but even that no longer obtains for those who stood at Sinai, both male and female and their descendants. As xenophobic as this tradition is, with its implication that those who did not stand at Sinai are still impure, it is not misogynistic.
12
"Woman," in Bible and midrash, is almost never essentialized as something evil and dangerous, as a snare to man.
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According to the Rabbis, there was no Fall into sexuality in the Garden of Eden. On the rabbinic readings, Adam had had intercourse with Eve from the beginning. Their intercourse is not associated in any way with the snake, the "forbidden fruit," or a Fall or expulsion from the Garden (Anderson 1989 and Pardes 1989). Licit sexuality, the intercourse of married couples, belongs not to the demonic realm of the snake but to the innocent realm of the Garden of Innocence itself. Indeed, according to Genesis Rabba 18:6 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 168), the snake became inflamed with lust for Eve because he saw Adam and Eve having intercourse with each other, and according to 19:3 (17172), he came and spoke to Eve while Adam was sleeping after having had intercourse with her. This narrative idea is plausibly interpreted as a quotation and reversal of prevailing pre-rabbinic interpretations by which the snake taught Eve and Adam about sex in imitation of the animals, interpretations that assimilate sexuality to the bestial and fallen (Brown 1988, 94 n. 43). This interpretation is in line with my understanding of rabbinic culture as in part a resistance movement to forces within the dominant Hellenistic formation. There is, indeed, explicit evidence of this reversal, for in another passage of the same midrashic text, we are told that the verse "Adam knew Eve his wife" means that he and she
taught the animals [caused them to know] about sex
(20405). The snake is the aggressor. While there is illicit sexuality involved"the snake had intercourse with Eve''it is not female sexuality itself that is identified with the snake, as it was in Philo.
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 | | 12. Indeed, I am tempted to suggest that the statement by the third-century Palestinian Rabbi Yohanan is in response to the doctrine of Original Sin, as if to say, you believe in it, you have it. Alternatively, it might represent a triumphalist claim on the part of the Rabbi that Pagans are more given to sexual immorality than Jews area fairly frequent rabbinic charge. In support of this latter interpretation is the fact that the Talmud cites Rabbi Yohanan's statement to support a claim by Mar Ukba bar Hamma that Pagans frequent the wives of their neighbors, and when they don't find them, they find an animal and have intercourse with it (Baylonian Talmud Avoda Zara 22b. See also Romans 1).
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| | 13. For other views, see Bal 1987. See also Mordechai A. Friedman 1990.
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