Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [28]
Genesis 3 offers no hint as to why the serpent addressed the woman. The passage even indicates that the man and the woman were together when the serpent spoke. In some views, Adam was not merely an innocent bystander but a coconspirator whose silence in the face of the serpent implies his willingness to go along. When offered the choice by Eve, Adam doesn’t put up much of a fight in favor of obeying God. In other words, the first man was a bit of a wimp, a moral weakling who was simply a passive accomplice to the decisive, daring Eve.
But in eating from the tree, Adam and Eve acquire the capacity for rational and ethical judgments, one of the key ingredients in setting human beings apart from the rest of the animal world. If the First Couple had obeyed God, it would have meant that humanity would have lived in a paradise without wants, worry, or presumably violence. But what a boring paradise that might have been. A vegetarian paradise with no wants is like a life of eternal infancy—a Paradise without science, art, and the sort of rational distinctions that have brought humanity to its present state.
The biblical tale of the Fall is similar to other legends that contrast humanity’s sufferings with an earlier time of perfection, a lost paradise or golden age. The Greeks’ Pandora, like Eve, is responsible for the misfortunes of mankind because she disobeyed the order not to open the box out of which all the troubles of the world flew. The Blackfoot Indians of North America told of Feather-woman, a maiden who unleashes great ills when she digs up the Great Turnip after being told not to do so. For this, she is cast out of Sky-Country. Like all such myths of a lost golden age, the biblical Fall is an attempt to account for the problems of evil and human suffering and a symbol of how humans have always yearned for a better, but possibly unattainable, world.
And Eve’s sentencing to the pain of childbirth? Perhaps that is also part of the cost of wisdom. As scientist-archaeologist Charles Pellegrino notes in his book Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, “Childbirth is more difficult for human beings than for any other known species, a price apparently paid to accommodate the brain’s tripling in size during the past two million years. The head is the largest part of the body and the first to emerge.” In a manner of speaking, science and Genesis agree: women paid for the knowledge gained from eating from that tree by having babies with big brains.
Was Eve really Adam’s first woman?
In the summer of 1997, the most popular rock concert in America was a collection of women musicians who barnstormed the country as the “Lilith” tour. Readers of The New York Times might have been surprised by the newspaper’s statement that Lilith was Adam’s first wife.
Was Eve really first? Or was there “another woman” in Adam’s life?
In strictly biblical terms, Eve was the first woman and Adam’s only wife. But Hebrew legend has another story that’s a lot more spicy. As recorded in the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, who preceded Eve. In this version, Lilith is created from the earth, as Adam was. In the Talmud, the vast collection of rabbinical teachings and commentaries on Jewish Law and learning, Lilith was also made out of dust, but her crime was even more specific: she balked at the way Adam wished to make love, with the man on top. When Adam refused Lilith’s demand that she be regarded as his equal, she walked out on him. Then she uttered the unspeakable name of God and was sent to live with the demons, becoming a demon herself.
Lilith doesn’t appear in Genesis, and the only biblical reference to this mystery woman is a single line in Isaiah that mentions her as a female demon. A Canaanite demon called Lilitu who tormented men may have inspired the Hebrew Lilith, and the figure has been traced back even further to Babylonian mythology. The Lilith demon was later depicted as a slayer of infants and women in pregnancy and childbirth who came out at night and drank human blood. In essence, Lilith