Adam & Eve: Deconstructed
The story of Adam and Eve has often been used to debase women, but if you look at the original text, it’s actually oddly empowering for women. Let’s start from the beginning.
"And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” (Gen 2:18)
The word used for “helper” here is “ezer”, which is always used to refer to someone providing life-saving help. In fact, it’s most often used to refer to help given by God.
“Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.” (Gen 2:22)
The word used for rib here is NEVER used elsewhere to refer to a rib. It refers to “side”[1]. So Eve wasn’t taken from Adam’s rib, but from Adam’s side. So Eve was originally part of Adam. The feminine aspects of Adam were removed from Adam and made into a second person. Ancient Jewish rabbis believed that Adam and Eve were originally hermaphrodite but were then split into 2 different people[2]. This makes sense, considering Adam says afterwards that Eve is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”.
This was used to make sense of Genesis 1:27 which says "So God created man in his own image - in the image of God created him. Male and female he created them." “Him” seems to refer to 1 person. Some modern misogynists like to use this to claim that women weren’t made in God’s image, but Genesis 5:2 clarifies that woman is included in the word “man”. The word “man” is the word used to refer to humanity as a whole; it is not the same word used for “male” later in the verse.
Also, if the woman wasn’t made in God’s image, I’d like to know why the word used to describe her (“ezer”) is used to refer primarily to God elsewhere in scriptures. Also, if not from God, I’d like to know where Eve got her ability to give birth to people made in the image of God (Deut 32:18 says God gives birth).
And by the logic Eve isn’t made in God’s image because she was constructed out of Adam...well, that means that nobody except for Adam is made in God’s image, because everybody else was constructed from a woman’s body. Except the fact that everybody is made in God’s image (James 3:9).
Elsewhere in Genesis, the word used for the construction of Eve in Gen 2:22 was used almost exclusively to refer to the construction of a temple for God[3]. The word used in Gen 2:7 for the creation of Adam was used to refer exclusively to the creation of beasts. Take that as you will. (Did I mention yet that I have NO idea how people have managed to misconstrue this story into claiming that women are inferior?)
Why Was Eve Approached First?
Now that we know that Eve was made to be Adam’s ezer, with ezer referring to life-saving help, it becomes more understandable why the snake would approach Eve first; she was the one supposed to be protecting Adam spiritually. Unfortunately, Eve made a mistake in this instance.
But was Adam blameless? No, he did the equivalent of watching your wife drink bleach while doing nothing to stop it. A lot of people don’t notice that Adam was there the whole time; Gen 3:6 says that “she gave to her husband who was with her.”
I was going to label this section as “the punishments” but I’m no longer convinced they were punishments. Rather, they were consequences, because now that Adam and Eve had knowledge of good and evil, it could’ve been easy to just stop depending on God, & distance themselves from God (which is only bad for humans - God doesn’t need us, we need God). Thus, the consequences were incentives for us to remain dependent on (and therefore close to) God.
2 Cor 1:9-10 says “In fact, we felt that we had received a death sentence so we would not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us. In Him we have placed our hope that He will yet again deliver us.”
Childbearing is potentially deadly for women, which causes us to depend on God. Indeed, Psalm 22:9, Genesis 4:1, and Isaiah 66:9 say that God helps in childbirth (which assigns a midwifery function to God, and during that time period, men never engaged in midwifery - so that’s a point against the idea that God is male).
The stresses of pregnancy and childbearing would make it more difficult to work, and therefore make a woman dependent on her husband to provide for her needs during that time, which is why the Bible says “he will rule over you”. According to the Bible, being a “ruler” is to serve the people under your rulership, and to put them before yourself:
“[...]The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them[...] It shall not be this way among you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” (Matt 20:25-28)
Eph 5 utilizes Christ - who “did not come to be served, but to serve” - as the example of an ideal husband. So Gen 3:16 isn’t saying that husbands will be able to “lord it over” their wives, but rather that husbands will be needed to protect and provide for their wives (as is commanded in Exodus 21:10, Eph 5, & Neh 4:14). I guess the one negative part of this is a bit of an ego-kill: Eve would still be Adam’s life-saving helper (ezer), but now she would be dependent on him too. It balances the scales.
Notice that right after God tells Eve that Adam will rule over her (which indicates protecting and providing for her, from a Biblical perspective), God informs Adam of the struggles he will endure in order to fulfill this function and provide for his family. It should be noted that Eve’s “curse” was one verse long, while Adam’s was three verses long. Furthermore, the passage only condemned Eve to pain during childbearing, but condemned Adam to sorrow "all the days of [his] life."
This is consistent with my idea that these aren’t “curses” but rather incentives to remain close to God - something that would be easier for Eve since she was built as a Temple of God (as per the terminology used in regards to her creation). This is also consistent with countless studies that do demonstrate that women are more religious than men [5].
Genesis 3:15, a statement from God to the serpent, is commonly assumed to be referring to Jesus: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
So...Jesus is the woman’s seed. I find it interesting that the one person who was the seed of a woman, and not a man, is the person who’s sinless and perfect. But that makes sense of the fact that the Bible elsewhere says that sin is spread by Adam not Eve (1 Corinthians 15:22).
[1] https://biblehub.com/hebrew/hatztzela_6763.htm
[2] http://www.jewishanswers.org/ask-the-rabbi-category/jewish-texts/the-chumash-five-books-of-moses/adam-and-eve-story/?p=2537
[3] https://biblehub.com/hebrew/vaiyiven_1129.htm
[4] https://biblehub.com/hebrew/vaiyitzer_3335.htm
[5] https://www.pewforum.org/2009/02/26/the-stronger-sex-spiritually-speaking/
