I started studying about Eve awhile back when I tried explaining the creation story to my daughter and realized I didn't understand it as well as I thought. One thing that fascinated me in my studies was the incredibly negative view that most Christian and secular (and even a few older Mormon) sources have towards Eve. For example, medieval art usually depicts the serpent with Eve's face (like below) and there's a belief that Cain was actually fathered by Satan as the serpent. Their interpretation usually rests on the assumption that Eve eating the fruit was a "bad thing" and the serpent tricked her into it.
We don't share these assumptions but that raises new questions for which I do not have answers. Satan must have known God's plan (to send us with agency into the mortal world) so why did he try to convince Eve to eat the fruit and thereby learn and grow? What did he gain from this action? What was he trying to gain?
Eve exists in our scriptures as a prototype. We are all in some sense Eve. How does the tale of Satan's actions in the garden apply to us? Why are Satan's actions in the garden recorded for us to read?
Scripture Sources:
Genesis 3-4
Moses 4-5
2 Nephi 2
One thing I've been thinking about in all of this is how often satan, in order to lead us astray, doesn't go for direct opposites to truth but instead just tweaks truth slightly to confuse. I don't have an answer for why satan would tempt Eve when that only furthers God's plan except that his hatred for Adam and Eve might have been so intense he was willing to cause them pain in any way possible.
ReplyDeleteMy question about this is that in our modern day conversations about Eve in the church we talk about Eve making a concious choice to eat of the fruit and yet she says, "the serpent beguiled me". Why would she say he cunningly tricked her if she understood and knew what she was doing. My only answer to that might be that God told her the law and its consequence (death) without talking of the reward(knowledge), while satan told of the reward (knowledge) while lying about the consequence (he tells her she will not surely die). So in that way if she believed him that she break the law and have the reward but not the consequence, she was beguiled. Or maybe she knew there would be a punishment of death but didn't understand the its extent (which if she was fully innocent she probably couldn't understand).
That brings me to why God give two commandments that contradict each other without explaining why. Maybe they literally could not understand in their current state of innocence. I try to be pretty straight forward with my kids but there are explanations that they just cannot understand with their limited experience.
Eve's reasons for eating the fruit are actually given and the Bible rarely provides motivation. She obviously was making a choice. The word beguiled is an interesting one. According to Strong's Concordance, it means something like "led astray". Other Hebrew scholars say it is a richer word than that, connoting a rich, multi-sensory experience. I'm not sure that our word 'beguiled' is that helpful. Maybe she was saying something along the lines of "I was led (on multiple levels by the taste and sight of the tree and my desire for wisdom) to do this by the serpent." A least, that seems the closest to the text to me.
DeleteOh, and when Adam says Eve gave him the fruit and he ate, the Hebrew he's using is (according to people who know more about this than I do) rather mechanical. Like "She handed it to me so I just ate it because that's what I do when she hands me food." Okay, I totally took some sarcastic liberties with that translation.
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DeleteIn reference to my point above about satan tweaking the truth I was really struck when studying this about how often 1) there is something good for women 2)men are led to twist that into the same basic thing but blame it on women so 3) when women stand firm about their rights they deprive themselves of 1.
ReplyDeleteExample: 1)After a baby was born women kept close to home for a while and tried not to have a lot of people over. This was good for women and the baby giving each time to recover especially in a time where not much was know about sanitation. 2)Somehow the church (catholic etc) turned this into the woman being unclean during the time of birth and after. The catholic church even had specific time periods like being unclean for 30 days if you had a boy but 60 days if you had a girl etc. At its most extreme, if you died during this period you were buried in the potters field (unhallowed ground)- and a lot of women died of child birth or its complications back then. 3) So today there is this push to get back into the world as soon as possible after birth as if to prove we are strong, able and most definitely not unclean. And while there are some fewer germ etc concerns it would probably do a lot of moms and babies good to stay closer to home with less visitors for a while longer.
I doubt most women think 'I've got to get out of the house so everyone knows I'm not unclean' but I really believe it is such a deep issue in society it's like an underground current in the river of society that we find ourselves responding to. These undercurrents are so intrenched in our society that I think even amazing, inspired members of the church are not immune. We all come with societal prejudices that are so very difficult to change, or even recognize and I think these are often where satan does his best work. And I think the story of Eve being so universally misunderstood is one of these.
Yeah, I'm always amazed at how men think their man-things are so great and women-things aren't nearly as cool. One of my favorites in studying Genesis was the assertion that Adam is greater because he was created before Eve and the first is always better. The men who say this never follow it by "And of course the animals are even greater than men because they were created before Adam." If you just read it with no agenda in mind then it is clear that the creation of Eve is the climax of the creation story. That's when the creation is finally done and declared good.
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