Theology Today - Vol 45, No.1 - April 1988 - ARTICLE

34 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

Eve and Pandora Contrasted

"Contrary to prevailing opinion, there is reason to hold that the myths of Eve and Pandora are quite dissimilar in original meaning. Our lack of awareness of this difference has been due to interpreters throughout Western civilization who have mingled these two stories together. "

THE Hebrew myth of Eve, found in Genesis, and the Greek myth of Pandora, found in Hesiod's writings, have had profound impact on Western civilization because they allegedly reveal woman's true nature. Scholarly studies as well as popular treatments have generally presumed that both myths aim at alerting men to feminine evil.¹ Classicist Walter Headlam thought the myths were two versions of the same primeval story of the first woman. Both show that woman is a divine "afterthought" and is, in Hesiod's words, "a curse and a bane."² According to Frederick Teggart, the pattern of both myths is the same: "First, a state of bliss; second, the mischievous activity of the woman; third, a description of evils. Consequently, it might reasonably be inferred that Hesiod had made use of some variant of a narrative that was also utilized in the story of the Garden of Eden."³

Contrary to prevailing opinion, there is reason to hold that the myths of Eve and Pandora are quite dissimilar in original meaning. Our lack of awareness of this difference has been due to interpreters throughout Western civilization who have mingled these two myths together. In what follows, the earliest written expressions of the independent myths will be examined. Then we can trace the way in which Eve has been transformed to resemble Pandora.

William E. Phipps is Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Davis and Elkins College. Research for this essay was assisted by a National Endowment of the Humanities grant. A previous article by Dr. Phipps, "Adam's Rib: Bone of Contention," appeared in THEOLOGY TODAY (Oct., 1976), to which this is a sequel.

¹Cf. Louis Sechan, "Pandore, l'Eve grecque," Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Bude 23 (1929), pp. 3-36; Patricia Marquardt, "Hesiod's Ambiguous View of Women," Classical Philogy 77 (1982), p. 286; Michael Grant, Myths of the Greeks and Romans (New York: World Publishing Co., 1962), p. 124; "Prometheus," The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); Mark Morford and Robert Lenardon, Classical Mythology (New York: Longman, 1985), p. 56.

² 'Prometheus and the Garden of Eden," Classical Quarterly 28 (1934), pp. 63-67.

³ 'The Argument of Hesiod's Works and Days," Journal of History of Ideas 8 (1947), p. 50.

35 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

The name Eve is introduced at the end of the Garden of Eden story to designate the first woman. Due to translation and conceptual difficulties, few readers understand that there is no gender differentiation for much of the story. At the beginning, the divine Potter shapes clay and animates it by blowing breath into its nostrils. "The human" (ha-adam) is created from the earth. The use of the definite article ha indicates when adam is not a personal name. (The New English Bible and the Jerusalem Bible correctly avoid the use of the proper name "Adam" in the creation story.) The human is provided a garden to till as well as to enjoy and is given the freedom to eat fruit from all trees but one. Realizing that solitary life and work is less than ideal, Yahweh forms other animal species for human companionship. However, satisfaction does not arrive until a second divine experiment is completed. Simultaneously the male (ish) and the female (ishshah) are created from adam. Each sex then seeks the missing part of the divided body. Soon the naked male and female rejoin and "become one flesh."

In the subsequent episode, the primeval pair engage in conversation with one another and with others. To assist in identifying the speakers, the husband is once given the proper name Adam (adam without the definite article) and the wife is once called Eve. The serpent initiates the conversation by subtly suggesting that the divine command was a total fruit prohibition. Eve responds by relating-presumably from knowledge obtained when she was part of the collective human-that the prohibition was limited to one tree. The serpent then persuades Eve that divine wisdom rather than human death will result from eating the forbidden fruit. Regarding the off-limits tree, it is stated: "She took of its fruit and ate; and she gave some to her husband who was with her, and be ate." The jointly disobedient couple then have a misplaced shame over their appearance. Both attempt to transfer responsibility to others. Consequences of the misuse of freedom ensue. Yahweh gives Adam a life sentence at hard labor on marginal farmland, and Eve is given pain in childbirth and domination by her husband. After being evicted from Eden, they raise a family.

This re-examination of the adamic myth discloses that its composer did not express the male bias that has been characteristic of most subsequent translators and interpreters. To cite one example, they have usually not conveyed that Adam was with Eve at the scene of the crime. The Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible, and Today's English Version are among those following the Latin Vulgate's error of not stating that Adam was with Eve in the encounter with the serpent. In the Vulgate, Jerome omitted translating from either the Hebrew Bible or the Greek Septuagint the prepositional phrase which establishes Adam's presence. Jerome seems unwilling to accept that the representative male is unprotesting to the serpent. On the other hand, the King James Version, the Jewish Version of 1917, and the New Jerusalem Bible do not overlook translating immah as "with her" in Genesis 3:6.

36 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

Thus, the composer pictures "her husband with her" when the fruit was stolen. Also, the plural verbs in the dialogue with the serpent suggest that Adam was present.

A century ago, Lillie Blake observed: "Adam standing beside her [Eve] interposes no word of objection... Had he been the representative of the divinely appointed bead in married life, he assuredly would have taken upon himself the burden of the discussion with the serpent, but no, he is silent in this crisis of their fate. Having had the command from God himself, he interposes no word of warning or remonstrance, but takes the fruit from the hand of his wife without a protest."⁴ More recently, Jean Higgins has likewise been amused: "There is something comical in the image of the man standing there and never entering into the conversation at all, never intervening to stop the temptation, leaving the woman to do the talking, thinking, deciding, acting, and only at the end reaching out his hand to accept and eat what his wife put into his hands." ⁵ Phyllis Bird makes a more restrained comparison: "The woman in this portrait responds to the object of temptation intellectually and reflectively, employing both practical and esthetic judgment. The man, on the other hand, passively and unquestioningly accepts what the woman offers him."⁶

What the story does not say should also be noted. The composer approves of the pair clinging together in the nude prior to the serpent episode, so the forbidden fruit is not a symbol of sexual temptation. Their shame is from the loss of self-respect after stealing what did not belong to them, not from any lustful embrace. Tikva Frymer-Kensky's perspective on Eve is based on the Genesis text: "Eve is portrayed as the spokesperson for the couple, and during her talk with the serpent she presents theological arguments. She is never portrayed as wanton, or as tempting or tempted sexually, nor does the biblical author single her out for greater blame than her partner."⁷

Interpreters have frequently but erroneously presumed that the Genesis storyteller was describing what ought to be a continual divine penalty to humankind for the sin of Adam and Eve. But myths are a historical and do not attempt to chronicle the past or predict the future; they attempt to explain the present situation. Alienation from Yahweh causes disharmony in earthly associations. Work is no longer a pleasant activity as intended, but a grim struggle with nature. The maternal toil to insure biological survival becomes harsh when a tyrannical husband replaces a companion in marriage. Nothing is said in Genesis regarding this oppressive sexual relationship being perpetuated on humanity. The

⁴ Elizabeth Stanton, ed. The Woman's Bible (New York: European Publishing Co., 1895), p. 26.

⁵ 'The Myth of Eve: The Temptress," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 44 (1976),pp.646-7.

⁶ " Images of Women in the Old Testament," Religion and Sexism, Rosemary R. Ruetber, ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), P. 74.

⁷ "Women," in Harper's Bible Dictionary, Paul Achtemeier, ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 1140.

37 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

Hebrew Bible nowhere refers to a "fall" of Adam and Eve, even though expositors have commonly portrayed them plunging precipitously from innocence into depravity.

The myths of Pandora and Eve are similar in that both attempt to explain why woman was created. Hesiod's poetry, entitled Theogony [507-6161 and Works and Days [47-105], provides the only Greek source pertaining to woman's creation. Hesiod wrote in about 700 B.C., probably a century or more after the recorder of the myth of Eve. Hesiod and the Hebrew writer were probably aware of oral traditions about human origins. Both may have known of stories of gods making humans of clay, a motif in earlier Babylonian and Egyptian texts.⁸ But there is no evidence that the Greeks and Hebrews shared a common oral tradition pertaining to human creation. Actually, the Greeks have a story of the creation of woman, but not of man.

Classics scholars suggest that Hesoid reversed the meaning of the name of an earth goddess called Pandora (all-giving) or Anesidora (one-who-sends-up-gifts). Vase paintings⁹ and literary texts¹⁰ give evidence of Pandora as a mother earth figure who was worshipped by some Greeks. The main English commentary on Works and Days states that Hesiod shows no awareness of the mythology of a divine Pandora Anesidora giver of fertility.¹¹ Apparently, he made up a story of Pandora passively receiving gifts from the gods. While acknowledging a Pandora mythology older than Hesiod, Robert Graves states regarding Hesiod's tale: "Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention."¹² Jane Harrison sees in Hesiod's story evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. As the life-bringing goddess Pandora is eclipsed, the death-bringing human Pandora arises.¹³

Woman, according to Hesiod, was created under the direction of father Zeus as retaliation against Prometheus. That trickster demigod had stolen heavenly fire for earthlings. The outwitted Zeus commissioned members of his pantheon to make "an evil thing in which men will all delight while they embrace their own destruction." Like a potter, crafts-expert Hephaistos shaped a lump of clay into the shape of a luscious maiden; like a goldsmith, he made her a crown. Athena decked out this creation with clothes, jewelry, and flowers. Aphrodite bestowed

⁸ See P. Walcot, Hesiod and the Near East (Cardiff: Wales University Press, 1966), pp. 71-79.

⁹ A. H. Smith, "The Making of Pandora," Journal of Hellenic Studies 11 (I 890), p.283.

¹⁰ Aristophanes, Birds, 972; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 6, 39.

¹¹ T. A. Sinclair, ed., Hesiod: Works and Days (London: Macmillan, 1932), p. 12.

¹² The Greek Myths (New York: George Braziller, 1955), p. 148.

¹³Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (New York: Arno Press, 1975), pp. 283-85.

38 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

charm and seductive powers, while Hermes implanted "a bitch's mind and a thief's temper." The "beautiful evil" (kalon kakon) was named Pandora because a variety of Olympian gods and goddesses had given her traits. This "booby trap" equipped with "lying and tricky talk" was delivered to Epimetheus ("afterthinker"), the uncautious brother of Prometheus ("forethinker"). Before Epimetheus accepted the gift, men lived like gods in a paradisiacal Golden Age "free from evils, harsh labor, and consuming diseases." But when Pandora maliciously opened the lid of a huge jar, all kinds of miseries flew out and infected mortals throughout the earth. Hesiod ends his story: "This was the origin of damnable womankind, a plague with which men must live." Further on in Works and Days, the poet warns of sweet-talking and hip-wiggling women who steal from those that find them fascinating. Hesiod's final judgment: "Any man who trusts a woman, trusts a deceiver" (373-375). He believed that the multitude of Pandora's daughters inherit their mother's loveliness and cunning. Their charm and breeding potentially compel men to associate with them, but their bad character makes domestic life miserable.

Hesiod expressed a hostility toward womankind that was endemic throughout Greek antiquity. G. L. Snider shows in his dissertation on the myth of Pandora that Homer's portraiture of women influenced Hesiod.¹⁴ In the Odyssey, the soul of Agamemnon comments on Clytemnestra who stabbed him to death: "A bad name she gave to womankind, even to the best" (24, 201-202). The infidelity of his wife stimulates a reflection that has become proverbial: "Never trust a woman" (11, 456). Hesiod's story of Pandora became a part of Greek education, and youth thereby formed prejudices against women. Works and Days "was widely known and taught in various parts of Greece and the Aegean and thus exerted an influence on the moral and legal ideas of the centuries following Hesiod."¹⁵

Semonides, a younger contemporary of Hesiod, owed much to generalizations about women by Homer and Hesiod. In some passages, these early poets assume that women are naturally a scourge, because their evil actions come not from choice but from a divinely imposed fate. Satirist Semonides describes types of women in terms of seven different kinds of animals. He evaluates positively only those who are industrious like bees. He lampoons the rest, who are like filthy sows, yapping bitches, stubborn asses, wretched ferrets, vain mares, or tricky monkeys. Semonides concludes: "Zeus designed woman as the greatest of all evils. She is a source of evil, especially to her husband, even if she seems to be a help in some ways. No one manages to spend a whole day in contentment if he has a wife... Yes, this is the greatest plague Zeus has made, and he has bound us to them with a fetter than cannot be broken. Because of

¹⁴ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 75 (1971), p. 221.

¹⁵ Sinclair, p. xxxvi.

39 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

this, some have gone to Hades fighting for a woman."¹⁶ Semonides is here probably thinking of the adulterous Helen of Troy.

Eva Cantarella, in a recent book entitled Pandora's Daughters in English translation, has combined sociological and literary scholarship in an examination of women's status in Greek antiquity. With some exaggeration of the evidence, she maintains that the misogyny articulated by Hesiod permeated the subsequent eras of Greek history. She concludes that Greeks throughout the ancient period "perpetuated a misogyny that excluded the female sex not only from social and political life but also from the world of reason, and consequently from that of love."¹⁷

Can literary fragments be relied on to portray dominant cultural values? If so, the characteristic ancient Greek outlook on women can be found in two quips by comic playwrights. Eubulus, a fourth century Athenian, judging evil women to outnumber good ones overwhelmingly, alludes to Pandora. "The second man to marry should be punished, but not the first [Epimetheus], who had no experience of how awful a wife can be."¹⁸Eva Keuls, in her study of sexual politics in ancient Athens, entitled The Reign of the Phallus, selects this line from the fifth century Pherecrates to illustrate the deep-seated misogyny: "He who bemoans the death of his wife is a fool who doesn't appreciate his good fortune."¹⁹

III

Hellenization's impact on Western Asia came after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century. The Greek theme of women being universally and inherently alluring, but disastrous, infiltrated Jewish thought when Palestine came under Hellenistic influence. In the Hebrew Bible, the best example of what the French would call la femme fatale is found in Ecclesiastes 7:26. In that verse, a philosopher sounds a warning about the wiles of women: "I found something more bitter than death--woman. The love she offers you will catch you like a trap or like a net; and her arms around you will hold you like a chain. A man who pleases God will get away, but she will catch the sinner." In the Israelite society prior to the Hellenistic era, there were proverbs and stories about prostitutes and nagging wives who could precipitate a calamity, but such women were usually denounced in order to heighten the contrast with virtuous women.

The Testament of Reuben, written in the second century before the Christian era, continues the female ensnarement motif: "Do not devote

¹⁶ On Women, frag. 7.

¹⁷ Pandora's Daughters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987), pp. 69, 177.

¹⁸ Fr. 116, 117; cf. Mary Lefkowitz and Mauren Fant, Women's Life in Greece and Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), p. 18.

¹⁹ Fr. 248a; Eva Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 130.

40 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

your attention to the beauty of women... For women are evil, my children,... they scheme treacherously how they might entice man to themselves by means of their looks... By a look they implant their poison, and finally they take them captive" (4:1; 5:1, 3).

The Pandora motif was transferred to the Eve myth in Jewish writing after the era of the Hebrew Bible and before the Christian era. Philo, who absorbed the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria, projects onto the Hebrew Bible alien Greek ideas. His references to the poems of Hesiod show that he must have been acquainted with the Pandora myth. In his commentary on Genesis, woman is singled out as "the beginning of evil." Eve and her daughters are described in this disparaging way: "The woman, being imperfect and depraved by nature, made the beginning of sinning and prevaricating; but the man, being the more excellent and perfect creature, was the first to set the example of blushing and of being ashamed, and indeed of every good feeling and action."²⁰

The Greek text of "The Life of Adam and Eve," probably written in the first century of the Christian era, retells the Eden story in order to stress Eve's culpability. In that Jewish midrash, published now in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Eve explains to her children what she did after eating the forbidden fruit:

I cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Adam, Adam, where are you? Rise, come to me and I will show you a great mystery... When he came, I opened my mouth and the devil was speaking, and I began to admonish him, saying, "Come, my lord Adam, listen to me and eat the fruit of the tree of which God told us not to eat from, and you shall be as God." Your father answered and said, "I fear lest God be angry with me." And I said to him, "Do not fear; for as soon as you eat, you shall know good and evil." Then I quickly persuaded him. He ate, and his eyes were opened, and he also realized his nakedness. And he said to me, "O evil woman! Why have you wrought destruction among us? You have estranged me from the glory of God" (chap. 21).

The midrash also says that Eve denounced a beast for attacking her son Seth and for not being in subjection to those made in the image of God. The beast replied that Eve's sin caused the animals to revolt. After she greedily ate the forbidden fruit, the nature of beasts was transformed (chap. 11).

Rabbinical Judaism accepted the Pseudepigrapha's degrading view of Eve. To justify punishment directed toward women, the Palestinian Talmud offers this invidious comparison: "Adam was the light of the world... and Eve was the cause of his death."²¹

Eve is not mentioned in the Gospels, but Jesus referred to the Eden creation story. When questioned about his interpretation of the biblical doctrine of marriage, he stated that the ideal is a prolonged cleaving of two in one flesh and that the Torah permitted divorce because of "hard-heartedness" (Mark 10:2-9). Jesus is not recorded as speaking of matters related to an alleged fall in Genesis 3, and there is no basis in the

²⁰ Questions and Answers on Genesis 1, 43 and 45.

²¹ Shabbath, 2, 5b, 34.

41 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

Gospels for blaming the daughters of Eve for evil in the world. Indeed, there is no instance in the four Gospels of Jesus warning his disciples about the wiles of women. Had he been asked about the reference to husband domination in Genesis 3:16, would Jesus not have responded along the lines of his other interpretation of marital relations in the Torah? He would probably have given priority to the ideal of equal partnership expressed earlier in the Genesis creation stories and would have attributed husband domination to a disruption of what God desired.

In the authentic letters of the apostle Paul, the origin of sin is not associated with one gender. "Sin came into the world through one human (Greek, anthropos)," according to Romans 5:12. The apostle uses the name "Adam" to designate the representative head of sinful humanity, but not to distinguish the first male human from the first female.

A letter to Timothy, attributed to Paul but probably written some decades after his death, provides the Christian Bible's first and only invidious blaming of Eve more than her mate. It starkly asserts: "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor" (I Tim. 2:13-14). The consensus of current scholarly interpretation of this passage is well summarized by Rosemary Ruether: "The teachings of I Timothy about women keeping silence appear, not as the uniform position of the New Testament church, but as a second generation reaction against widespread participation of women in leadership, teaching, and ministering in first-generation Christianity."²² The pseudepigraphal letter then declares--quite contrary to Paul's doctrine-that the work of bearing children was necessary for a woman's salvation. The eisegesis of the Genesis text and perversion of Paul's teaching in I Timothy became the basis for subsequent churchmen to declare that women are more susceptible to sin than men and that therefore only the morally stronger male can be ordained. To extend sacred offices to the gender last in the order of creation but first in the order of sin would be blasphemous.

As a survey can display, a continual theme in Christianity from the second century onward has been that women are more responsible than men for the debilitating evil that permeates life. Christian writers often borrowed a scurrilous Jewish tale which attributes the birth of Cain to Eve's seduction by the serpent in Eden.²³ In the influential apocryphal

²² Elizabeth Langland and Walter Grove, eds., A Feminist Perspective in the Academy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), P. 56; cf. Wayne Meeks, "The Image of the Androgyne," History of Religions 13 (1974), p. 205.

²³ Fourth Maccabees 18:8; Genesis Rabbah, 18; Sayings of Rabbi Eliezer, 21.

42 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

Protevangelium of James, Joseph, on learning of Mary's pregnancy, initially responds in this manner: "Has the story of Adam been repeated in me? For as Adam was absent in the hour of his prayer and the serpent came and found Eve alone and deceived and defiled her, so also has it happened to me" (13,1). Apologist Justin imagined that Eve's mind was impregnated by the seminal ideas of Satan, but a second Eve came to the rescue. "Eve, an undefiled virgin, conceived the word of the serpent and brought forth disobedience and death. But the virgin Mary... gave birth to him...by whom God destroys the serpent,"²⁴

Bishop Irenaeus, the most formidable defender of Christianity in the second century, developed the Eve-Mary typology in which sexual abstinence becomes prominent as a means of salvation. "Eve became disobedient and was made the cause of death both to herself and to the entire race."²⁵ Virginal Mary and her virginal son restore the damage begun by Eve.

Dora and Erwin Panofsky, in their valuable study of the Pandora motif in Western literature and art, show that Christian leaders had more interest in Pandora than pagan Roman writers. "The Fathers of the church are more important for the transmission-and transformation-of the myth of Pandora than the secular writers; in an attempt to corroborate the doctrine of original sin by a classical parallel, yet to oppose Christian truth to pagan fable, they likened her to Eve."²⁶

Tertullian, the first leader of Latin orthodoxy, compared the biblical and Greek stories of the first woman. Eve only differs from Pandora, he notes, in that she is "encircled with leaves about the middle rather than with flowers about the temple." ²⁷ His infamous denunciation of women displays his mixture of the two myths:

Do you not know that each of you is an Eve? God's sentence on your gender lives even in our times, and so it is necessary that the guilt must also continue. You are the one who opened the devil's door; you unseated the forbidden tree; you first betrayed the divine law; you are the one who enticed him whom the devil was too weak to attack. How easily you destroyed man, the image of God! Because of the death which you brought upon us, even the Son of God had to die.²⁸

Opening the devil's door and unseating the forbidden tree are similar images to Pandora's raising the lid of a jar containing the earth's evils. Tertullian also carried into Western Christianity the slander against Eve that Justin transmitted from Jewish lore: "Let no one say that Eve conceived nothing in her womb at the devil's word. The devil's word was the seed for her so that afterward she should give birth as an outcast and bring forth in sorrow. In fact, she gave birth to a devil who murdered his

²⁴ Dialogue with Trypho, 100, 5.

²⁵ Against Heresies, 3, 22 4.

²⁶ Pandora's Box (New York: Pantheon, 1962), p. 11.

²⁷ The Chaplet, 7.

²⁸ On the Apparel of Women, 1, 1.

43 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

brother."²⁹ In the Judeo-Christian tradition, mother Eve is more identified with wicked Cain than with righteous Abel.

Marina Warner finds in men who share Tertullian's perspective an unwitting tribute to those they denounce. She writes: "The fury unleashed against Eve and all her kind is almost flattering, so exaggerated is the picture of women's fatal and all-powerful charms and men's incapacity to resist."³⁰

John Chrysostom ("the golden mouth"), an outstanding fourth century leader in Constantinople, called Eve "an ensnarer" who triggered the fall of all humanity.³¹ Hesiod would agree with Chrysostom's description of Eve's daughters: "How often do we, from beholding a woman, suffer a thousand evils... The beauty of women is the greatest snare... Let us then discern the snares, and walk far off from them! Let us discern the precipices, and not even approach them!"³² In a sermon on I Timothy, Chrysostom declared: "Women taught once and ruined all... What happened to the first woman occasioned the subjection of the whole sex."³³

Chrysostom claimed that Eve's wiley nature was well displayed in Bathsheba. When his friend Theodore became engaged to marry, Chrysostrom wrote: "If you consider what is contained in beautiful eyes, a straight nose, a mouth, and cheeks, you will agree that a well-shaped body is merely a whitewashed tomb; the parts within are full of filth...The blessed David also had a fall like that which has now happened to you."³⁴ Chrysostorn's inversion of the biblical story of David's seduction of Bathsheba became a staple of medieval sermons.³⁵

Gregory Nazianzen, another fourth century leader of Greek Christianity, interprets Eve as the devil's advocate: "Instead of an assistant, she became an enemy... beguiling the man by means of pleasure."³⁶

Augustine, Western Christendom's most influential theologian, explained how the New Testament could state that both Adam and Eve sinned even though only Eve was deceived. "The woman accepted as true what the serpent told her, but the man could not bear to be severed from his only companion, even though this involved a partnership in sin."³⁷ Adam would have preferred not to eat the forbidden fruit, but he gallantly ate "with his eyes open" because he did not wish to vex the only woman around. In the biblical story of the first woman, Augustine finds this moral for men: "Whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman."³⁸ Satan did not

²⁹On the Flesh of Christ, 17.

³⁰ Alone of All Her Sex (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 58.

³¹ Sermons on First Corinthians, 26, 3.

³² Sermons on the Statues, 15, 9.

³³ Sermons on Timothy, 9.

³⁴ Letters to the Fallen Theodore, 1, 14.

³⁵ Cf. Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 60, 71.

³⁶ Oration on the Death of His Father, 8.

³⁷City of God, 14, 11.

³⁸ Letters, 243, 10.

44 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

remove Job's wife when tormenting Job, Augustine believed, because the devil learned from his success with Eve that a woman was an able assistant.³⁹ Augustine treated the story of Eve as allegory as well as history, noting that "our flesh is an Eve within us."⁴⁰

The misogyny of the church fathers encouraged even more exaggerated contempt for women in the Middle Ages. In Ireland, this testimony was treasured: "I am Eve, the wife of noble Adam;... it was I who robbed my children of heaven; it is I by right who should have been crucified... There would be no hell, there would be no grief, there would be no terror but for me."⁴¹ "Mystere d'Adam," one of the earliest morality plays, depicts Eve as lacking a moral conscience. Adam is unable to convince her that the devil is treacherous. Although vexed at his wife's eating the forbidden fruit, her persistent nagging causes him to capitulate to her offer.⁴²

In the fourteenth century, the faculty of the University of Bologna decreed that the academic community should avoid female contacts, because "woman is the fountain of sin, the weapon of the devil, the cause of man's banishment from Paradise."⁴³ At that same time, the priest in The Canterbury Tale thought:

Woman's counsel brought us first to woe,
And made Adam from Paradise to go (15263-4).

Chaucer's Wife of Bath recalls clerical libel on her sex and speculates on what would have happened if scribes were not males:

If women had but written stories;
As have these clerks within their oratories,
They would have written of men more wickedness
Than all the race of Adam could redress (6275-78).

The most vigorous attack on women by the church was launched by two theological professors, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII appointed them as inquisitors for the purpose of stamping out alleged witches. In their manual for detecting and punishing them, they direct readers to the primal pattern for women: "The Scriptures have much that is evil to say about women, and this because of the first temptress, Eve, and her imitators... Eve seduced Adam ...therefore she is more bitter than death." Although Kramer and Sprenger do not explicitly refer to Hesiod's curse, they describe Pandora's nature: "A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep." These witchhunters discovered in a sermon of Chrysostorn this eloquent portrait of Pandora, alias Eve:

³⁹Augustine, On the Creed, 10.

⁴⁰ On the Psalms, 49, 6.

⁴¹ David Greene and Frank O'Conner, eds., A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry, 600-1200 (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 158.

⁴² Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (New York: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 125-26.

⁴³ Quoted in August Bebel, Women Against Socialism (New York: Labor News Press, 1904), p. 205.

45 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

"What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors!"⁴⁴ Chrysostom had followed the Hesiodic tradition in alleging a gap between a woman's attractive appearance and her horrible nature.

In the medieval period, a witch-angel polarity emerged in attitudes toward women. The sexually active were often associated with the underworld devil, while those with unruptured hymens were adored on a par with heavenly angels. Virgins had virtue because, as the roots of these words indicate, they had male (Latin, vir) restraint. "Ava" was Gabriel's greeting to Mary, according to Jerome, because the Nazareth virgin reversed the bad name of "Eva," the sexual siren of Eden. The exalted "Queen of Heaven" of the cult of Mary set in bolder relief " witches" who, by means of satanic voluptuousness, enchained men for consignment to hell.

The Hammer Against Witches, the title of Kramer's and Sprenger's work of quintessential misogyny, "was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority," wherever witchcraft trials were held.⁴⁵The book provided the rationalization for torturing and executing many thousands of women.⁴⁶ Its popularity over the centuries is attested by the fact that it has gone through dozens of editions since it was first published in 1486. Even though it is as bigoted as Hitler's Mein Kampf, Montague Summers, a prominent witchcraft researcher and a twentieth century Catholic priest, judges it as "among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books in the world."⁴⁷ The fifteenth century Catholic witchmania infected Protestantism in the subsequent two centuries. Trevor Davies, in a well-documented study, has demonstrated that "the Protestant Reformers were even more zealous witch-bunters than the Roman Catholics themselves."⁴⁸

Were one limited to Renaissance art for understanding the Eden story, one might presume that Eve was created in the image of the primeval serpent. Bearing the torso of a human female, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel serpent is entwined about the forbidden tree while handing fruit to Eve. Other artists of that period followed Michelangelo's lead and portrayed Eve as similar in appearance to the evil serpent, who could stand erect. A German Protestant, Hans Baldung Grien, painted a wily eye and grinning Eve playing with the serpent's phallic-like tail. Jean Cousin's "Eva Prima Pandora" makes explicit the mythological confusion that was common in the sixteenth century. He

⁴⁴The Malleus Maleficarum (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), pp. 43-47; Chrysostorn, In Matthaeum Homilia 33, J. P. Migne, ed. Patrologia Graecae (Paris, 1862), vol. 56, col. 803.

⁴⁵ Kramer, p. viii.

⁴⁶ R. Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch-Beliefs (New York: Ayer Co., 1972), p.4.

⁴⁷ Kramer, p. viii.

⁴⁸ Davies, p. 5.

46 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

paints a lovely, nearly nude body with a snake coiled around her left arm. Her right hand, ominously resting on a skull, holds a sprig from the forbidden tree. Behind Eve/Pandora is an open vase from which vapors are escaping.

Erasmus converted Pandora's storage jar (pithos) into a box (pyxis) by confusing a detail from the Greek story with an episode in Roman literature when retelling the story of the prototypical woman. A comment from Bishop Jean Oliver's sixteenth century book entitled Pandora illustrated the way in which Erasmus' mistranslation became accepted in most modern European languages. "Eve in Scripture opened the forbidden fruit by her bite, by which death invaded the world. So did Pandora open the box in defiance of a divine injunction, whereby all the evils and infinite calamities broke loose and overwhelmed the hapless mortals with countless infirmities."⁴⁹

John Milton blended his thorough knowledge of classical mythology with Christian tradition in extolling the original human creation. "A consummat and most adorned Pandora was bestow'd upon Adam," he writes.⁵⁰ The Puritan poet imagines the Greek and Hebrew primal women as alike, except that Eve is "more lovely than Pandora, whom the Gods endowed with all their gifts." She "ensnar'd mankind with her fair looks, to be aveng'd on him who had stole Jove's authentic fire."⁵¹ In Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton develops Augustine's heroic Adam interpretation. At the time of the encounter with the serpentine incarnation of Satan, Eve is laboring in Eden at a place separated from Adam. He had urged her to stay under his protection by his side, but she stubbornly wanted to work independently. On learning that credulous Eve has succumbed to the flattering tempter and has become a surrogate serpent, Adam is horrified. He then indulges in eating the forbidden fruit against his better judgment, because he is willing to die bound to his spouse. The moral superiority of self-sacrificial Adam stands out in bold relief against the deadly delight of Eve.

The Eve/Pandora composite is also embedded in Western secular literature, Anatole France remarked that the location of hell was unknown until Tertullian discovered its gate "between the legs of women."⁵²In a bestseller, Philip Wylie concludes his diatribe against the power of American women by comparing them to Pandora and "the mother of Cain."⁵³ English writer Geoffrey Ashe calls Eve a "troublemaker" who "appears in Genesis as a Hebrew Pandora, the villainess in a story about the origin of human misfortune."⁵⁴Nikos Kazantzakis' most famous character views women as did his Greek literary ancestor.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Panofsky, Pandora's Box, p. 155.

⁵⁰ The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2, 3.

⁵¹ Paradise Lost, 4:714-15, 717-19.

⁵² Quoted in Theodore Reik, Myth and Guilt (New York: Braziller, 1970), p. 114.

⁵³ Generation of Vipers (New York: Pocket Books, 1959), p. 205.

⁵⁴ The Virgin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 16-17.

47 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

Even as Hesiod called Pandora "a booby-trap," so Zorba warns: "No matter where you touch a woman, you touch the devil's horns. Beware of her, my boy! She also stole the apples in the garden of Eden; she shoved them down her bodice, and now she goes out and about, strutting all over the place. A plague on her! Eat any of those apples and you're lost; don't eat any and you'll still be lost!"⁵⁵

Eve has been so closely associated with sin that one might think that her name is the etymological root of evil. Mary Daly, for example, contends that over the millennia Eve has been continually viewed as the universal woman and as the incarnation of evil. She entitles a chapter in one her books, "Exorcising Evil from Eve."⁵⁶ John Phillips has recently analyzed the Eve motif in the works of artists, theologians, and psychologists across the ages. He believes that the story of Eve is "at the heart of the concept of woman in Western civilization." In his concluding summary, Phillips states: "She becomes through her weaker nature the instrument of evil."⁵⁷

Many interpreters, including Daly and Phillips, have unfairly transferred some of Hesiod's misogyny to a basic Judeo-Christian story. Eve has been persistently but wrongly thought of in Western culture as the lovely but treacherous specimen of femininity who unleashed wickedness. By twisting the Genesis text, translators and interpreters have declared that Adam's uppity wife caused the downfall of her noble spouse and that every woman reflects the image of her primeval counterpart. For instance, Jerome, one of the most famous of all translators and interpreters, counseled, "Always bear in mind that it was a woman who expelled the tiller of Paradise from his heritage."⁵⁸

Some churchmen continue to ridicule and subordinate women by repeating to their impressionable flock a myth of feminine evil that is alleged to have biblical authority. For example, a Catholic priest, Franz Arnold, declares that Eve symbolizes "all the failings of humanity."⁵⁹ Thousands of delegates at the 1984 Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution presented by Carl Henry, the former editor of Christianity Today, which states in effect that women are cursed by Eve. Baptists agreed that women should be excluded from ordination because "the woman was first in the Edenic fall."⁶⁰ The largest Protestant denomination in the United States provides the most striking example of the prevailing but perverse caricature of Eve in Genesis. In his book on the theology of sexuality, Paul Jewett of Fuller Theological Seminary writes: "As in ancient Greek mythology, Pandora opened the

55 Zorba the Greek (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), p. 131.

⁵⁶ Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).

⁵⁷Eve: the History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. xiii, 170.

⁵⁸ Letters, 52, 5.

⁵⁹ Franz Arnold, Woman and Man (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), p. 21.

⁶⁰ The Christian Century, July 18-25, 1984, and November 7, 1984.

48 - Eve and Pandora Contrasted

fateful box, so in Christian thought it was Eve, the first woman, who ruined mankind."⁶¹

Biblical scholar Bruce Vawter, however, rightly observes: "Genesis does not share in the motif common in ancient mythologies according to which a woman was the cause of the miseries of a disordered world ('Pandora's Box' is a familiar example)."⁶² The ancient story-teller seems to regard Adam's attempt to hide behind his wife as ludicrous buck passing. Regarding this perennially popular rationalization, some wag has quipped that Adam took it like a man and blamed his wife! He attempted to excuse his own bad choice by complaining to God about having to eat what his wife served him. A century ago, Lillie Blake commented on Genesis 3:12: "'The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat,' he whines-trying to shield himself at his wife's expense! Again we are amazed that upon such a story men have built up a theory of their superiority!"⁶³

Exonerating one gender at the expense of the other is a pernicious scapegoating procedure that has been going on all too long. Corrective exegesis in our time, done mainly by feminist scholars, will bring an end to this denigration. Male prejudice toward women is difficult to eradicate, but a fresh look at the myth of Eve provides no reinforcement for keeping it alive.

⁶¹ Man as Male and Female (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p. 156.

⁶² On Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 87.

⁶³ The Women's Bible, p. 27.