The Goddess Myth

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In her book The Battered Woman, domestic abuse counselor Lenore Walker claims that "prior to the creation of the Bible, women . were worshipped as the Goddesses of Life" and, even though she never uses the word Jew, implies that the Hebrews invented wife beating. Would she really have us believe that in the older Egyptian and Babylonian societies, men never beat their wives? Ironically, we must turn to a male author, Pierre Montet, and his book Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt, to learn that, in fact, an Egyptian husband had the right to beat his wife and a brother to beat his sister.

Versions of the feminist fairy tale can be found in magazine articles, best-selling books, and television documentaries on the history of Western religion--a piece of revisionist history that's now believed simply because it's been so often repeated.

The Hebrew Bible tells a different story; but before you can get to it, you've got to forget everything that Christianity has taught you. When Christianity appropriated the Hebrew scriptures as its Old Testament, it ignored centuries of rabbinic commentaries that, in Judaism, are considered essential to understanding any biblical verse. It wasn't Jewish tradition that used the story of Adam and Eve to rationalize the subordination of women, or that equated the forbidden fruit with sexuality (and made the woman a temptress). Nor did the earliest Jews claim that Adam and Eve, by eating the forbidden fruit, stained all of humanity with original sin. These and other concepts now viewed as hostile to women--and often traced to ancient Hebrew thought--actually arose from later readings. Unfortunately, these Christian interpretations now predominate in Western civilization (even in the minds of many Jews).

As for the ancient rabbinic teachings, while many are certainly sexist, many others--some might say most--actually protect the interests of women. The first human was created as a hermaphrodite, for instance, a male and female joined at the back. The "creation of woman" was, more accurately, the separation of the female from the male by cutting them apart at the "side" (tzela, a Hebrew word that often gets translated as "rib").

The term ezer knegdo, usually translated as "helpmate," has been interpreted to mean that women are to be obedient wives. In actuality, the term means "a help against him": Worthy husbands are to be helped while the unworthy are opposed, thus validating a woman's ability to judge a man accurately and treat him accordingly. As for why the serpent spoke to Eve alone, Adam was "asleep" (a metaphor, perhaps, for male consciousness).

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