ABSTRACT
It has been characteristic of human societies since at least the Bronze Age that, despite being widely separated in time and space and adopting a diversity of manners and customs, they oppose the idea of the female to that of the male, according precedency to the male and a secondary, derivative or subordinate status to the female. In the European tradition it is to the Genesis creation myth (1) that this conviction most commonly appeals for justification. Genesis in fact recounts two distinct creation stories, distinguished by Biblical scholars since the late nineteenth century as belonging to the separate source traditions which lie behind the writings which came to form the Pentateuch (Skinner (1930), pp. xliii-lxv; Speiser (1964), pp. xx-xliii). The P (or Priestly) narrative (i.1 to ii.4a) is a good deal less discriminatory than the second (ii.4b to iii.24) J narrative (Jahvist or Yahwist, from the Hebrew word Yahweh which this tradition prefers to Elohim as the name of God). Like their predecessors, however, seventeenthcentury commentators paid far more attention to the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib in the latter than they did to the simultaneous creation of male and female in the former (‘male and female created he them’) which grants apparently equal authority to man and to woman (‘let them have dominion over the fish of the sea…’). The second J narrative proved more serviceable: in the subsequent creation of Eve was found evidence of woman’s secondary status (115: III.§3), in the rib proof of her crooked nature (9), in the story of the Fall reason to blame her for all the ills of humankind, and in the curse placed upon her, as in Adam’s naming of the beasts before Eve’s creation, evidence of her intellectual inferiority and her subordination to man. ‘The fallen angel knew what he did when he made his assault upon the woman. His subtlety told him that the woman was the weaker vessel [I Pet. iii.7]’ (138. For summary accounts of seventeenth-century interpretations of Genesis see Turner (1987); more generally, see Philips (1984)). These inferences continued to be the commonplaces they had been throughout the Middle Ages, whether muted, as in Milton’s verse equivalent of the idealized human forms of Renaissance painting and sculp-ture (2), or tenaciously pressed home, as they are by Bunyan (3). Bunyan’s marked
sympathy for Adam as the victim of a ‘woeful tragedy’ is matched by his determination to draw from the narrative the moral that women should obey their husbands. The point was never more tersely put than by Sir Thomas Overbury: ‘For she is he’ (4). This is John Swan’s inference, too, though more gently put (5). He wrestles also with a perennial difficulty: since Paul so often associates the image of God with masculinity (e.g. Rom. viii.29; I Cor. xi.7; Coloss. ii.10), in what sense is woman formed in the image of God?
