The Mother of All Living, and the Weight She Was Made to Carry

Eve is a figure of enormous consequence built on a very few verses. In Genesis she is formed as a companion to Adam, named Hawwah, "the mother of all living," and it is she whom the serpent addresses, she who takes the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and she who gives it to her husband. The text itself assigns no elaborate theology to the act; the vast structure later built upon it, original sin, the subordination of women, the transmission of a fallen nature, is the work of interpretation, above all in the Christian tradition through Paul and Augustine, who read her as the gateway of sin into the world.

Jewish tradition, reading the same verses, drew markedly different and often less condemnatory conclusions, and modern feminist scholarship has re-examined the text to question how much of "Eve" is in Genesis and how much was projected onto it. In every reading she remains the archetype of human beginnings: the first woman, the first choice, and the first bearer of consequence.