Only after the expulsion from the Garden is Eve said to become pregnant. (Of course, only after the expulsion is Adam said to have lain with her--no one has ever really been able to comment intelligently on that.) Eve gives birth to Cain and exclaims, "I have gotten a man from the Lord" (Genesis 4:1, KJV). The personal connection Eve feels to God's agency in the matter--it almost seems she does not understand Adam's role--raises even a deeper question than whether Eve really understood childbirth. We should also ask whether we have really understood the "curse" on Eve.
Eve, in contrast to the snake and to her husband, is not hit with God saying, "Because thou hast. . . ." God simply tells Eve that she will have pain in childbirth (3:16) and the translations do not make clear that she had ever been aware before of her child-bearing role. Indeed, only after this does the text say, "And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living" (3:20).
Eve, after all (if all the noise through the ages about the importance of God's gender has ever really amounted to anything) had in the Garden known another male person--Adam. Adam had never known another male than God, and Adam from the first had seen Eve as only an adjunct to himself. Eve's master--Adam--was inescapably a flawed character. Would it be any surprise that Eve would be inclined to harbor doubts about God, at least in in manner more acute than would be Adam's inclination?
So was Eve really cursed at all? The pain of childbirth cannot be ignored, of course, but that need not be central to the question; in the Bible people were often cursed for other's transgressions. But child-bearing itself? Did Adam and Eve really know before God's post "Fall" pronouncement that, if children were to be had, Eve would be the one to do the bearing? Adam, the animal-namer, would possibly have had millennia to study their wildly-varying habits (if indeed the animals were procreating at all themselves). What immutable law of God had decreed to the first couple--or to us--that the prototype human male would not be the first child-bearer? It would seem to have been potentially a great honor. Of course, such wondering is of little more substance than the age-old question of whether Adam and Eve had navels.
Surely the God who made all could have made human "males" the child-bearers, starting with Adam. Eve was chosen instead, and she acclaims God, not Adam, as the source of the fact that she has had her first-born son. What is most important to us is the question of Eve's (indeed, in the Bible, any woman's) agency. Was Eve ever given an even chance to Adam to sin, or not? Was Eve really the source of the "curse" of child-bearing?
The importance of the question of agency relating to women in the Bible cannot be overstated, though it is so often ignored. Have we ever really considered the import of Matthew 5:32: "But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery." "Causeth her to commit adultery"? Whose agency is involved then in the un-named woman's transgression?
In "Bible times" a woman without support could expect that she--and possibly her children--would face beggary, prostitution, starvation. It is ridiculous to view the marriage-divorce-remarriage question the way we do, as though it were some sort of middle class soap opera, when in the ancient world it was a matter of life and death. And yet the story of the Samaritan woman in perennially viewed as though Jesus was lamenting on her having shucked off five husbands in pursuit of a sugar-daddy or a stud. Jesus was establishing himself to her as a prophet; it is we who have decided to pronounce on his view of the Samaritan woman. Who knows what manner of husbands she had been married to, or whether she had been repeatedly abandoned?
And consider the "woman caught in adultery" of John's Gospel. She is presented to Jesus and it is said of her that she was "taken in adultery, in the very act" (8:4). Jesus, of course, effectively pardons her because no one else present will take up his dare to pronounce themselves "without sin." All well and good. What if the charge had been something different, say, "Master, this woman was taken in the very act of drowning her five children so that she might be free to marry a beautiful young man." Would we still have the same story? Surely Jesus' exacting standard of an executioner being "without sin" could still apply, yet no one will believe that Jesus would let the murdering, lustful hypothetical woman off.
Inescapably, the "woman caught in adultery" was allowed to go unpunished because the crowd could not bring themselves to punish her so cruelly. Jesus expected people to address the world with understanding, as they themselves progressed through the arc of their lives. It is only from such an approach that we can even begin to ask the right questions.
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