Back to the Beginning: An Exploration of the Roles Played by Eve and the Garden of Eden in Modern Poetry by Jewish Women

Abstract

Despite Eve’s somewhat tarnished reputation in traditional and feminist circles, contemporary Jewish poets often evoke the biblical story of Eve and the Garden of Eden to present it in a more positive light. These rereadings of traditional texts add new levels of midrash and produce new understandings of the original text. This paper analyzes poems by two American poets, Linda Pastan and Kim Chernin, who focus on the Garden, seeing it in the context of other ancient civilizations; and by two Israeli poets, Techiyah Bat-Oren and Ruḥama Weiss, who challenge the classic rabbinic understandings of Eve. Despite the diversity of form, language and context, all of these writers reclaim Eve as a powerful and independent person. The poets create varied templates for the relationships between women and men in society, revisiting issues in the biblical text such as hierarchy, culpability, voice, and agency. In many ways, the biblical character of Eve is unlikely to resonate with modern Jewish women. Long considered an afterthought, a female derivative of the male first human, she was perceived in the early stages of the second-wave feminist assessment of classical Jewish texts as less admirable than her nonbiblical “predecessor,” the demon Lilith. 1 According to some late rabbinic traditions, Lilith was the very first woman, whose creation is implicit in the verses recounting the creation of the adam 2 in Genesis 1. Lilith’s independent mind-set earned her rabbinic opprobrium; Eve was the second “first” woman, a remake described in Genesis 2, who accepted a subservient position and tempted the male who “birthed” her into violating the divine command not to