Rethinking Eve: New Insights into the Genesis Story

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson 

Well, I am so happy to let our Bible and Beyond listeners know about an intriguing lecture series, “Paths in Biblical Studies,” which is founded by Bart Ehrman, and this online conference is called “New Insights into the Hebrew Bible.” It’s coming up soon on March 21st and 22nd, and the focus for the whole conference is on the book of Genesis. And when you sign up for the conference, you’ll have a chance to hear from ten outstanding speakers.

And now we get a chance to talk to one of those speakers.

Shawna Dolansky is going to be talking about “The Fall of Eve.” Wow! Okay, so Shawna is an associate professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She’s a historian who specializes in the emergence of the Hebrew Bible within its ancient Near Eastern context. Her publications are on goddesses, magic, gender and social structure, and the history of biblical interpretation. And she’s particularly interested in how text, archaeology, politics, and imagination come together in the writing of history.

Shawna Dolansky 

My pleasure.

Shirley 

So, I think you have chosen a very perplexing and powerful story from the Bible. Jews and Christians both lean heavily on the creation stories at the beginning of the book of Genesis, and your focus is on Eve—it’s hard to fathom how much agony in the world has been placed on her shoulders. So I’m really eager to get some new thinking about this, and I’m thinking maybe you could get us started with a question  probably most of us have about Eve. Do you think she’s really the villain she’s made out to be, causing such agony for both women and men throughout the history of humankind?

Shawna 

So, can I just say, “No!” and we’ll move on to the next question? No, so I think you can actually read the story in a very different way. We’re very used to reading it back through the lens of 2000+ years of interpretation. What I’m proposing to do is to read it on its own terms and in its own context. So if you just read the story, and you try to bracket out everything you think you know about what’s going on in the story, Eve is the protagonist.

She’s the one who reasons; she weighs options; she acts, and she moves history forward. So she sees the tree; she considers that it’s good for food, pleasing to the eye, desirable for wisdom. It’s a deliberate, reasoned choice. It’s not malevolent; it’s not a moment of weakness; and the text doesn’t use the word “sin.” That gets read into it later. And  also, where’s Adam in all of this? if you read the text, they’re going to gloss over the fact that he’s right there with her! It very explicitly says he’s right there with her the whole time

she’s having this conversation with the snake. And he’s just standing there until she hands him the fruit, and he eats it. So there’s no temptation, there’s no seduction. She’s sharing this divine knowledge with him because he’s there with her.

So the villainess part—the reading that she’s a villain—comes from later interpretation starting in the 2nd century BCE. You have Ben Sira who is the first writer to explicitly blame Eve for the human condition. He says,”From a woman, sin had its beginning, and because of her, we all die.” And then we have a history of interpretation where, you know, Paul works with the Adam typology. Augustine formalizes the idea of original sin, and Milton makes the whole scene vivid and dramatic in Paradise Lost. And so when most people think about the story today, we’re understanding it through these later interpretations.

Shirley 

Wow! Thank you! Great. Do you think of this more like a myth rather than a record of history?

Shawna 

Okay, so I have a couple of thoughts on that. So I’m a historian, and so I I work with concepts of myth and history all the time. So the first thing I want to say is those are modern concepts; those are our ideas. The categories of myth and history are things that we’ve made up in order to understand stories. The ancient authors are not working within these genres. They’re doing something very different—well, very different on the one hand, and really not so different on the other hand. They were trying to understand the world in which they lived, and they’re trying to explain their present realities through storytelling.

So some of the stories are grounded in cultural memories some in ancestral legends; some of them are grounded in the landscape around them and just kind of the daily grind of of life. So when people use the word ‘myth,’ we usually mean ‘falsehood’—something that was made up. When a scholar uses the word ‘myth,’ we mean stories that conveyed cultural truths. So if we say something is a myth, we’re not trying to answer… Well, if we say something is a myth, we’re not trying to say it happened or it didn’t happen. And myths in the ancient world are not intended to answer the question,

“What happened?”

They intended to answer the question, “Why is the world the way it is?”—which is a very different question. Why do we suffer? Why do we die? Why is there tension between men and women? Why do we have to work hard to produce food and suffer in childbirth when animals don’t have to do either? And yet we are higher beings with access to knowledge of the gods. Genesis 2 and 3 are answering those questions, and it’s wonderful to think about that. It’s a “why” question, rather than a “when” or “how” kind of question. It’s very interesting.

Shirley

Alright, so then, where do you think the Genesis myth of Eve might have come from?

Shawna

I mean, a lot of it is speculation because we don’t have any records, and we don’t have any…if only the author had signed their work! But look, the Eden story in Genesis 2 and 3 is generally assigned to what scholars call the J-source, or the Yahwehist. It’s probably the older of the two creation stories in Genesis. Chapter 1 comes from a different hand—the priestly source—probably written after the J-source. And I say ‘probably,’ because the documentary hypothesis—the idea that the Pentateuch is composed of several originally independent sources—that idea has been around for a long time. Since the 19th century. It’s been revised and debated a lot since then. The details are very contested. I won’t get into the details.

What isn’t contested is that the Pentateuch is a composite text with different layers. It’s got different theological perspectives and different historical contexts behind them. So the Eden story is probably coming—at least in its original form, it’s going to be edited over time—but probably the original core story is from a world when there were still Israelite kings. It’s written in classical biblical Hebrew. It reflects the live religious debates of that world

that wouldn’t have the same urgency later on, and wouldn’t therefore have the same meaning later on. So it’s going to be interpreted and reinterpreted to fit new contexts.

Shirley 

Okay, that’s really helpful too. I got that we can put that in context. Then go on. Do you see any specific ways that this this story of Eve affected later developments of the Bible, then?

Shawna 

Yes, so I mentioned already that one of the things that’s striking about the story is how quiet it is for the first few centuries after we have a Hebrew Bible. We get almost no commentary about this story or interpretation; nothing in the Hebrew Bible itself. And it’s not really going to be until we get to the Second Temple period in Judaism, particularly 2nd century BCE and later, when Jewish communities under Hellenistic pressure are grappling with questions like, “Why do we suffer, and why did evil enter in the world?” And then, “Oh, we have the story.” So the Eden story becomes a vehicle for working through these questions. but there are multiple answers, and, you know, the earlier answers to these questions didn’t even look at Eve. They looked at Genesis 6, which is that really weird story about the sons of the gods and the daughters of men. That was the original answer to the question of “why is there evil in the world?” But then at some point some of the writers in the Second Temple Jewish period, and certainly into the early Christian period, are looking at Eve. They’re blaming her, or they’re blaming Adam. The New Testament is going to pick this up in interesting ways.

So Paul is going to use the Adam-Christ typology to make a theological argument about universal redemption. So Adam’s act and Christ’s act as parallel, one as sinking us into sin, and one as beginning of redemption, and that’s enormously generative for Christian theology. But even Paul isn’t doing what Augustine will later do, which is to formalize original sin as this kind of transmissible condition inherited through sexual reproduction. And that’s an even later development under Augustine. But now we all think of the story and we think,

“Oh, original sin!” So the history of interpretation is very much going to kind of become this snowball that just grows and grows and grows and adds on to what’s there before.

Shirley 

You know, you mentioned two things I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about. You jumped into Genesis 6, and I think most people are familiar with Genesis 2 and 3, but maybe not know much about Genesis 6. and I think that’s really important.

Shawna

Yeah, for sure. So Genesis 6 gives us this story just before the flood where the generations are increasing upon the earth, and Genesis 6 begins with this idea that the Bene Elohim, which a direct literal translation is “the sons of the gods”—even though the history of translation kind of tries to soften that a little bit—it says the sons of the gods saw the daughters being born to humans and took an interest. They saw that they were beautiful and so they took them as wives, and then from them were born the Nephilim—which is a word that shows up in various places and seems to mean ‘giants,’ but they’re here.

There are these semi-divine creatures, and they give birth to the Nephilim, and then things go bad, and people are really bad. And God says, “You know, it’s not right that my breath should abide in humans forever so I’m going to limit human lifespan to 120 years.” And and it’s just this very weird story with all these different elements turn in, and then we move on to Noah and the flood.

And it’s never mentioned again until the Nephilim are going to show up in later texts in different contexts. But that story is very much in line with what we would expect from ancient Near Eastern myths, where you have the sons of gods and the daughters of men intermingling, and you get the birth of demigods like Hercules or Gilgamesh, or any of these ancient demigod heroes. That was perfectly normal in that world, but in the Bible it really feels out of place. And part of my argument is that the Bible belongs in that world. Iif you want to understand the origins of these stories, and not the history of interpretation.

Shirley

Wow, okay. And then the other thing you mentioned was Augustine, who came later. Maybe not everybody knows when Augustine was. Could you give us just a little hint of the history of when…

Shawna

Yeah, so 4th century CE, and he’s working with earlier ideas.

I believe it’s Irenaeus, in like the 2nd century CE. I could be wrong; Christian history is not my normal area of expertise. But Iranaeus is the one who sort of comes up with the idea of ‘original sin.’ And then Augustine kind of makes it this whole platform, and it really becomes the center of the theological program from Augustine onward. And Augustine is also right there in the aftermath of Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. And so his voice is certainly going to be amplified in that milieu when their Christian doctrine is being worked out from the Council of Nicaea onward, after Constantine converts. And so, the amplification of this idea of original sin becomes a basis for all subsequent thinking in Christianity about the nature of sin, about the nature of humanity, about our relationship with God, and about how grace works. And Adam and Eve are front and center.

Shirley

That’s so interesting because you’re right—the way you put that is that we tend to think that what Augustine told us is what Adam and Eve told us. Yeah, the history of interpretation is really important there. Now then, do you think that Eve’s contributions to the human world contributed to the idea of putting humans above the rest of the natural world?

Shawna

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting connection to think about. The dominion language that we get in Genesis 1: let them have dominion over the humans, have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. That’s in Genesis 1. That’s in the priestly creation account. It’s not in the Eden story. So we’re talking about two originally distinct theological frameworks.

But they’re working together. And we’re reading them together in the history of interpretation, so they do end up speaking to each other in our interpretation of Genesis 2 and 3 in the Eden story.

What Eve is doing is kind of claiming the prerogative of divine knowledge. And the serpent tells her this tree will give you the knowledge of the gods, knowing good and bad. And there’s been obviously a lot of ink spilled over what exactly that means—what kind of knowledge is this? So you could define that as the capacity to distinguish good from evil and to make independent moral judgments. I tend to think that’s one of the theological paths that people have taken, looking at it in its ancient context. I tend to think of this as more along the lines of cultural knowledge—things that animals don’t have but that civilized humans do, because I think this story is answering the question, “What does make us different from the animals?,” because the first thing they do when they get this knowledge of the gods is they realize they’re naked. And they put on clothes, and from then on, they’re going to have to turn raw into cooked, and they’re going to have to do all of these kinds of civilized technological things that animals don’t have to do.

So whatever you think that means, whatever you think knowledge of good and bad means, it’s not exactly dominion over nature. I think it’s something more profound. It’s the assertion that humans are capable of wisdom that was previously understood as belonging to God. So that’s, I think, the contribution that Eve makes in this particular story. There’s a connection to the question of human distinctiveness though the naming of the animals in Genesis 2—which is Adam’s act before Eve even exists—already positions the human as the one who categorizes and orders the natural world. Eve’s choice in Genesis 3 kind of completes that trajectory. Humans become beings who not only name the world but also act in it in a fundamentally different way from all other creatures.

And that capacity is what separates us from the animals. It was what makes us, in the story’s own terms like gods, and that’s a major point of connection with Genesis 1, where the idea is that humans are created in God’s image—whatever you think that means. And that gives us dominion over the natural world. So I think both authors are coming at the same thing, but from very different perspectives.

Shirley

Wow, that’s new to me to think about. So are you seeing a distinction between Adam and Eve in this?

Shawna

I think, like Adam names the animals. Adam’s the one who’s going to order creation, but Adam also needs a partner. And none of the animals fit the bill. So Eve is created to be his—and again there’s a question over translation—even if you think she’s created to be his helper, I will point out as other scholars have pointed out before me, that the word helper is most often used to describe God in the Bible, in his capacity to help human beings. So it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s like the hired help. It’s not the same thing. So I do think she’s created to be a sort of a companion partner. I think equal, opposite him, you know, kind of thing is what’s worked into the language of the text itself that people have translated in different ways. So they are doing different things, but they’re intended to be complementary, and ultimately they are humanity in this myth. They represent humanity over the animals.

Shirley 

So, for people who grew up with the King James Bible and thought of Eve as the help meat!, she’s more than meat, huh?!

Shawna

Yes! Or she is exactly “meet,’ you know, depending on how you use that old English word, yep!

Shirley 

Alright, and I expect that there has been an interesting history of interpretation of Eve, then, over the past—what?—2300 years or so. Maybe, could you share a little on how people have used her story to explain or even justify cultural attitudes over the centuries? I know that’s a huge question.

Shawna 

It’s a huge question. I’m actually teaching a course on this right now, and it’s really fun to go through these these primary texts over the last 2,000 years with students so they can see all of the vastly different ways in which the same few pages have been interpreted and the differences that they’ve made. Huge differences that they’ve made in different religious communities, particularly around questions of hierarchy, subordination, and gender roles. I think the trajectory is really striking. Genesis 3 is remarkably silent on the question of blame, right? It says Adam kind of blames God for giving him Eve. Eve blames the serpent for telling her that it’ll make her wise, but having Eve as a partner and becoming wise are kind of key to the whole thing moving forward. So the story doesn’t really dwell on this question of blame, but rather dwells on the question of consequences the history of interpretation. It does something very specific with that silence around blame.

So I’ve already mentioned Ben Sira. Around 180 BCE, he gives us the first sustained engagement that explicitly blames Eve. From a woman, sin had its beginning; because of her, we all die. That’s not in Genesis. But it’s going to come into the history of interpretation in a big way from that point onward. The Second Temple period sees enormous diversity in how different Jewish communities are asking what questions they’re asking about the story, what they’re trying to understand from the story, the principles, morals, lessons that they draw. It’s there’s a dizzying number of different ways in which they go with this.

Shirley 

Before you go on, could I just ask you: everybody may not know what “Second Temple” refers to.

Shawna

Yes, sure. So the first temple, Solomon’s Temple, is destroyed in the year 587 BCE to 586 BCE by the Babylonians. It’s rebuilt when the Persians conquered the Babylonians in 539. The Temple’s rebuilt between 525-515 BCE, something like that. And this is the beginning of the Second Temple period. This is where we see Judaism as we come to know it developing, inspired by earlier Israelite religion, but in specific directions that are really kind of laid out and in conversation with the Hebrew Bible that is also developing.

Jesus is in there, right at the end of that, so Jesus in, let’s say the first half of the first century CE, on the plus side of the timeline, and within the background of Jesus and the New Testament, we have all of these diverse groups, different communities—Jewish communities—that are interpreting the Hebrew Bible within this very new context of Roman imperialism and in a variety of different places around the Mediterranean diaspora that the Jews are living in.

And I’ll mention one of these interpretations because it becomes very important in the history of Christianity, and that is Philo of Alexandria. Philo of Alexandria is a Jewish philosopher in Egypt who reads the entire Hebrew Bible basically as an allegory, as an allegory in very Hellenistic, very Greek terms. That is, Eve is sense perception, and Adam is the rational mind, and this is very Greek. It’s kind of natural, I think, in the West, for us to think in terms of spirit versus flesh, or matter and soul, soul and matter, reason and emotion. We think in those dichotomies. But we can thank the Greeks for thinking in those dichotomies. It really isn’t the way in which the ancient Near East was operating before Hellenism. So Philo is reading this in a very Hellenistic way,

and he reads Eve as sense perception and Adam as rational mind, let us stray through the senses. And the reason that’s important is if you know anything about the subsequent history of interpretation, of the story in Christianity, that’s going to have a lot of influence. It’s a deeply Greek philosophical way of reading the text, and it’s deeply different from even the conversations that other Jewish communities were having before and during the time of Philo.

Paul is going to add another dimension to this, and he’s actually much more focused on Adam in his typology, you know. Adam is bringing us into sin. And Jesus is bringing us out of sin—sort of this Adam-to-Jesus arc that also goes Eve-to-Mary. But Adam and Jesus are the important ones for for Paul, and so Paul talks about this somewhere in Romans—again, I’m not a New Testament scholar—1 Timothy, which is written in the name of Paul, uses Eve to argue against women teaching. Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived, and so we get back to that blame game.

And then we’ve got Augustine in the 4th century, who formalizes original sin, … ties it to sexual transmission.

Eve becomes the gateway for both sin and sexuality as theological problems. And that’s the reading that I think shapes Western Christianity most profoundly.

And then if you fast forward to the 17th century, Milton’s Paradise Lost gives us this dramatic, vivid psychologically complex Eve. And that’s the one that I think most modern people carry around, seduced by Satan, who’s going back to early Christian interpretation—Satan is the serpent, and Eve tempts Adam because she’s so beautiful, and we have the fall of the human race. Milton is rewriting in a big way, and that’s the story that we all tend to know as the Adam and Eve

Story. But it’s Milton’s version, and it comes from this long trajectory of interpretation.

Shirley

This is so interesting to think about—the fact that we’re not reading right out of the book.

Shawna

That’s right! No, it’s really, really hard. Like, when I teach Hebrew Bible, one of the first things I do with the students is, I say, “Tell me about the story of Eden.” And they all like, “Oh, Satan, original sin. You know—Eve’s the seductress.” You know, the whole thing. I’m like, “Okay, let’s open our books and let’s just read what’s actually there. And now how do we get from one to the other, and it’s super interesting to see because I think that’s yeah, that’s the story we all carry around in our heads. Even people who are not religious, even people who have never read the Bible, that’s the popular culture version.

Shirley

Wow, okay. Well thank you. Thank you especially for this background and understanding of Genesis and how we got to where we are. Could you give us a little hint as to what your lecture is going to be about at the conference?

Shawna 

Yeah, so the title is “A Goddess in the Garden?” Rethinking the figure of Eve, and the question mark is a real question mark because I’m making a historical argument, and one of the things that I like to say right up front is as a historian, my job is not to give you a bunch of facts. My job is to make an argument based on the evidence that we have. So I’m going to lay out my evidence and make an argument and really looking at the Eden story against the backdrop of what we now know about Israelite religion. Archaeology has given us remarkable evidence in the last 50 years, and there are several things that strike me as very strange about this particular story.

We have magic trees, we have a talking serpent. I mean, if you pause and think about it, it’s a really bizarre story, but we don’t think of it as a bizarre story because it’s so familiar. And so I’m starting with these weird elements of the story, and what I want to show is that each of these is a very specific kind of potent symbol in the ancient Near Eastern world, where it stands for something that wouldn’t mean anything once that world is gone—or wouldn’t come to mean different things once that world is gone. A talking serpent in the ancient Near East does not mean Satan was a talking serpent in the ancient Near East. It means something very different, and it’s in my title. It probably means “goddess,” not that the serpent is the goddess. I don’t want anybody to be confused about that, but that there are certain symbols of goddesses in the ancient world, like magic trees and wise serpents that would have been the worldview in which the ancient author and his original audience was functioning. And so trying to recover that ancient background—what came before our history of interpretation—is really my question.

Shirley 

That sounds fascinating I have to say. So interesting. Alright. Well then, let me remind our listeners that this conference is coming up soon! It’s called New Insights into the Hebrew Bible, and it’s March 21st and 22nd (2026). So don’t miss it. You’ll want to enroll right away, and if you do, you get to hear Shawna tell us much more about where this myth of Eve came from and why it matters to us today—plus nine other outstanding speakers talking about the book of Genesis.

So please go to https://earlychristiantexts.com/genesis-conference/ to get the registration link and find out more about the conference. One more time, that’s earlychristiantexts.com/genesis-conference. I know you’ll love it. Thank you so much for being with us today, Shawna.

Shawna

My pleasure. Thank you.