankind that already was in the person of Adam; rather, Adam himself (in that part of him which was his rib) is built up into woman.

Ishah, then, does not walk in on Adam from the outside as an alien element. She proceeds from inside of Adam, where she was already present as that to which mankind was destined, as the development that would bring it to perfection, as the identity with a difference which makes society-building possible. “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Mankind recognizes itself in Ishah. It speaks of itself as being present in woman. It knew itself hitherto as Adam; and now there comes the revelation of itself in another and thereby of itself as no longer an “it,” but a “he” related to a “she.” Adam receives his name of glory, Ish, companion of Ishah, who is his own companion. In this revelation Adam perceives clearly what his confrontation with the animals had only weakly hinted at, his personality. Adam becomes a person, aware of himself, reaching consciousness as mankind at the unveiling of woman. For woman also is mankind. She is no other than Adam; but she is Adam as bringing to perfection what had first been imperfect. She is mankind as fully aware of its status, as the goal and perfection of man. Thus, woman is not made as Adam’s helpmate just because he is lonely; she is created as the perfecting element, to the revelation of which he aspired when he refused companionship with the animal world.

Seeing each other, Ish and Ishah know each other to be one. For this reason (besides this, no doubt the author wanted to emphasize the point that this was taking place in Paradise), the text adds that although they were nude, they were not ashamed. They could not be ashamed because they were not viewing each other as strangers, but each saw the other as himself. Ish saw Ishah as the perfection of the Adam which he had been. Ishah saw Ish as the Adam that she was bringing, by her advent, to completion. In one way, Ishah was made for mankind, as she was to bring it perfection, to be its perfection. In another, mankind was made for Ishah, the less perfect, the uncompleted, the undifferentiated being preparatory of the more perfect, the fullness, the being-in-relation. In the oneness of man and woman, it is woman who brings perfection. Marriage proceeds from the memory of this perfection, from a hankering after the differentiated oneness which was no longer the primordial state of indetermination and not yet the present state of self-estrangement of mankind. “This is why a man [Ish] leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife [Ishah], and they become one body ”-or rather, one flesh.

The ecstatic discovery expressed with the phrase: “bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” presents still another facet. The symbolism of house-building is not absent from this text. A man’s house is a symbol of the race to be born from him. Israel as a people was so called because it was the house of the man Israel. The Messiah will be born from the house of David. The house in this sense is built by Yahweh himself in a process which prolongs, in our case, the building of woman from Adam. When the text reports that the rib is built into woman, it includes all the descendants of woman in that process; and when Ish acknowledges her as “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” he salutes in her all his descendants, all mankind.

The revelatory dimension of the advent of woman is better suggested in the Septuagint than in Hebrew. Whereas the Hebrew Bible speaks simply of a “sleep” into which Adam has been plunged by Yahweh, the Septuagint refers to an “ecstasy.” Adam enters a prophetic trance, in which all that follows takes place, the removal of the rib, its upbuilding into woman, and their ecstatic encounter. In this perspective, mankind and its energies are not dormant during the formation of woman. For ecstasy implies the silencing of the faculties only so that they may be transformed. It implies access to a new world, transfiguration no less than recognition.

If we now read the account of man’s creation at the end of the first chapter of Genesis, we find a much shorter text with a different orientation, yet one which is also highly sophisticated.

God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth’. God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. (1:26-27)

We can barely touch here upon the relationship of this account of the creation of man with that of chapter 2, which we have just studied. In the modern analysis of Genesis, chapter 2 belongs to the Yahwist tradition, originating in Judea under David and Solomon, and therefore dating back to the ninth century. Chapter 1 belongs to the Priestly tradition, probably written down in the fifth century, after the Exile, although it contains much more ancient material. It would therefore constitute a more recent account. In this case it is tempting to regard the two verses on the creation of man as summing up the longer story of chapter 2, pruning its anthropomorphic aspects, and instead of paying attention to details of the process of creation, throwing a sharp light on the core of it: God creates man in his own image, and he makes man male and female. The Priestly tradition would have extracted the essence of the religious teaching of the Yahwist tradition.

I do not propose to read the text in this way. Its connections with the other story of the origins of mankind are of less importance than the framework in which it appears, the creation of the universe in six days. This framework sets the stage in terms that are both cosmological and liturgical. The six days followed by the day of rest are naturally the week, based, in the Hebrew calendar, on the lunar month. They are also the six days of work leading to the day of worship of the religious calendar. And it may not be purely accidental that the name given to the creator in this first chapter is not, as in chapter 2, the unique name Yahweh, but the plural name Elohim, which is not reserved to him but applies also to the gods of other nations and occasionally designates the inhabitants of the invisible world above this one, which is glimpsed at night when the multitude of the stars shine. Thus, in verse 26, Elohim speaks in the plural: “Let us make man in our own image...,” whereas the next verse refers to Elohim in the singular: “God created man in the image of himself.”

The dialectic of the one and the many thus still dominates the creation story; but the theology of this tradition has not restricted it to the world of Adam, struggling to reach beyond a state of undifferentiation. The dialectic belongs to the divine sphere itself, where Elohim is one and yet his name is plural. There is even a hierarchy of Elohim (plural), at the head of which stands the one Elohim who is also called Yahweh .

From this perspective, the expressions “image” and “likeness” become all-important. The six days of creation end with the fulfillment of a new purpose. Until then the creator had made the heavens and the earth, and he had filled and adorned them. He finally starts something else, the creation of one who will be like himself, in whom the dialectic of the one and the many will also be realized. This is related to the liturgical context of the story, for the sixth day is the final preparation for the seventh, the Sabbath, when the many come together into one for worship at the Temple. This is in keeping with the concerns of the Priestly tradition, which argues for the Jerusalem cult against the cults that are still carried out in old Canaanite shrines on the mountains of the countryside.

Adam is therefore made one and many, singular and plural. One and the same sentence passes from the singular to the plural: “Let us make man ... and let them be....” The singular is Adam, the collective term for mankind which in itself has no connotation of sex. The plural, with which Adam is identical, is explained in the next verse: “... in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.” The balance of the terms in this verse suggests, besides the poetic form in which the story has suddenly been couched, that the image and the likeness of mankind consists in being male and female. Neither male nor female alone is in the likeness of Elohim, but both together. There is no special emphasis on the mutual relationships of man and woman or on their distinct origins. On the contrary, there are no two origins of mankind; the creation of woman is not delayed, as in the Yahwist account. This tradition is interested in the identity of the collective, Adam, with the plural, man and woman. In its anthropology, man and woman are not only two, they are also one. Their oneness in distinction is the image and likeness of God.

Furthermore, the terms for “male” and “female” are not Ish and Ishah (man and woman), which can be used for human being only; they are now strictly sexual terms, like male and female, applying to animals as well as to men. That is to say, if the image of Elohim in mankind resides in sexuality, then sexuality cannot be primordial. Whereas other creation myths of the Fertile Crescent place sexuality at the origin of all, the Priestly saga sees it at the end of the process of creation. In Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, it all begins with the begetting of the gods in the womb through the mingling of Apsu and Tiamat. Genesis 1 contradicts this openly by placing sex at the end of the process, and only at the level of the created world. Elohim is not involved in sex. Yet he gives meaning to human sexuality beyond that of animal sexuality: in being male and female, mankind is “in the image, according to the likeness” of Elohim. The injunction to use sex follows naturally: “God blessed them, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth’ (v. 28). By thus multiplying, they will fulfill themselves as “image” of Elohim, by becoming numerous like the Elohim in the heavens. By dominating the earth they will also become the image of the divine power.

The originators of these two traditions probably lived at the beginning of the monarchy, when the rise of a small-scale empire-consciousness contributed to the development of strong cultural traditions. The Yahwist poet of chapter 2 depicts his Ishah-Eve in opposition to the feminine idols of Canaanite religion, whose fertility cult, centered on the Mother-Goddess, wielded great power over the imagination of Hebrew women. Israel has already passed from a nomadic-pastoral to a settled agricultural existence, in which the seasonal fertility of the earth focuses attention on the mysterious correspondence between the forces of the earth and the female cycle. In this context, the author tries to woo the Hebrew woman away from Canaanite examples by extolling the primordial status of womanhood, whose present dependence on fertility cycles and whose submission to the domination of her husband derive from sin, whereas her pristine vocation was one of completion and perfection.

When the main layer of chapter 1 was composed, the Temple was already built and a regular weekly liturgy followed the lunar calendar. But the lunar calendar is also the female calendar. That is to say, the female cycle had then been taken as a pattern for Temple worship and, accordingly, for the life of worship. Thus the entire People, as represented at the Temple, became feminine in relation to Yahweh. Woman had begun her ascent back to her original, prelapsarian, position as the spiritual ideal and embodiment of mankind. The Canaanite fertility cults—as witness the prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries, Elijah, Amos, Osea, and Isaiah—present a lasting and attractive temptation, particularly appealing to women. One can hardly decide if this orientation of the chapter is preexilic—in which case it would show an early and prolonged attempt at transforming popular themes of Canaanite religion into acceptable material for Hebrew reflection—or if it depends on the lunar calendar of the Babylonians, known during the Exile. At any rate, the final form of this chapter is postexilic and corresponds to the reconstruction of Hebrew civilization in its recovered homeland. The adoption then of the lunar-feminine period as the pattern for both liturgical piety and the creation myth was meant to draw the Hebrews toward authentic feminism, away from the siren songs of Canaanite female worship. Man and woman may now be shown as sexually polarized within the oneness of Adam without making specific mention of the fall and of the dramatic reversal of values which followed upon it.

We may now briefly consider the two accounts of creation together, as they were strung one after the other when the Pentateuch was compiled, around 400 B.C., shortly after the tradition of chapter 1 had found its final shape. As the chief result of this compilation, the two stories are now read as one, so that the characteristics, aspects, and emphases of each are lost on the average reader. The Yahwist account of the creation of woman is mistaken for an amplification of the Priestly account. The two chapters form two episodes of one story, where their common points rather than their divergences and their distinct orientations keep the limelight. Read in this way, the creation of woman becomes a straightforward account of the creation of mankind in two stages. Its first moment coincides with the making of Adam (chapter 1); its second with that of woman from and for Adam (chapter 2). Verses 27-28 of chapter 1 announce chapter 2, and are not completely understood until chapter 2 has been read. Woman appears as the helpmate through whom Adam will be enabled to multiply and fill the earth. She becomes less a companion and more an instrument. Her creation is read in the twofold right of the previous creation of Adam and of the subsequent fall in which she will play a leading role. From the start she is seen as Eve, the fallen woman who carries the burden of painful pregnancy, although this name does not appear before chapter 3. Thus the very compilation of the Yahwist and the Priestly traditions already betrays a certain lack of perception of their implications and the underlying anthropologies.

With the story of the temptation and the fall in Genesis 3, we are still, as in chapter 2, in the Yahwist tradition. The text of chapter 3, like that of chapter 2, and perhaps more so, is related in many minor ways to several pagan myths, especially to the Epic of Gilgamesh. For this reason a number of exegetes have seen the story of the temptation as conflating two previous legends, the one centered on Paradise, the other on woman. Yet whatever the prehistory of our text, it is to be read now as one myth, set in Paradise, and in which the major actor is Ishah, the companion of Ish. In chapter 2, Adam, the collective name of man, was differentiated into Ish and Ishah: this accounts for the origin of the sexes. The collective name gave way to what I have called the names of glory, of man and woman in interpersonal relationship to one another. Chapter 3 will end with the bestowing of a second name on woman, Eva, the mother of the living. The whole trend of the story of the fall, as I understand it, points toward this name, which will be at the same time a name of shame and a name of redemption.

The woman is tempted first not, as male prejudice suggests, because she is the weaker, but because she is the perfection. Only a pusillanimous temper would strike at the weakest link in the chain of being. But the serpent is not such a petty figure. Although the text shows him to be one of the animals of Eden (who received their names from Adam), an obscure symbolism may hide behind this familiarity: there are serpents among the pagan divinities that surround Israel, and the Hebrews too practiced a certain cult of the serpent as a salvific figure in the times of Exodus. The serpent of Genesis is not evil, and what he tells the woman is not false. But he is clever; he knows more than she does of the meaning of the taboo concerning the tree at the Garden’s center, and he speaks to her ambiguously so as to mislead her. In the context, there is no sexual connotation to the image of the serpent. What the serpent exactly is appears clearly enough from what he says and from the curse that Yahweh will pronounce on him.

There may have been in Israel other legends about the primordial sin. Isaiah 14 may be taken as alluding to one such myth:

‘How did you come to fall from the heavens,
Daystar, son of Dawn? ...
... You who used to think to yourself:
“I will climb up to the heavens;
and higher than the stars of God
I will set my throne.
I will sit on the Mount of Assembly
in the recesses of the north.
I will climb to the top of thunderclouds,
I will rival the Most High."
What! Now you have fallen to Sheol
to the very bottom of the abyss!’ (14:12-15)

In the context, the Daystar (Lucifer) is the king of Babylon; but the prophet may apply to Babylon a myth of the primordial man, who sinned through hybris, the pride that pushed him to seek equality with God, to be counted among the Elohim.

Ezechiel 28, polemizing against the king of Tyre, likewise sees him as a type of the primordial sinner. Residing in Eden, richly attired, with a cherub for companion, he was perfect “until the day when evil was first found” in him. “Your heart has grown swollen with pride on account of your beauty. You have corrupted your wisdom owing to your splendor” (v. 17). The outcome has been apocalyptic: “I have thrown you down from the mountain of God, and the guardian Cherub has destroyed you from amid the coals” (v. 16).

In both cases, the sinner is presented as a king, and there is no suggestion of the presence of a feminine element in what brought him to sin. Does that contradict the legend of Genesis 3? It seems significant that in both instances it is kingship which has been corrupted; and kingship, in the world of Mesopotamia and in its cultural client, Phoenicia, is akin to divinity. The king stands as the symbol of his nation, the perfect example of mankind as embodied in a certain political and religious contexture. Only the sin of the perfect acquires the dimensions of tragedy. The same effect is reached in the Yahwist tradition precisely by the involvement of woman in the primordial sin. For Adam does not appear as a figure of glory until he has found his feminine companion. He is lonesome at first and becomes pathetic in his search for companionship among the animals, who cannot fulfill his spiritual needs even though he masters them well enough to give them their names. Only with the advent of woman does he himself reach to the dimensions of glory, when he is transformed in ecstasy. It is through woman, through its very perfection, that mankind sins.

In what does the sin consist? We have recognized the grandeur of the image of woman in Genesis 2 and 3 and identified this greatness with her perfecting function. She brings mankind to its fullness. She contains in herself this plenitude which will be spelled out through time in the upbuilding of the house of man. The temptation is thus set on a cosmic stage. The wish to know good and evil entails neither mere divergence from a legal prescription, nor the breaking of a taboo, sexual or other. Like the woman’s origin and function, the temptation concerns mankind as a whole.

The serpent said to the woman, ‘No, you will not die! God knows in fact on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.’ The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. (3:5-6)

The heart of this passage lies in the meaning of “knowing good and evil.” Is this intellectual knowledge, comparable to an awareness of the law? Or does it imply also an experience, affective knowledge, knowledge by connaturality? In what way does the knowledge of good and evil bring about a likeness to the Elohim? There is no question at this point of becoming equal to Yahweh. Even the serpent could not suggest this, as it would be opposed to the very experience of the woman, who knows herself to have been built by Yahweh. The world to which she aspires is indeed near to Yahweh; but it is the world of the Elohim, who include the angels, messengers of God, the stars up in the sky, the better world of which one dreams and of which one is more likely to dream if one already lives in Paradise, in the familiarity of that beautiful world. No wonder that the first fruit that is able to open the gates of heaven looks “good to eat and pleasing to the eye.”

Woman, therefore, following the serpent’s hints, wishes to know what the Elohim are able to know. The problem for her is not to transform herself into what she cannot become. She is well aware of the fact that she is not being built into one of the Elohim. She does not aspire to escaping Paradise and her own destiny on earth. What she wants is to be “like the Elohim, knowing good and evil.” She desires, not the status of the Elohim, but their ability to know.

What she wants to know may appear more clear in the light of this statement: “Things hidden belong to Yahweh our God, but things revealed are ours and our children’s for all time, so that we may observe all the words of this Law” (Deut. 29:28). In the mythical time of the story of the temptation, nothing yet has been revealed: the Law has not yet induced an intellectual and experiential knowledge of what is legally good and legally wrong. Torah is destined to provide Israel with its very structure; the entire life of the people must center on it; and it is eventually by the standard of Jerusalem and of Torah that all nations will be judged. Thus, that to which the woman aspires is the knowledge of what is still a secret hidden in God: the Law, that is, the structure of her own future as the house of Adam. The woman wishes to know what touches her most intimately: in what way, through what means, by what episodes will the house of mankind be built? Woman wishes to have a foreknowledge of the structure and the history of man. This is the “good and evil” in question: that which is known only to Yahweh and those to whom he reveals it.

If we analyze this further, we shall see that the knowledge of good and evil in this sense implies more than knowing what will happen to mankind. For good and evil, in the Yahwist conception of God’s transcendence, proceed from God’s action, who blesses for good and curses for evil. Behind the good or happiness and the evil or unhappiness, there looms a divine attitude of benediction or of malediction. He who does good was blessed before doing it, as the evil-doer suffered from God’s wrath. Woman wants to hold the key to these acts of God. Were it granted her, the outcome would not be religion but magic. She would attempt to control God’s doings. At this level, her wish could not possibly be met. God could not let her know that. We will see in a moment what he revealed to her instead.

Yet the woman’s wish is not evil (in our sense of the term). Her wish is good in itself, but it is improper and presumptuous to try to penetrate the secrets hidden in God. Yet, we can recognize the great depth of the Yahwist tradition in that this desire has remained with mankind and still constitutes one of the basic drives of man. The thirst for knowledge about man’s future has remained fundamental. Its effects may be seen in the development of all the sciences and in their being marshalled in man’s attempt to transform the earth and thereby assure his future. Here again we may perceive the reason why it is Ishah, rather than Ish, who sins first: as the element of mankind which brought it to completion, she becomes the interpreter of the deepest nisus in man.

What happens as a result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is, however, only a partial fulfillment of this wish. The serpent has not told the whole truth about knowing good and evil; presumably he was not aware of the extent of good and evil that would be known after the experiment he was attempting. There is an unveiling of the future; but what is revealed does not tell much about the future of mankind as it will live century after century. Ish eats of the fruit after Ishah. In the story, he was present all along, even though he remained silent in the exchange with the serpent. His act unites him to the expressed desire of mankind to acquire the knowledge of good and evil. And, like Ishah, he is given only a limited insight: “Then the eyes of both were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loin-clothes” (3:7). In other words, they are initiated to sex. What they had not understood at 2:25 when seeing each other naked without shame, they now grasp. It is through their nakedness that mankind will be shaped. The Yahwist account becomes comparable to the many rites of initiation found all over the world. There will ensue from this the acquisition by Ishah of a new name: “The man named his wife Eva because she was the mother of all those who live” (3:20). This they did not know before. Now they realize the glorious function and already (this name is given after the curse) the drudgery of each. They are now not only Ish and Ishah, man and woman, but male and female. All is now ready for the beginning of chapter 4: “The man had intercourse with his wife Eva....”

The curse should now be examined, as it throws light on the whole issue. Yet we should carefully distinguish between the curse on the serpent, which is a piece of largely nontheological folklore, and the other two curses. The curse on the serpent is highly interesting as a piece of etiological speculation: why, of all the animals, does the snake alone run by wiggling his belly instead of using legs and feet? The answer appeals to a curse pronounced on him as a punishment for tempting the woman. It would seem, too, that the author injected a certain amount of polemical theology into this legend. For by calling the snake “cursed beyond all cattle, all wild beasts” (3:14), he throws discredit on all the ophic cults, those of Canaanites and of Egypt, connected with fertility, those of Mesopotamia, and the prolonged use of the serpent figure in Israel itself as a symbol of life and death.

The enmity between the offsprings of both may well contain a prophecy relating to Israel and the fertility cults of Canaan. These still tempt Israel, striking at its heel whenever there is an occasion; but Israel in the long run will crush the serpent and return to its true God. It seems doubtful that more can be read into this and that a proto-gospel is really included in this passage.

‘I will multiply your pains in childbearing, you shall give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning shall be for your husband, yet he will lord it over you.’ (3:16)

The curse of woman evokes a reversal of the order of the universe achieved in Eden. Whereas woman in innocence was the acme of creation, woman in experience, following her initiation to sexuality, will be dominated by her sexual desire for her husband, by her husband himself who will rule over her, and by the pains of pregnancy. Literally, it is not only the pains, but also the childbearing, which will be multiplied: “I will multiply your pains and your childbearing....” That is, the punishment will bear on the woman at the very point of which she was curious: this will be her good and evil, the thing she desired to know. The future of the race lies with her, but it will require from her the loss of her original nobility. The higher aspect of mankind becomes enslaved, and the ruder aspect, the man, takes over the leadership.

Admittedly, the order of things is also reversed as regards the man’s relationship to the soil which he was to till. It will no longer be the well-ordered Garden; he will no longer live in Paradise. For he will now have to labor for food. He will have to struggle with nature. And at the end he will return to his place of origin, dust.

Read in the light of our previous analysis of the Garden and the happenings in it, the curse contains the clue to the meaning of the entire Yahwist tradition concerning the origins of mankind. The author could look at the problems of the origins of man only from his own situation within mankind. He himself necessarily belonged to the order of the curse, to postlapsarian history. Yet he did not accept the opinion that this order had always existed. The pains of work and childbearing, the drudgery of woman under male domination could not represent the proper order of the universe. The origin must have been different. So, the poet reconstructed a prelapsarian order, a paradise condition, which he depicted as the exact reverse of the reality which he himself knew in his daily life. And when, through the ages, Israel heard these legends and later read them, they were reminded that they experienced the ambiguity of living East of Eden, while yet longing after a return to Paradise. They were nourished by two conflicting traditions: the postlapsarian one, regulating their lives and the order of their society, and the dreamt prelapsarian one which they expected to return some time at the end of their cycle of life, in what will eventually be called the messianic era.

We are thus invited to read the entire Old Testament in this light. There were two traditions about woman. The one corresponded to the order of society, in which woman, though protected by many laws, was inferior to man. The other echoed the legends of the origins as recorded in the Yahwist text: originally, woman was the higher and better part of mankind. The fall from this primitive nobility to the everyday reality was caused by a cosmic catastrophe which provoked a reversal of values. The current anthropology did not fit the order of creation. In my view of the matter, this was by no means a tradition that had been handed down from primitive times. Rather, it was a poetic and theogonic reconstruction with the purpose of explaining how things had come to be what they were. Whatever the exact origin of the story, eventually it became identified with the religious view of primitive times, to the point of itself being taken as the primitive (and therefore the true) account of the relationship between the sexes. The primitive order had indeed been lost. Women had become, in all the societies of the Fertile Crescent, little more than slaves. In Israel itself they kept this inferior status, although Mosaic legislation protected them in many ways from the brutality of the male world. Yet the primitive order can never be utterly lost as long as it is remembered. In the Hebraic concept of the return to the beginning, of Shoub Sheboth, the primitive times of Israel—the Exodus and the Cahal in the wilderness—were also ideals to be evoked at the recurrence of the yearly liturgies and to be somehow expected again in the future. Likewise, the Eden that had been lost by mankind as a whole could be hoped for. The beginning presented an ideal, and therefore a future. The values whose order had been upset were not forgotten.

The daily life of the people of Israel was naturally led at the level of a society which had itself felt the effects of sin. The traditions of the Old Testament were quite clear as to the origin of civilization, particularly in its technical and urban forms: it came from the descendants of Cain. This society is ambivalent. As the recipient of Yahweh’s favor, it experiences the “good and evil” that the woman in the Garden had aspired to know. The ultimate purpose of God remains hidden, but the means to fulfill God’s will are known: Torah, the Law. Thanks to this ambiguity, the two traditions as to the status and function of woman could continue side by side. Or rather, the life of the people and its regulation according to the legal system of Leviticus and Deuteronomy reflect the order of the curse, the fallen state of mankind in which woman is legally, socially, emotionally subject to man. The Law is not now given for Eden, but for the real world of time. Indeed, the originators of the myth of the sin of Adam and the woman must have proceeded backwards, reflecting on the legal and natural inferiority of women. This was the data they had to work with. It is therefore to be expected that biblical literature includes many passages where women are berated. The wisdom literature, relatively recent yet going far back, through the proverbs which it incorporated, into the past of Israel, forms a classical source of misogynic statements and antifemine humor. “I find woman more bitter than death,” Qoheleth writes during the second century B.C.," she is a snare; her heart a net; her arms are chains; he who is pleasing to God eludes her; but the sinner is her captive" (7:26-28). And the wisdom of Ben Sirach, around 180 B.C., is notorious for its indignation against women, who seem to be assimilated, as a matter of principle, to loose women (e.g. 9:1-13; 25:13-26; 18; 42:12-14). Even Ben Sirach’s kinder passages are not flattering for women:

A woman will accept any husband, but some daughters are better than others. A woman’s beauty delights the beholder, a man likes nothing better. If her tongue is kind and gentle, her husband has no equal among the sons of men. The man who takes a wife has the making of a fortune, a helper that suits him, and a pillar to lean on. If a property has no fence, it will be plundered. When a man has no wife, he is aimless and querulous. Will anyone trust a man carrying weapons who flies from town to town? So it is with the man who has no nest, and lodges wherever night overtakes him. (36:21-27)

A text of this kind appreciates woman only in relation to man. She is essentially an object man stares at. In herself she has no special wishes, but is ready to take any husband. If she has been well selected, she can be very useful. Above all, she helps a man to settle down and thus to deserve trust. In other words, a wife is better than many prostitutes. In such a view, woman cannot even find an incentive to any values other than those which male society imposes upon her. Ben Sirach’s book even includes this ferocious proverb: “A man’s spite is preferable to a woman’s kindness” (42:14).

No doubt, Ben Sirach’s misogynist wisdom corresponds rather accurately to the actual condition of woman in Jewish society.(4) The older books of the Bible, mirroring to a great extent the preexilic society, show woman behaving with great freedom, as is proper in nomadic and rural societies where her toil is necessary to the subsistence of the group. Later books illustrate a growing restriction of her movements. She becomes man’s thing. She is bought for marriage from her father, and she may be divorced, at least according to Hillel’s opinion, “for any reason whatsoever.” As a virgin she is respected but she enjoys no freedom to organize her own life and to refuse marriage. Her official life of prayer is not so extensive as that of man. She has no active function in the synagogue even when she is admitted. The Temple of Herod, unlike the Temple of Solomon and that of Zorobabel, admits her only as far as “women’s precincts,” where merchants and vendors have their market. After puberty, and in marriage more than before marriage, woman frequently becomes legally impure through no fault of her own: her shedding of blood in her periods and in childbirth render her taboo to her entourage. A good Jew even refuses to be served by a woman and avoids talking to one. At least in Jerusalem and in wealthy society, the growing trend in the Greek period is to confine her to home, which turns into a gyneceum or harem. Even when she is outside, her veil is a symbol and reminder of her hidden condition. In her relation to her husband, there is no question of love, only of obedience.

Admittedly, exceptions may be cited. The names of some prophetesses have been recorded, although they belong to primitive times. While permitted by the Law, polygamy was never extensively practiced; yet this may have been due to economic reasons more than to respect for woman’s personality or wishes. The Essenian communities did not encourage marriage, thus promoting a cult of virginity unknown to orthodox Judaism. In Egypt, the ascetic community described by Philo under the name of Therapeutes included, unlike the Qumran monastery, women as well as men.(5) They lived separately, each in a cell; yet they met for the Sabbath worship in a synagogue where men gathered on one side and women on the other, separated by a wall. They also met for a weekly evening meal. This time they still divided in two groups, “men on the right, women on the left”; after the meal they formed two choirs for liturgical chanting and dancing that lasted through the night. Philo notes that “carried away by the enthusiasm, and drinking, as in Bacchic rites, the generous wine of divine love, they end by forming only one group of singers.” It may not be irrelevant to remark that the Therapeutes lived in Egypt, the land where Greek mores were the most permissive for women, influenced as they were by the older Egyptian tradition. Diaspora Jews in general tended to adopt local practices, thus abandoning some of the Palestinian restrictions of women.

Above all, Jesus’ behavior, as recorded in the Gospels, does not follow traditional Jewish reserve. To his companions’ surprise, he speaks with the Samaritan woman at the well. He heals women as well as men, entertains relations of friendship with Martha and Mary. The group of his followers includes both married and unmarried women. His teaching on marriage implies the equality of man and woman. This will be of great importance for the concept of womanhood in the early Church; it was at variance with the mainstream of the rabbinic tradition.

The Book of Proverbs ends with an alphabetical poem about the perfect woman. Interpreted literally, as a description of the ideal wife, this describes a slave, a person who is entirely dominated by another. This woman in fact does more work than anyone else in her household, looks after everything and everybody, never tires, is the last to retire and the first to rise. She earns a fortune for her husband, while he sits at the gate palavering with the elders of the land. This is an eloquent and puzzling description of woman as pushed by the curse to total devotion to a husband who dominates her and eats away all her substance: “Your yearning shall be for your husband, and he will lord it over you.”

Yet, and this will help us to appreciate the ambiguity of the feminine picture in the Old Testament, this text of the Book of Proverbs was also interpreted as describing not a woman of flesh and blood, but the very wisdom of God. The Septuagint identifies this “wise woman” with “the fear of the Lord” (v. 30). Precisely, in the later books of the Old Testament, woman remains also a symbol of what is highest in the proper order of the universe.

This could be illustrated with the stories contained in the various books of the Bible about the great-women of Israel. The prophetesses should come first, for in them Ishah’s desire of knowing good and evil is fulfilled in what is no longer an ironic way: they do share some of the secrets of Yahweh. Among them we ought to mention Myriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, who, in what seems to have been a common rite among the tribes of the Near East, celebrates the victory over the Pharaoh’s army by song and dance (Exod. 15: 20-21), and especially Debora, the woman “judge” through whose prophecy Baraq destroyed Sesara’s troop (Judg. 4-5). These early examples date from the time of migration and conquest. Later writers will imagine similar figures who would deserve the name given to Debora in the epic poem about her, “Mother to Israel” (Judg. 5:7). Thus Judith and Esther, fictional heroines, yet models for Jewish womanhood. And, in a more subdued light, this other dim figure from the period of the Judges, Jephthah’s daughter: she dies a victim of her father’s vow to Yahweh to offer in sacrifice the first person who would cross his path on his return from battle. Human sacrifice, forbidden eventually by the Law, was occasionally practiced in primitive times, perhaps under the influence of Canaanite pagan practices. Yet Jephthah’s daughter was not the victim of bad luck. “The spirit of Yahweh” had come on Jephthah and inspired him to make this vow. Thus, we touch again this knot of ambiguity which characterizes the woman of the Old Testament: she is both the chosen one and the slave.

There is but one step from reflection on the heroines of Israel’s history to the representation of Israel itself, in its role as the people of Yahweh, in the form of a woman related to Yahweh through the bonds of wedlock. This is a classical theme with the prophets, from Osea to John the Baptist. The spark which enabled this theme to catch the imagination of the prophets and, consequently, of the people, seems to have been the historical and religious situation of the Northern Kingdom toward the middle of the eighth century, some two decades before the fall of Samaria in 721. The cult of Yahweh was in imminent danger of being overrun by practices borrowed from the pagan cults which subsisted among what remained of the older inhabitants of the country. The cult of Baal, with its center at the great sanctuary at Ras-Shamra, included sacred prostitution as a fertility rite. This religion continued, in probably a cruder form, in the villages of the Canaanites who still lived within the confines of the Northern Kingdom. And the Israelites in turn sometimes took part in these or similar orgiastic rites. Osea speaks to this situation when Yahweh, through him, blames this sin on the entire population:

So, although your daughters prostitute themselves and your sons’ wives commit adultery, I shall not be hard on your daughters for their whoring or on your sons’ wives for their adultery, when everyone is wandering off with whores and offering sacrifice with sacred prostitutes. (4:13-14)

In these conditions, the very participation of Hebrews in Canaanite mysteries could easily be seen as an act of prostitution, as a betrayal of Yahweh, whose relationship to his people is likened to that of a man for the woman he woos. Part of Osea’s mission was graphically to show this relationship through his preaching and also through the example of his own life. I take here chapters 1 and 3 of the Book of Osea to be a doublet of one incident, namely of his marriage with a Hebrew woman who had prostituted herself by participating in unlawful sexual practices in honor of the “Baalim.” This is the starting point for the magnificent development of chapter 2, where a similar sequence of prostitution, atonement, and love describes the position of the entire people of Yahweh.

Yes, their mother has played the whore, she who conceived them has disgraced herself. ‘I am going to court my lovers,’ she said, ‘who give me my bread and water, my wool, my flax, my oil and my drink.’ She would not acknowledge, not she, that I was the one who was giving her the corn, the wine, the oil, and who freely gave her that silver and gold of which they have made Baals. (2:7 & 10)

Between the fertility cult of the Baalim, believed to be the dispensers of agricultural abundance, and the worship of Yahweh alone, the people has hesitated. Therefore God denounces it as an adulteress: “She is not my wife, nor am I her husband. Let her rid her face of her whoring and her breasts of her adultery” (2:2), a probable allusion to tattooed marks of initiation.

Up to this point, the analogy is between Israel and the sacred prostitute (or the woman who has somehow participated in these cults). The turning point comes in the analogy when the prophet announces that the sovereignty of Yahweh will be able to change this course of prostitution into a return to Israel’s first love: “Then she will say, ‘I will go back to my first husband, I was happier then than I am today.’ That is why I will lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart.... I will betroth you to myself for ever, betroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love; I will betroth you to myself in faithfulness, and you will come to know Yahweh” (2:9 & 16, 21-22).

The perspective which opens here is a return to Eden. For the renewed tenderness between Yahweh and the woman will be accompanied by “a treaty on her behalf with the wild animals, with the birds of heaven and the creeping things of the earth” (2:20), the three categories of Genesis 1:30 (in the same words, with the exception of the word for “earth”). Thus the woman Israel will be - and, in her moments of fidelity, she is—the woman of the Garden, the perfection of mankind.

This double reference of the theme of the woman Israel recurs throughout the age of the prophets. In Jeremiah (34), in Ezechiel (16,23), in the second Isaiah (62,66), Israel is both the harlot and Yahweh’s bride. As harlot, she has betrayed Yahweh through prostitution with false gods; as bride, she is the first fruits of mankind, with whom God takes pleasure because in her the woman of Paradise has retained—or recovered—the state of holiness.

The last of the prophets will still be aware of this. Will not John the Baptist, in what the Gospel of John presents as his last testimony before going to jail, answer his disciples: “The bride is only for the bridegroom; and yet the bridegroom’s friend, who stands there and listens, is glad when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. This same joy I feel, and now it is complete (John 3:28-29)?

The wisdom literature of the Old Testament, during the last two centuries B.C., offers another kind of illustration of the typology of womanhood. Although much of this literature, is misogynist, books which include some of the most disparaging statements about women also elevate a feminine image to the level of the divine wisdom.(6)

What is the Hokmah, or Sophia? Admittedly, as in all the wisdom literature of the ancient Near East, Egypt included, it includes the practical and ethical maxims which grow out of the experience of life. Couched in proverbs, in parables, in riddles, these are collected and loosely organized in order to form summaries of the rules of the good life. It is the beginning of a philosophy of ethics in a people not given to intellectual speculation. The books of wisdom (like Proverbs, the wisdom of Qoheleth, the wisdom of Ben Sirach, Job) contain principles and pieces of advice for behavior. They also speak about wisdom as a valuable quality that the human mind ought to acquire. It then becomes the capacity of discernment by which one knows how to behave properly, eschewing the pitfalls and choosing the better and more profitable course of action. As such, it includes the knowledge of Torah. Such a wisdom can be presented figuratively as though it were a substantive entity: it is occasionally made to speak for itself, addressing its listeners and teaching them the ways of wise conduct.

So far, wisdom is not relevant to our inquiry except for the contents of its teaching. However, the Hebrew books of wisdom go further, attributing wisdom also to the Lord. This would not be particularly striking, since the Lord of all things, who gave his people Torah, must know the principles of behavior. It becomes highly important when the writers describe the divine wisdom and, again, make it address the people as though it were a feminine entity belonging to the realm of the divine. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is the first and highest creature of God, identical with Torah in its heavenly state as conceived in God’s mind. “Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works.... I was by his side, a master craftsman, delighting with him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere in the world, delighting to be with the sons of men ..." (8:22, 30-31). Now this wisdom figure is feminine, and not only grammatically, which is the case both in Hebrew and in Greek. It is also described like a woman, who invites her children to abide with her and to live in her house. Furthermore, her opposite number is Folly, also presented with feminine features and explicitly called Ishah, Dame Folly (8:13).

The contrast of Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly shows that we are still at the level of an allegory or parable. The text is cast in the form of a midrash and graphically presents the two ways, of life and of death, symbolized by two women, wise and stupid.

Ben Sirach’s personification of wisdom, however, goes further than this. Wisdom, Sophia (since this book is in the Septuagint and not in the Hebrew Bible), is here again a creature, though an eternal one (24:9). It is successively identified with the spirit of the Lord hovering over the chaos of the earth at the beginning (24:3), with the glory of Yahweh which resided in the pillar of cloud of Exodus (24:4), with the worship in the holy Tabernacle (24:10), with the Book of the Covenant and the Law of Moses (24:23). This wisdom presides over Paradise, since Ben Sirach connects her with the four rivers of Eden (24:25-26). This last notation points to her as to a prototype to be imitated and forever followed. She is the feminine model of all those who love and obey the Lord, the true Ishah, of whom Ben Sirach says: “The first [o protos, that is, Adam, the first man] never managed to grasp her entirely, and the last [o eschatos, the ultimate one, the one who comes at the end] has not found her” (24:28).

With the Book of Wisdom, the personification of Sophia reaches its apex. Like the book of Ben Sirach, Wisdom is found only in the Septuagint. Yet Ben Sirach’s composition existed in Hebrew before being translated into Greek and placed in the Alexandrian Bible. The Book of Wisdom, on the contrary, is itself an Alexandrian production; or at least (since we cannot be quite certain of its place of origin) it was written in Greek around 50 B.C. by diaspora Jews who were themselves influenced by Greek thought. Alexandria was a likely place for this to happen, as, a few decades later, in the case of the Jewish philosopher Philo (20 B.C.-54 A.D.)

Here, Sophia is no longer a creature, but an eternal emanation from God: “She is a breath of the Power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.... She is a reflection of the eternal Light, untarnished mirror of God’s active power image of his goodness” (7:24-25). She is the repository of his multiform spirit (7:22-24). She participates in all the powers of God, being identical with his Word (9:12); yet she is not he. Divine, she is not God, who remains, as much as in any biblical text, the Unknowable. Wisdom is that which man can know of God’s glory, or, equivalently, that of God which is communicable to man. In other words, Wisdom is the “good and evil” which the Ishah of Genesis 2 desired to know and never knew. It is the image of Ishah as transformed by the true knowledge of benediction and malediction, the divine antitype of Ishah. It shows what Ishah would have been had she waited for God’s self-unveiling instead of attempting to grasp the secrets of God by herself. Significantly, the account of the beginning of mankind, in chapter 10 of the Book of Wisdom, contains no allusion to the woman: everything seems to stem from “the first-fashioned father of the world, created alone” (10:1). It seems consistent that the Book of Wisdom, placing the primitive feminine figure in heaven with God, would not place her on earth with the first man.

It would be tempting at this point to apply the thesis of this chapter to an interpretation of the Song of Songs,(7) seen as the crowning point of the Old Testament reflections on the theme of womanhood. Admittedly, this meaning could not be attributed as such to the text of the Song when it was written (or compiled), in the fourth century; yet it could fit the Song as found in the Septuagint, placed among the books of wisdom. The lover is Yahweh, wooing Israel. The Shulamite is Israel in its feminine aspect, the bride of Yahweh of the Prophetic tradition. The various episodes of the Song, whether or not they originally belonged together, can be read as poetic expressions of the ebb and flow of the historical relationships between Israel and her God, ever seeking, and often estranged from, each other.

Such an interpretation makes sense only when the Bible is seen as a whole, in which the same themes are used successively, enriched by experience, reflection, and poetry, and reach higher levels of meaning as the tradition of Israel runs toward its fullness.

In the Christian reading of the Bible, this fullness includes the New Testament. Likewise, the theme of woman of the Israelite tradition must be homogenous with that of the writings of early Christianity. The insights that have been opened by the Old must reach their flowering in the New. The full scope of Genesis 2, which, in my view, dominates the entire picture of woman in the literature of the Hebrews and the Jews, will come into better light from a reading of the relevant passages of the New Testament.

Before this, however, the thesis of this chapter may be summed up. The Ishah of Genesis brings perfection or completion to mankind as its feminine aspect. Sin itself arises from this feminine aspect of mankind as something good and desirable, but premature, which should be expected as a gift rather than grasped as a possession. Following the fall, the order of history reverses the balance of mankind, making the feminine inferior to the masculine element, and confuses as well as obscures the symbolism of the sexes. But the prelapsarian tradition of the value of feminity is never lost. It comes to life with the prophets, who see Israel as the fiancee of the Lord; in the books of wisdom, where the divine Wisdom is depicted as the primordial woman antecedent to the creation of the world; occasionally in poetry, as in the Song of Songs, where the union of love between man and woman becomes a symbol for the relationship between God and his bride Israel. Israel is also mankind, that is, mankind as loved by God; it is mankind itself which is feminine before God.

Notes

1. Besides the standard commentaries and dictionaries, see Joseph-Marie Lagrange, Le Judaïsme avant Jésus-Christ (Paris, 1931); Roland de Vaux, Les Institutions de I’Ancien Testament, 2 vols. (Paris, 1965); Louis Bouyer, Man and Woman with God (London, 1960);Pierre Grelot. Le Couple humain dans I’Ecriture (Paris, 1961); Lucien Legrand, La Virginité dans la Bible (Paris, 1964); Thierry Maertens, La Promotion de la femme dans la Bible (Tournai, 1967); Marie Welles Clapp, The Old Testament as It Concerns Women (New York, 1934); Elsie Thomas Culver, Woman in the World of Religion (New York, 1967); Clarence Vos, Woman in Old Testament Worship (Delft, 1968). For a totally absurd interpretation of Genesis, see Theodor Reik, The Creation of Woman: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into the Myth of Eve (New York, 1960).

2. The Old Testament translations are taken from the Jerusalem Bible.

3. The New English Bible translates, in keeping with Hebrew and RSV: “closed the flesh over the place.”

4. Johannes Leipoldt, Die Frau in der antiken Welt und im Urchristentum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1955), pp. 72-116.

5. On the Therapeutes, see Philo, The Contemplative Life (Loeb Classical Library, Philo, IX [Cambridge, Mass., 1941], 113-169). The following quotations are from chap. 9, p. 155 and chap. 11, p. 165.

6. Pierre Bonnard, La Sagesse en personne annoncee et venue (Paris, 1966).

7. Daniel Lys, Le Plus Beau Chant de la création (Paris, 1968).

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