wlotus | Biblical Ponderings

To the woman [God] said, “...Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”
~Genesis 3:16b, NKJV

In the later years of my identification as an evangelical Christian, I understood this account of God's word to Eve after Adam and she sinned to be a warning: God was warning Eve that because they were no longer sinless, men would oppress women, rather than women and men living and ruling the earth (not each other) as complete equals as Eve and Adam had done up to that point (Genesis 1:27-30). But it was only this afternoon that I realized God made no mention to Adam of a backlash against men because of the way they had oppressed women. It couldn't be because God (as the writer of this account knew God) did not know; according to the Bible, God knows everything. So was that part of God's word left out by the writers (or later editors), who were products of their misogynistic culture? Or, perhaps, did God not say anything to Adam about the inevitable backlash, because he knew Adam's sinful state would not allow him to hear and understand the danger of giving in to that sinful desire to rule over women?

Discuss.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Personally I think it's a racket; men wrote it, and wrote it thus in order to provide divine justification for the oppression of women. I highly doubt that God said any such thing at all. But then, I'm a godless heathen with all manner of unapproved religious notions.

Do you know the Gnostic version of Scriptures? The idea that the God Yahweh of Genesis is actually the Demiurge, a false God who created the earth and humankind because he wanted to rule over something? It goes on that Satan was actually sent by the true Creator (or came of his own volition, the stories vary) to encourage Adam and Eve to partake of the Tree of Knowledge in a bid to free them from the blind enslavement forced on them by the evil Yahweh. In this interpretation, Christ came not to offer people eternal life with Yahweh via the traditional Christian take on salvation, but to offer them freedom from Yahweh's tyranny through enlightenment.

Alternatively, there is the story of Lilith, said to be Adam's first wife. The story for her follows that because she was created simultaneously with Adam, she considered herself his equal and would not submit to him (some variations put a decidedly sexual spin on this, saying that Adam wanted Lilith to be on the bottom, and she adamantly refused). She left him, and was turned into a demon, and Eve was given to Adam as a replacement. She had no real choice but to submit because she owed her existence to Adam, originating from his rib and all.

Both stories put a veeerrrry interesting new spin on how to interpret the Fall, and the Gnostic stories have always made much more sense to me, lending some internal consistency to the Scriptures that otherwise aren't there in the traditional texts.

I am not familiar with the Gnostic scriptures, but they bear further study. I can see why the patriarchal Christian church would suppress them. A woman refusing to submit to a man's every whim? Heretical!

Here's a few links to Gnostic material you might find interesting.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/gnostic2.htm

Annnd...make that link. All the other links I rounded up turned out to be dead. Meh.

I'm currently reading a book on the Gospel of Judas, which has some gnostic elements.

Oooh! Yes, Lotus -- if you haven't read the Gnostic scriptures you should definitely check them out! There is a wonderful passage in one of them in which Mary Magdalene offers the rest of the disciples secret teachings which Jesus had shared only with her. Peter gets upset and says "You're a woman! He wouldn't have shared secrets with *you*!" and one of the others replies, in effect "Oh, shut up, Peter. You always were jealous of their relationship."

The Lilith story is not Gnostic, however. . . There is scholarly research which indicates that the version of her story in general circulation was part of a satirical work written during the Renaissance(?) called The Alphabet of Ben Sirach.

However, the figure of Lilith appears does appear in ancient literature, including Inanna and the Huluppu Tree.

I think I have some of the Gnostic scriptures in my religious library at home. (I used to be good for buying books out of curiosity.) I shall hang my head in shame...later. I need to comb my bookshelves, first. :-)

I don't know anywhere near as much about the Gnostic gospels as I would like.

Here's some good info too: http://gnosis.org/welcome.html

:-)

I didn't mean to suggest that Lilith was a part of gnostic belief. Apologies for not being clear on that.

The idea that the God Yahweh of Genesis is actually the Demiurge, a false God who created the earth and humankind because he wanted to rule over something? It goes on that Satan was actually sent by the true Creator (or came of his own volition, the stories vary) to encourage Adam and Eve to partake of the Tree of Knowledge in a bid to free them from the blind enslavement forced on them by the evil Yahweh. In this interpretation, Christ came not to offer people eternal life with Yahweh via the traditional Christian take on salvation, but to offer them freedom from Yahweh's tyranny through enlightenment.

As a Jew (who is, incidentally, far from traditional and far from uncritical of Judaism or its scriptures), I find this extremely reductionist and presumptuous. Beyond that -- as much as I agree that certain aspects of the texts are problematic -- I think the whole Old-Testament-Jewish-God-Evil/New-Testament-Christian-God-Good dichotomy is pretty offensive, has historically fueled a lot of Christian anti-Semitism and speaks to a real lack of understanding of the various and complex ways in which God is portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures.

The thing that confuses me is the idea that one God is Jewish and the other is Christian. The way I was raised is that it is the same God in both the Old and New Testaments, and at some point, for some reason, God changed how God dealt with the Jewish people, moving from a law-based relationship to a redemptive one.

The first Christians, after all, were Jews (and devout Jews, at that), and they had no interest in sharing their belief in Jesus Christ as Messiah with non-Jews. As the account goes, it took a divine revelation from God to the Apostle Peter for Peter to preach the gospel to a household of Gentiles who were interested in learning more. Before that, Christianity was a purely Jewish thing. Christians who use Christianity to justify their anti-Semetic prejudices totally miss that aspect of their religion's foundation.

I believe much of that particular idea would be traced back to Marcion, in the early church:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcion

His theology was eventually officially repudiated, but continued to have some influence.

Marcion seems to be tied to the Apostle Paul, not the Apostle Peter, according to that article. Peter was the first Christian to preach the gospel of Christ to non-Jews, if the account in the book of Acts can be believed.

This blows my mind completely. I know a woman who adamantly believes that Jesus literally ceased to be a Jew at some point, and who blames all Jews, everywhere, then and now, for his execution.

I know that blame for the murder of Christ is part of the psychology of Christian anti-semitism, but having a person actually express the belief that every Jew ever born in history is personally responsible for nailing him on the cross...it's mind-blogging.

She's an extremely devout woman, but when I tried to discuss the matter with her once, pointing out that Christ's mother, relatives, and closest disciples were all Jews, all I got was a blank expression.

More than likely, this brand of anti-semitism comes from believing uneducated preachers who did not actually study the scriptures or history.

I'm not sure why you find it reductionist or presumptuous. It's not my interpretation, it's an alternative Christian theology that goes back way, way back. Moreover, Gnostic beliefs are not merely a differing interpretation of the Bible. There are quite a large number of gnostic texts that differ significantly from the official Biblical canon.

I don't think Gnostic Christianity is responsible for anti-semitism either. I concede the argument about the OT God = evil and NT God = good, except that mainstream Christianity, and most of the Christian anti-semites I know, hold the God of the Old Testament to be the same God of the New, and reject the notion that they are separate deities. The Christianity of today that we inherited from the early Church bears very little resemblance to gnostic Christianity, enough so that I don't think gnostic beliefs can be held responsible for antisemitism.

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