Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (180 page)

Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

When her husband came, he heard her voice crying out, and said, "Perhaps you touched that jar?"
Similarly [God said to Adam]: "Did you eat from the tree which I commanded you?"
(Theodor and Albeck 1965, 17980)
Let us compare this text to its "model." As a rendering of Pandora, which the jar theme suggests that it is, or even as a parallel to it, it certainly presents some startling inconsistencies. Where Lachs sees a
corruption
of the Greek myth (Lachs 1974), I find a
parodic subversion
of that text. When we look just at the parable itself, it seems that we have a fairly close copy of the Greek exemplar. The wife, who equals Pandora, is tempted to open the jar and does so, thus releasing an evil. However, once the parable is applied to scripture, the picture changes entirely, for the equivalent to the wife of the parable is not Eve but Adam!
A midrashic parable (
mashal
) typically comes to fill in a gap in the biblical narrative with a plausibly analogous situation and especially with an exemplary one drawn from the cultural intertext. In this case, the exegetical problem is the motivation for God's accusative questioning of Adam, "How did you know that you were naked?" and its continuation, "Did you eat from the tree which I commanded you not to eat of it?" The mashal suggests that God's proof of Adam's malfeasance was precisely the fact that he was ashamed of his nakedness, thus connecting the two halves of the verse. The "Pandora'' story is produced as the model for this interpretation. Just as in that story the husband accused the wife because he knew that her crying out meant she had disobeyed him, so God accused Adam because he knew that Adam's being ashamed and afraid meant he had disobeyed God. The Pandora figure of the parable is compared to Adam of the application. This interpretation is guaranteed by
 
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the statement within the midrashic text that "Similarly [God said to Adam]: 'Did you eat from the tree which I commanded you?'" The word
similarly
in a midrashic parable sets up the analogy between the parable story and the biblical narrative. The question of the husband in the parable: "Did you open the jar that I asked you not to?" is a figure for God's question to Adam, "Did you eat?" By equating this statement with the verse addressed to Adam in the Bible, the midrash says that it was he who opened the jar and was bitten, thus revealing his disobedience to the husbandGod. By thus equating Adam and not Eve with the Pandora figure of the parable, the text subverts the myth of essential, female demonic evil that the Pandora story projects explicitly. Moreover, it signals that for
this
midrashic writer at least, Adam's attempts to deflect blame for his behavior to his wife are not accepted. Of course, this does not exonerate Eve of her own sin, only of the blame for Adam's. On the other hand, this text provides a powerful example of androcentrism at the same time that it subverts misogyny, for it emphasizes that the culturally significant moment is Adam's eating of the fruit and not Eve's. That is, by shifting the Pandora figure from the woman to the man, at the same time that the midrash is disabling a reading that "puts the blame'' on Eve, it renders her agency in the story entirely invisible. This could almost be a paradigm for rabbinic gender relations which, while generally patronizingly solicitous toward women (as opposed to cultures which are violently misogynistic), at the same time marginalize them utterly.
There is, however, a parallel version of this midrash, in which the gender roles are not so complexly subverted. After telling the parable in more or less the same terms as in the version of Genesis Rabba, the midrash there concludes: "She put forth her hand and opened the jar and the scorpions bit her and she died. The [husband] is Primeval Adam and the wife is Eve, and the borrower of vinegar [whose gender also shifts from version to version] is the snake, for it says, 'And the snake was slyer than any beast of the field'" (Schechter 1967, 7).
16
What is crucial to note is that
16. It should be noted that even in this text, there is a version in which the Genesis Rabba inversion is maintained and the foolish wife is Adam and not Eve. I find it astonishing that when Aschkenasy cites this text she remarks on "the rabbis' attempts to reduce the stature of Eve to that of an empty-minded, jealous housewife" and does not pay attention to the fact that in most versions it is Adam who is so portrayed and not Eve (1986, 43). Aschkenasy's whole account, however, is more balanced than many in that it recognizes explicitly how rare it is to find "woman" identified as "evil incarnate" in rabbinic texts (ibid.). In contrast to Carol Meyers
(footnote continued on the next page)
 
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even in this version of the story, which assimilates it more closely to the Pandora model, the burden of the woman's role is still entirely different from her role in Hesiod. Like Pandora, she is the victim of her curiosity and the victim of the snake, who is portrayed as having evil intent, but unlike Pandora she is not the victimizer of her husband and the world, because only she gets bitten. She does not unleash evil in the world. Adam's "self-defense" of blaming it all on Eve (in the biblical text) is not accepted.
17
She got punished for her curiosity, but he alone is responsible for his malfeasance. Indeed, according to one passage in Genesis Rabba, his attempt to blame things on Eve is cited by God later as a classic example of the ungrateful quality of human beings (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 359). In another classical midrashic text, this lack of gratitude is given as the reason that God drove him out of the Garden (mandelbaum 1962, 284), and Rashi comments, "Because it is a shameful thing that he tries to shift the blame
onto the gift
that God gave him" (Rashi ad Genesis 3:13; emphasis added).
18
Both in Hesiod and in the Rabbis, the first woman is a divine gift to man; in one, however, the gift is a snare and in the other a true benevolence.
Misogynistic Midrashim on Eve
Other midrashic texts take a different view of Eve's complicity or guilt. Some of these are indeed quite virulent, though with few exceptions they do not ascribe to Eve the kind of evil and demonic aspect that we see in Philo's absolute equation of Eve with sexuality, the source of all evil from the very start.
19
The only exceptions that I know of in early rabbinic texts are from a single context in Genesis Rabba, where Rabbi Aha explains the name Eve (Hebrew
Hawwah
) as being related to the Aramaic
Hiwiah,
snake. He has Adam say to her, "The snake was your snake, and
(footnote continued from the previous page)
(1988, 7475), who conflated the early rabbinic interpretative tradition with that of non-rabbinic Jews and Christians, Aschkenasy writes, "As we have seen, unlike in Christian Bible exegesis, the figure of Eve in Judaic tradition did not take on the aspect of cosmic evil" (Aschkenasy 1986, 50).
17. See below, however, for another tradition of rabbinic hermeneutics, which does blame it "all on Eve."
18. I know of one dramatic exception to this pattern in classical midrashic literature and will discuss it below. Compare, for instance, Ambrose, "Well does the Scripture omit specifying where Adam was deceived; for he fell, not by his own fault, but by the vice of his wife" (cited in Higgins [1976, 644]).
19. Philo (1929a, 275), among many examples. See also Sly (1990, 109).
 
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