Eve

There are at least two sides to every story. I wish to examine the role of Eve in the Book of Genesis in light of this old saying. One can detect in the second and third chapters of Genesis a latent or implicit as well as an explicit storyline. The explicit is, I propose, by and large the one that the Yahwist redactors intended and which has preoccupied much of standard exegesis. It concerns the creation of man, the act of disobedience and man’s expulsion from paradise, the so-called Fall (‘so-

called’ because the story itself makes no direct mention of a fall). The implicit storyline is, as its name suggests, largely submerged or even repressed, although some commentators, preeminently the gnostics and Milton, either elaborated or intimated versions of it. Playing on the text’s many ambiguities, this storyline pictures the Fall as fortunate, indeed, an elevating movement.1 In making this distinction and recounting the two storylines sequentially, I do not mean to imply that they are perfectly separate and distinct. Rather, they are interpenetrating, a point to which I will return in conclusion. They are related as if each were the mirror image of the other, such that they form chiasmic contraries and present themselves simultaneously. And, like all such contraries, the boundary between them, and between the implicit and the explicit, is no less relative and fluid than it is plain.