[Re-Post] Eve Was Framed

A brief theological detour to discuss the Original Misinterpretation

Eve took the fruit, Eve bit the fruit

Juice ran down her chin

Babies will put things in their mouths

She’d never heard of sin

- “Lumina,” Joan Osborne

When I was twelve years old, Joan Osborne dropped the absolute banger of a single “One of Us.” It was all over the radio during my seventh grade year, and I was obsessed. With throaty, bluesy vocals, Joan posed questions about what we would do if God was just a regular person, living amongst us in everyday life, riding the bus and being a messy human. It was the first time in my short, Christian life that I’d heard anyone ask theological hypotheticals, and it blew my adolescent mind wide open.

My parents had recently gotten me a Columbia House subscription, and I immediately added Joan’s album “Relish” to my monthly order. When it came in, I gushed to my girlfriends about this amazing new artist I was listening to and how much I was enjoying her music. The other twelve year olds in my life were absolutely scandalized that I would listen to a “secular” artist who had “such bad things” to say about God in the one single they had heard everywhere in recent weeks. They told me they would pray for my soul, that I would learn to “respect God” again.

My contrarian adolescent self just smiled and said, “If you think that’s bad, you should hear what she says about Eve.”

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I hadn’t expected to write about Eve so soon on here, but after last week’s post, I just can't stop thinking about her and how wrong the Church has gotten her story. 

Let’s start with the story we know, the one we were taught in Sunday School: In the beginning, God created all things, yada yada, until He got to the Garden of Eden. There, He created Adam, the first human, out of dirt. And out of Adam’s body, he created Eve, the first woman. And everything was wonderful and perfect, as long as the humans obeyed the order to not eat the fruit of this one tree. Which they didn’t, until one day, a snake tempted Eve and convinced her to eat the fruit. Then Eve—the evil, sinful woman—made Adam eat the fruit, too. And that was that. Perfection in the garden was ruined. The “original sin” had been committed. Humans were kicked out of the garden to be punished eternally. And women would be punished most of all with the pains of childbirth, as a reminder of Eve’s role in the world’s first sin.

Yikes. This story is a rough one.

Eve’s story has been used to justify a lot of sexist, patriarchal oppression. From the Middle Ages onward, and especially in modern conservative Christian churches, women are treated differently, less than, or as in need of more behavior policing, and often Eve’s story is used as the theological basis. Things like purity culture and strict dress codes for girls and women can trace their roots back to a belief that women are inherently more sinful than men. And in many Christian spaces, monthly menstrual cycles receive little to no sympathy or care, because that’s “women’s curse” based on the original sin.

Dear reader, I cannot stress this enough, we’ve gotten the meaning of Eve’s story completely wrong.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all of my theological study, it’s that the most important question when reading scripture isn’t “How should we read this?,” but rather “How would they have read this?,” meaning the original audience when the text was written. The book of Genesis was written sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE for a primarily Jewish audience living in a pagan Roman world. Its primary purpose was to tell the history of the Jewish people.

But here’s the important thing to remember: Genesis is not a unique book. During this era of antiquity, many cultures and peoples were writing down their origin stories. Many of them, we now call “myths,” such as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the stories of Roman gods and goddesses. The story of Adam and Eve exists in a separate category not because it’s fundamentally different than those other stories, but because it ended up in a different kind of book and has lasted the test of time in popularity.

According to Dr. Susan Niditch, writing in the Women’s Bible Commentary (a must-have book for game-changing interpretations of the Christian Bible), Eve’s story exists in a pantheon of ancient literature creation myths in which the woman is the protagonist of the story, and is integral in ordering the world, creating society and culture. She is the protagonist of the story, not her husband. She is the one with agency, who makes a risky choice, who drives the story forward. She is the character in this story with depth and curiosity. And as a result, she is the one who introduces wisdom to humanity.

Let us remember, it is not the Tree of Good and Evil from which she eats, as many people believe. Eve takes fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Her actions have consequences, yes, but they part the veil of knowledge for humanity. They allow humans to see and understand as God does. They are stripped of delusion, wide-awake, and fully realized. All thanks to the bold actions of the first woman of Creation.

What changes if Eve isn’t the villain of the story, but the hero?

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Sometimes, I grieve over how different life could be if we read scripture the way the original audience had read it, rather than projecting our modern assumptions on top of it and eventually losing the plot. I think Eve’s story grieves me most of all, second only perhaps to Mary Magdalene’s. They’re alike in many ways: Two women who stepped outside the box, changed the spiritual game, only to be vilified for millenia, to have their names slandered and their stories used as justification for oppression of their daughters and granddaughters. Stories we’ve gotten wrong for so long.

Maybe the “original sin” was how we mis-told the story all along.

Eve had to ask, Eve had to ask

What is wrong with this

Here is the place, now is the time

Let’s invent the kiss

Next week, we’ll get back to our deep-dive series on the theology of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. And stay tuned for the first Meeting Magdalene podcast later this month! Some of these features will be for paid subscribers only. We hope you’'ll consider supporting us financially to continue receiving all our content!