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June 7, 2018
Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM
Will we ever be finished with the problems of Adam and Eve in the garden? Eve seems to get the blame, and through her, Eve-women are forever, supposedly, the cause of having brought evil into the world. So women should remember how terrible they are, repent of having been born female, and accept their social submission to men as just punishment for their innate moral weakness and susceptibility to temptation. They are incapable, in this line of interpretation, of making good moral decisions. They need to be told what to do, and kept under firm control by male authority – political, ecclesial, and interpersonal.
But there’s more to the story than these easy clichés. First, this is not a factual or historical account. It offers a parable-like story, a somewhat playful account to deal with several perennial questions: Why do men and women find themselves in conflict? What got broken in the relationship of human beings with God? If human beings are fundamentally good, where does evil come from? Wasn’t life on this earth intended to be harmonious and pleasant? What makes it so tough? The answer to these questions is not, “It is women’s fault.”
Let’s look at Adam. He doesn’t come off as the innocent bystander. God is engaging in a legal-sounding inquiry. We know that God is all-seeing. But God asks ironically, “Where are you?” As if to say, “Adam, what is going on in your mind?” The woman is not hiding from the sound of God’s voice, preoccupied with her body or how she looks. She has heard the voice and is ready for dialogue with God.
Adam has to be smoked out of his avoidance. The question, “Where are you?” is not curiosity on God’s part. It’s a question for Adam to examine himself, to come to consciousness. It’s Adam who doesn’t know where he is. He dissembles. He whines that he’s afraid, as though he wants to manipulate God into being easy on him. He severs himself from his union with the woman. He won’t admit his own responsibility. In this “J” strand of several compositional hands in Genesis, God earlier empathized with Adam’s loneliness. Even his naming all the animals didn’t provide Adam a partner. So God, in tenderness, gave Adam the great gift of the woman’s companionship. She’s drawn out from his own flesh, not molded from the dust and blown into being as Adam was.
But now Adam renounces his former joy at her companionship. He’s angry at her because he realizes he’s in trouble. Shift the blame. Cheeky and insulting, he fault-finds God and disowns the woman, the human being given him out of divine compassion and love. Adam will do just about anything to exonerate himself, even accuse God of causing the problem. “The woman whom you put here with me – she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.” In his desperation to protect himself from blame, he reduces the woman to a thing, an alien object. She is now “the woman whom you put here with me,” not the woman inseparable from his own flesh, fashioned from his rib, the answer to his longing for love and communion. He rejects God’s gift, degrades her dignity, and severs the memory of her origin from his own body. He ends up, in effect, contemptuous of his own body, his own existence. This does profound violence to who he is. Maybe this is the mythic story of how all violence in the world began, especially the violence of men against women. And how it is healed.
Adam makes a wordy defense of himself. He talks too much, and this only makes clearer his moral fragility, his self-deception, his inability to take responsibility for his actions, and his willingness to throw the woman under the bus to exonerate himself. The woman makes a simple admission: “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.” God accepts her candor and confession as the truth. Judgment made. Case closed. The serpent is not recognized as a conversation partner with God. The sure destiny, unseen right now, is that the woman will one day defeat the forces of evil. The story is more than it seems.
Mercy Sister Eloise Rosenblatt holds a doctorate in theology and is an attorney practicing family law. She lives in San Jose.