Eve


Eve is a figure from the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. According to the origin story of the Abrahamic religions, she was the first woman to be created by God. Eve is known also as Adam's wife.
Her name means "living one" or "source of life". The name has been compared to that of the Hurrian goddess Ḫepat, who was worshipped in Jerusalem during the Late Bronze Age. It has been suggested that the Hebrew name Eve bears resemblance to an Aramaic word for "snake". The origin for this etymological hypothesis is the rabbinic pun present in Genesis Rabbah 20:11, utilizing the similarity between Heb. Ḥawwāh and Aram. ḥiwyāʾ. Notwithstanding its rabbinic ideological usage, scholars like Julius Wellhausen and Theodor Nöldeke argued for its etymological relevance.

Etymology

"Eve" in Hebrew is "Ḥawwāh" and is most commonly believed to mean "living one" or "source of life" from the root "ḥāyâ", "to live", from the Semitic root ḥyw.
Hawwāh has been compared to the Hurrian goddess Ḫepat, who was shown in the Amarna letters to be worshipped in Jerusalem during the Late Bronze Age. It has been suggested that the name Ḫepat may derive from Kubau, a woman who was the first ruler of the Third Dynasty of Kish.
It has been suggested that the Hebrew name Eve also bears resemblance to an Aramaic word for "snake". The origin for this etymological hypothesis is the rabbinic pun present in Genesis Rabbah 20:11, utilizing the similarity between Heb. Ḥawwāh and Aram. ḥiwyāʾ. Notwithstanding its rabbinic ideological usage, scholars like Julius Wellhausen and Theodor Nöldeke argued for its etymological relevance.
Gerda Lerner postulates that the story of Eve's creation from Adam's rib may have originated in the Mesopotamian myth of Enki and Ninhursag. In this myth, Enki eats poisonous plants that give him diseases. His consort/sister, Ninhursag, then creates several deities to cure each of these ailments. One of them, Ninti, is destined to heal Enki's rib. Ninti's name means both "the lady of the rib" and "the lady of life". This association of rib and life is similar to that found in Eve, whose name is linked to life and who was born of a rib.

In Genesis

Creation Story

The opening two chapters of Genesis are regarded as a composite of two stories drawn from different sources expressing distinct views about the nature of God and creation. The first builds towards the creation by God of humankind, Hebrew adam, both male and female, although not identifying or naming individual people.
The second, starting around Gen.2:4, is about the fashioning by the God of two individual people: a man, adam and a helper: "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him." The woman is created to be "a help meet" ezer ke-negdo. Ke-negdo means "alongside, opposite, a counterpart to him", and ezer, help is a description of active intervention on behalf of the other person. The woman is called ishah, woman, with an explanation that this is because she was taken from ish, meaning "man". Most contemporary opinions hold that the two words are not connected. Later, after the story of the Garden of Eden is complete, she will be given a name, Ḥawwāh. This means "living" in Hebrew, from a root that can also mean "snake". A long-standing exegetical tradition holds that the use of a rib from man's side emphasizes that both man and woman have equal dignity, for woman was created from the same material as man, shaped and given life by the same processes. In fact, the word traditionally translated "rib" in English can also mean side, chamber, or beam. Rib is a pun in Sumerian, as the word "ti" means both "rib" and "life".
According to the second chapter of Genesis, Eve was created by God taking a rib of Adam and creating her out of that, to be Adam's companion, which has lead many some people to believe that men have one less rib than women. Adam is charged with guarding and keeping the garden before her creation; she is not present when God commands Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit – although it is clear that she was aware of the command. She decides to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil after she hears the serpent's argument that it would not kill her but bring her benefits. She shares the fruit with Adam, and before they could eat of the tree of life, which would bestow eternal life to the one who eats thereof, they are expelled from the Garden of Eden, with Eve herself suffering imprecations, with her being subjected to additional agony during childbirth, as well as her subjecting to her husband Adam.
Christian churches differ on how they view both Adam and Eve's disobedience to God, and to the consequences that those actions had on the rest of humanity. Christian and Jewish teachings sometimes hold Adam and Eve to different levels of responsibility for the "fall". God created Eve from ’aḥat miṣṣal‘otaiv, traditionally translated as "one of his ribs". The term can mean curve, limp, adversity and side. The traditional reading has been questioned recently by feminist theologians who suggest it should instead be rendered as "side", supporting the idea that woman is man's equal and not his subordinate. Such a reading shares elements in common with Aristophanes' story of the origin of love and the separation of the sexes in Plato's Symposium. A recent suggestion, based upon observations that men and women have the same number of ribs, speculates that the bone was the baculum, a small structure found in the penis of many mammals, but not in humans.

Expulsion from Eden

Eve is found in the Genesis 3 expulsion from Eden narrative which is characterized as a parable or "wisdom tale" in the wisdom tradition. This narrative portion is attributed to Yahwist by the documentary hypothesis due to the use of YHWH.
In the narrative of humanity’s expulsion from Eden, a dialogue occurs between the woman and a serpent possessing legs. This serpent is described in 2:19 as one of the animals formed by Yahweh among the beasts of the field. The woman is willing to talk to the serpent and respond to the creature's cynicism by repeating Yahweh's prohibition from 2:17. The serpent directly disputes Yahweh's command. The woman eats from the fruit of the forbidden tree and also gives to the man who is with her and he eats.. Yahweh questions Adam, who blames the woman. Yahweh then challenges the woman to explain herself, who blames the serpent, who is cursed to crawl on its belly, so losing its limbs.
Divine pronouncement of three judgments are then laid against all culprits. A judgement oracle and the nature of the crime is first laid upon the serpent, then the woman, and finally Adam. After the serpent is cursed by Yahweh, the woman receives a penalty that impacts two primary roles: childbearing and her subservient relationship to her husband, though the woman's desire in Genesis 3:16 is written in Septuagint as 'αποστροφή' which means 'turning away from', 'disgust', or 'repugnance', and this shows that man might be metaphorically likened to sin, considering that the terms 'turn away' and 'rule' are used in the verse. The reaction of Adam, the naming of Eve, and Yahweh making skin garments are described in a concise narrative. The garden account ends with an Elohim conversation, determining the couple's expulsion, and the execution of that deliberation.

Mother of humanity

Eve is sentenced to a life of sorrow and travail in childbirth, and to be under the power of her husband. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, the first a tiller of the ground, the second a keeper of sheep. In Genesis 4:1 she affirms that her son Cain was "gotten from the ", or "with the help of the ". H. E. Ryle notes that there is some obscurity about Eve's four words here.
Cain murdered Abel. After this, Eve gave birth to a third son, Seth, from whom Noah is descended. According to Genesis, Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old: "a son in his likeness and like his image". Genesis 5:4 affirms that Adam fathered other sons and daughters after Cain, Abel, and Seth.

In other works

Certain concepts such as the serpent being identified as Satan, Eve's sin being sexual temptation, or Adam's first wife being Lilith, come from literary works found in various Jewish apocrypha, but not found anywhere in the Book of Genesis or the Torah itself. She is remembered in De Mulieribus Claris, a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, composed in 136162. It is notable as the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women in Western literature.
Writings dealing with these subjects are extant literature in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian and Arabic, going back to Jewish thought of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. These influential concepts were then adopted into Christian theology, but not into modern Judaism. This marked a radical split between the two religions. Some of the oldest Jewish portions of apocrypha are called Primary Adam Literature where some works became Christianized. Examples of Christianized works is The Book of Adam and Eve, known as the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, translated from the Ethiopian Ge'ez by Solomon Caesar Malan and an original Syriac work entitled Cave of Treasures which has close affinities to the Conflict as noted by August Dillmann.
  • In the Jewish book The Alphabet of Ben-Sira, Eve is Adam's "second wife", where Lilith is his first. In this alternate version, which entered Europe from the East in the 6th century, it suggests that Lilith was created at the same time, from the same earth, as Adam's equal, similar to the Babylonian Lilitu, Sumerian Ninlil. Lilith refuses to sleep with or serve under Adam. When Adam tried to force her into the "inferior" position, she flew away from Eden into the air where she copulated with demons, conceiving hundreds more each day. God sent three angels after her, who threatened to kill her brood if she refused to return to Adam. She refuses, leaving God to make a second wife for Adam, except this time from his rib.
  • The Life of Adam and Eve, and its Greek version Apocalypse of Moses, is a group of Jewish pseudepigraphical writings that recount the lives of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden to their deaths.
  • The deuterocanonical Book of Tobit affirms that Eve was given to Adam as a helper.