Eve and Adam

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Scholars have identified two different creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, one in Genesis 1–2:4a and the other in Genesis 2:4b–3:24.

The first is attributed to the “P” source (the Priestly tradition) and the second is attributed to the “J” source (the Yahwist tradition).^a The two accounts differ in many ways. Their language and style are very different: The P account is repetitive and uses set formulas (for example, “it was evening and morning, the first day”; “and God saw that it was good”). The J account, on the other hand, flows along like a good story. The P account begins with a lifeless watery chaos from which dry land must emerge for life to begin, while the J story moves in the opposite direction from a lifeless dry land to which water is added to permit life to begin. In the P account, God creates by speaking a word; in the J account God acts like a potter, a gardener and a builder.

The two accounts also differ with respect to the creation of humans. In the first version, God creates woman and man at the same time, as the last act of creation. We are not told what they are made from, only that they are in the image of God. The P account does not give names to the woman or the man. In the second story, the J account, it seems as though man is created at the beginning of creation while woman is created at the end of the creative process. The man is fashioned from the earth, while the woman is built from one of the man’s ribs to overcome the man’s loneliness in the garden. In neither story, however, is the man or the woman given a name: they are identified only as “woman” (ishah) and “man” (ish).

The second story is generally thought to be much older than the first. Most scholars think that the J source was composed in the 10th century B.C. during the United Monarchy, most likely during the reign of Solomon.

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The story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3 also belongs to the J source, the earlier of the two traditions. There is no parallel account in the P source. At the beginning of the expulsion story we are introduced to the serpent, who questions the woman about the divine commandment regulating which fruit may and may not be eaten by the human couple. The woman explains that the fruit of only one tree may not be eaten. The serpent questions God’s motives for this injunction and the woman realizes that the fruit of that tree is also good for food. And so she eats this fruit and offers some to the man, who accepts and eats it.

As a consequence of disobeying the divine commandment, the man and the woman become aware and ashamed of their nakedness. God learns of the disobedience and drives the man out of the Garden of Eden. It is in this story—just before the expulsion—that the man names the woman “Eve.” She is called Eve because she is the mother of all living things (Genesis 3:20). This explanation of the name is a popular etymology: It links the Hebrew Havva (Eve) to the word for life (hayyim). The actual root meaning of the name Eve is uncertain.

The story of Eve in Genesis 2–3 has given rise to many difficulties for women and, as a result, it has been of major interest to feminist critics of the Bible, who have studied it extensively in the last 15 years. At the heart of the issue is whether this story is irretrievably patriarchal or whether its patriarchal elements can be overcome through feminist interpretation. Can this story be reclaimed for women? Can feminist analysis recover it from centuries of patriarchal interpretation and make it a positive spiritual resource for women?

There is no biblical story that has had a more profound negative impact on women throughout history than the story of Eve. The long tradition of patriarchal and, in some cases, misogynistic (characterized by hatred of women) interpretation 016has today made this text thoroughly unacceptable to a number of women and men from all religious backgrounds.

In early Christian writings, Eve is usually depicted as secondary and inferior to Adam because she was created after Adam and from Adam. She is also regularly portrayed as weak, seductive, and evil—the one who caused Adam to disobey God’s command.¹

At the same time, Eve came to be regarded not only as the mother of all living things, but as the paradigm for all women. A unique exception would be Mary the mother of Jesus, who later became, to Christians, a paradigm in her own right for idealized womanhood.

This combination of the negative image of Eve with the idea that she is the model of what it is to be a woman provided an important basis for the development of depreciatory patriarchal Christian theologies of woman.

In 1 Timothy 2:11–14, for example, we are told that women should not speak in the assembly, teach or tell a man what to do because Eve was formed after Adam and led Adam astray:

“Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:11–14).

The early church father Tertullian (c. 160–240 A.D.) taught that all women share the ignominy of Eve:

“And do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt, of necessity, must live too. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man.”²

In the traditional understanding of the text, Eve was created to be a “helper” (Hebrew Ôezer) to the man. Because Eve is thought to be secondary and inferior to Adam, the way in which she is a “helper” is said to be limited. Early interpreters often suggested that Eve was a helper to Adam only for the purpose of procreation. Listen to Ambrose, a fourth-century bishop of Milan and one of the four great Doctors of the Latin church:

“[E]ven though man was created outside Paradise (i.e., in an inferior place) [In Genesis 2:15 we are told that ‘The lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden.’], he is found to be superior, while woman, though created in a better place (i.e., inside Paradise) is found inferior… [I]ndeed, after woman was made, she was the first to violate the divine command. She even dragged her husband along with her into sin and showed herself to be an incentive to him. [God] said, ‘Let us make for him a helper like unto himself’ (Genesis 2:18). We take this to mean a helper for the purpose of generating human nature… This then is the way in which a woman is a good helper of less importance.”³

By Augustine’s time (354–430 A.D.), Genesis 2–3 was the well-established cornerstone of a theology that taught that women were secondary, and thus inferior and subordinate; that women were evil and seductive.

Extending the biblical analysis, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 A.D.), utilized Aristotelian thought to develop further the idea of women’s inferiority. Women, he urged, are defective by nature. They are “misbegotten males,” born female because of some defect in the active force or maternal disposition or because of some external force such as a moist south wind.⁴

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A work entitled Malleus Maleficarum, (Hammer Against Witches), written by Dominican priests Heinrich Kraemer and Jakob Sprenger for use in the Inquisition and published in 1486, uses Genesis 3 among other biblical texts to depict women as evil, feebleminded and lustful. This work provided the principal theological justification for the persecution of women as witches. In the years following its publication, thousands of women were accused of and executed for practicing witchcraft.⁵

These themes of inferiority, evil and seductiveness are repeatedly emphasized in the Christian writings of Luther, Calvin and Knox, all the way to 20th-century papal encyclicals and the broadcasting of TV fundamentalist preachers.⁶

In our own day, some men appeal to Genesis 2–3 to provide a theological basis for their “right” to “discipline” physically a wife who is not properly subordinate to them. Some battered women actually accept physical abuse because they think it is a husband’s divinely sanctioned “right” and “duty.”⁷

Until quite recently the traditional interpretation of Genesis 2–3 went virtually unchallenged. The American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton toward the end of her life focused her feminist critique on organized religion. Through her years of political struggle she had come to appreciate the role of religion, and especially of the Bible, in the oppression of women. In 1895 she published a feminist commentary on the Bible called the Woman’s Bible, which contains a feminist reinterpretation of the story of Eve and Adam. Stanton raised a direct challenge to the centuries-old patriarchal reading of this text:

“The unprejudiced reader must be impressed with the courage, the dignity, and the lofty ambition of the woman…Reading this narrative carefully, it is amazing that any set of men ever claimed that the dogma of the inferiority of woman is here set forth. The conduct of Eve from the beginning to the end is so superior to that of Adam.”⁸

However, biblical scholars and feminists alike largely ignored Stanton’s pioneering efforts depatriarchalizing biblical interpretation.

Not until the rise of feminist theology in the 1960s did anyone seriously question the image Eve and her function as a theological paradigm for women that had become established Christian tradition.

The most extensive and sustained feminist analysis and reinterpretation of the Eve and Adam story was undertaken in the 1970s by the feminist Bible scholar Phyllis Trible.⁹ She, like a number of other feminist exegetes at about the same time, argued that the problem with the Eve-Adam story was to be found not in a text, but rather in centuries of sexist, patriarchal interpretations of the text. She readily concedes that the Bible largely a “man’s book” but still believes that the Eve-Adam story can be liberated from patriarchal interpretations; Trible contended that when this is done, the liberating essence of the story for women can be discovered and appropriated.

According to Trible, none of the traditional patriarchal claims is altogether accurate and most are simply not present in the story itself. Some patriarchal claims, she argues, actually violate the rhetoric of the biblical account.

For example, in the traditional interpretation man is said to be superior because he is created first (Genesis 2:7), while woman is deemed inferior because she is created last (Genesis 2:22). But these same patriarchalist interpreters never argue that humans are inferior to animals because they were created after animals in the Priestly creation account (Genesis 1:27). On the contrary, they regard the final creative act in Genesis 1 as the pinnacle of creation. If this interpretative were applied consistently, the creation 018of the woman in Genesis 2 would be seen as the crowning achievement of divine creativity.

Traditional interpreters often focus on the fact that the serpent speaks to the woman and not to the man. They explain this in a variety of ways: the woman is morally weaker than the man and, thus, easier prey for the serpent; the woman is simpleminded, gullible, untrustworthy; the woman is more sexual, and her sexuality can be used by the serpent to ruin the man. Trible emphasizes that all of this is speculation, that the text itself does not say why the serpent speaks to the woman. She pokes fun at such eisegesis^b by suggesting how a woman might indulge in the same kind of speculation: The serpent speaks to the woman because she is the more intelligent of the two; the woman has a better understanding of the divine command and, therefore, she is in a better position to act as theologian and translator. She is more independent than the man. By contrast the man is silent, passive, bland and belly-oriented; he thinks with his stomach not with his brain.

In a similar vein, another feminist exegete has noted that Eve’s “temptation” of Adam is not found in the text, but rather has been read into the text by patriarchalist interpreters.¹⁰

Trible advocates a rereading and reinterpretation of the story that reads out of the text (exegesis), rather than into the text (eisegesis). In her effort to interpret the text, she uses one of the newer and widely used methodologies of biblical interpretation known as rhetorical criticism. Rhetorical critics analyze the literary devices of style and rhetoric used by the biblical author to convey meaning.

Trible combines rhetorical criticism with her feminist stance (a critique of culture in light of misogyny) to produce many fresh insights that frequently challenge traditional interpretations of the Eve-Adam story. She finds in the story a circular or symmetrical pattern. The creation of woman last is part of that symmetry. The creation of woman completes the creative process begun with the creation of ha-’adam in Genesis 2:7 (variously translated as “man,” “the man” or “Adam”; ha is the definite article “the”). The ’adam created at the beginning of the story should not, however, be thought of as male. Rather, she argues, the Hebrew text presents us with a pun of an earth creature (ha-’adam) created from the earth (ha-’adamah). This earth creature remains basically sexless until the differentiation of female from male occurs in Genesis 2:21–23. Only with the advent of sexuality does the term ha-’adam acquire the secondary meaning of male, but even then it is an ambiguous term.

When the woman is created, she is created as an Ôezer k^e-negdo. This is usually translated “a helper/helpmate for him.” The words “helper” and “helpmate” have a pejorative sense in English and, as we have seen, traditional interpretations assume this pejorative sense in understanding the relationship of the woman to the man. Trible translates the phrase “a companion corresponding to it.” She notes that Ôezer is a relational term, the meaning of which is totally missed in the English word “helper.” The relation implied is a beneficial one, not one of inferiority. Some biblical passages use this same Hebrew word to describe God (e.g., Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33:1; Psalm 33:20), but in these instances translators use “help” rather than “helper” to avoid the pejorative sense. Trible argues that the idea of mutuality and equality is conveyed by the phrase k^e-negdo.^c

Trible also challenges the patriarchal assertion that the superiority of the man over the woman is established by the man’s “naming” the woman in Genesis 2:23 (“She shall be called woman”), 019as he had previously named the other creatures in the garden. Trible points out that the usual naming formula—“to call the name,” (used, for example, in Genesis 2:19, 20; 4:17, 25, 26),—is not used here in Genesis 2:23. Moreover, the “calling” of the woman by the man does not signify the establishment of man’s power over woman but rather a rejoicing in their mutuality. The man does eventually name the woman “Eve” (in Genesis 3:20); only then does he assert his rule over her. But at that point—when he names her Eve—sin has already corrupted the relationship of mutuality and equality between the man and the woman. Thus, the man’s naming of the woman, his dominating of woman, is not part of the goodness of creation but rather, the very symbol of his sinfulness. Accordingly, male domination of female is not by divine intention but as a consequence, and a sign of, sinfulness. As such, it is not to be held up as an ideal, but deplored as a condition to be overcome in order to recover our full humanity.

When the story is reread in this way, functions, says Trible, to liberate, not to enslave.

The feminist approach taken by Trible and others is a “reformist” one.¹¹ The reformists believe that the biblical traditions contain reformable, recoverable core.

The counterparts of the reformists are the “revolutionaries,” feminists who maintain that the core biblical symbols of Judaism and Christianity are male and unreformable.

Most feminist biblical scholars and theologians are “reformists” who have remained within the Jewish and Christian traditions and have developed a variety of exegetical and hermeneutical strategies in an effort to reclaim the Bible as a positive spiritual resource for women.¹²

Recently, however, a growing sense of uneasiness has been detected among some reformists. There is less optimism that the whole Bible can be recovered and an acknowledgement that some parts might be so thoroughly patriarchal that they might have to be excluded from the canon (the collection of biblical books that are authoritative or sacred). This, in turn, has led to a questioning of the whole notion of canon and of biblical authority.¹³ But the Eve-Adam story is not among these texts. Genesis 2–3 is widely regarded by feminists as one text that can be reclaimed and can be seen to speak with a strongly positive message of sexual equality. In Trible’s rereading of the story, the traditional view of Eve overturned. The Eve in Trible’s interpretation not the simpleminded, gullible female who deviously seduces the male to sin. Rather, she is the “intelligent, informed, perceptive… theologian, ethicist, hermeneut, and rabbi” who speaks with “clarity and authority” and who acts independently but without deception.

Is this optimism on the part of feminist reformists about Genesis 2–3 well-founded? Feminist exegetes have certainly raised an important challenge to traditional interpretation. But have their efforts been successful in reforming the way in which the Eve-Adam story is understood? The answer seems to be no, at least, not yet. Mainline biblical scholarship has almost completely ignored the work of feminists on this text. For example, Howard N. Wallace’s 1985 study, The Eden Narrative,¹⁴ which surveys recent trends in interpreting Genesis 2–3, does not include a single reference to any of the feminist studies of the text. Clearly, Wallace did not think such feminist reinterpretation was significant.

Another, particularly interesting example is Jerome T. Walsh’s article, “Genesis 2:4b–3:24: A Synchronic Approach.”¹⁵ Like Wallace, Walsh seems completely unaware of feminist critiques as he reasserts many of the traditional patriarchal interpretations of the story. What makes this particularly ironic is that Walsh uses the same critical method as Trible, rhetorical criticism, to arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions about the relationship between man and woman.

Walsh assumes that ha-’adam is male from the beginning of the story. He thinks Genesis 2:23 is “a decree of naming” and that the woman is a “matching helper.” Like Trible, Walsh finds in the story a concentric ring pattern, although he does not identify the pattern in the same way. Walsh identifies seven scenes, six of which are balanced around the central (fourth) scene. Scene 2 (Genesis 2:18–25), he argues, “establishes a type of hierarchy among the characters: Yahweh God is supreme, the man is the highest of the creatures, with the woman closely associated but subordinated to him; least of all are the animals.”

By the central scene, Scene 4 (Genesis 3:6–8), where they eat of the fruit and suddenly realize they are naked, this proper social hierarchy has been inverted, according to Walsh. The woman is presented here as superior to the man so that he is now presented as “her man/husband” (Genesis 3:6). Here, the woman who has been “named for her derivation from him” in Genesis 2:23 now has the man “designated in terms of his relationship with her”; he has become “an adjunct” to the woman who was supposed to be “a matching helper” to the man. The proper order is then restored in Scene 6 (Genesis 3:14–19) when “man’s superiority over the woman is 020explicitly stated in the woman’s punishment”—“in pain shall you bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). With Walsh, we seem to be back where we started.

One of the newest approaches to the study of the Eve-Adam story, structuralist analysis, also largely ignores the efforts of feminist reformist interpreters.

Structuralism is not a methodology in itself but rather a perspective, a point of view, a way of looking at the world that is essentially independent of the subject matter.¹⁶ The structures of various kinds of relationships that structuralists investigate lie below the surface of the text (the level investigated by rhetorical critics) and, thus, cannot be apprehended directly. Structuralist analytical techniques identify and describe structures that operate at the unconscious or subconscious level.

The earliest structural study of the Eve-Adam story was undertaken by the British anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach in 1961.¹⁷ In the introduction to his analysis, Leach notes that binary oppositions are intrinsic to human thought. For example, objects are either alive or not alive; human beings are either male or not male!

It is this binary opposition that interests us in connection with Leach’s structuralist analysis of the Eve-Adam story. Leach notes that for males, non-males are divided into women of two kinds: (1) our kind, with whom sexual relations are incestuous, and (2) the other kind, with whom sexual relations are allowed. Every human society devises rules to regulate incest and exogamy (marrying outside one’s own group). A logical problem arises, however, with respect to human beginnings. If the original human parents were of the same kind, then their relationship was incestuous, but if they were of different kinds, then what exactly was the other kind to which one of the original pair belonged? Myths of human origin, according to Leach, serve to mediate this paradox by the introduction of a third category that is anomalous or abnormal in terms of ordinary rational categories.

The rational categories that form a binary opposition in Genesis 2 are, according to Leach, Man (i.e., ha-’adam, which Leach assumes is male) and Animal. None of the animals, however, can overcome man’s loneliness. The woman thus serves as the anomalous/abnormal “other” introduced to mediate this opposition. She belongs to a paradigmatic set of mediating terms that consists of the creeping things in Genesis 1 and the serpent in Genesis 3. All members of this set belong to the “confused category” of mediator that lies between the rational categories Man and Animal. Thus, for Leach, Eve apparently does not belong fully to the category (kind) animal or to the category (kind) human, in the order of creation.

Leach wrote his study before the feminist reformists’ analyses of the Eve-Adam story, so he may perhaps be forgiven for his androcentric conclusions. More recent structural analyses, however, are likewise unaware of the feminist reformist analyses and are not so easily forgiven. In 1980, an entire issue of a highly regarded scholarly journal (Semeia) was devoted to structural studies of the Eve-Adam story. Nowhere was there a direct reference to the work of Trible or any other feminist exegete. Not surprisingly, most of these studies end up supporting the familiar old patriarchal interpretations, albeit by a different analytical route.

Among structuralist studies, David Jobling’s most recent study of Genesis 2–3 stands out as the first serious attempt to respond to feminist concerns in general and Trible’s interpretations in particular.¹⁸ In an earlier article, Jobling had reached the conclusion that the Eve-Adam story is “male mythology striving to deal with the complexity of social life and in particular with women.”¹⁹ It is not a story with a universal perspective on human existence; it is not a story produced by a generic human mind. Jobling’s study shows the story to be the product of a male mind.

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Jobling is sympathetic with feminist concerns, and he would like to be able to agree with Trible in claiming Genesis 2–3 as a feminist story. But the results of his analysis will not let him do so. There is, first of all, a practical problem. In such a patriarchal culture as the one that produced the Bible, who would have composed a feminist story? Jobling asks. And if it is a feminist story, how could it ever have been accepted in ancient Israel as a basic myth of human origins?

Despite the fact that Jobling does not find Genesis 2–3 a feminist story, he remains convinced that a feminist reading of it is both possible and necessary. He argues that the positive feminist aspects of the story are not be found in its surface features, as Trible tries to do, but, rather, at a deeper level—in the tension between the text’s main narrative program (getting a man to till the earth) and the text’s dominant theological theme (the fall).

In the main program we find two opposed “logics,” according to Jobling: the logic of “inside the garden” vs. the logic of “outside the garden.” Inside the garden, humanity is solitary and male; he is born autochthonously and is immortal. Outside the garden, humanity is both male and female, born sexually and mortal. In Jobling’s own words:

“ ‘Inside,’ woman does not exist—the solitary ‘earth-creature’ is male …. ‘Outside,’ she shares the hardness of life, indeed has more than her share of it. But the hardness is defined for her wholly in terms of her sexual/generative function; it includes being subordinated to the will of man.”

In “the fall” theme, the opposed logics are “before” vs. “after.” The fall theme is a typical myth of transformation from the “other world,” where there is male only, to “this world,” where there is male and female.

The cultural mindset that thinks in terms of such oppositions is, according to Jobling, male centered, patriarchal, even misogynistic.

Ultimately, according to Jobling’s analysis, a middle semantics is needed to mediate the oppositions. Woman represents the possibility of the “after” in the “before” and thus precipitates the transformation from “inside” to “outside.” In the “after,” the woman suffers subordination to the man. To make this appear logical, she must be made to do something in the “before” that is worse than what the man does. That “worse” thing is to instigate man’s disobedience. It is intolerable for the male mindset to place the responsibility for evil either upon the deity or upon the man. And so woman (and the animals) are made to assume the guilt in this myth.

Even with a consciousness of feminist scholarship, Jobling arrives at essentially the same conclusion as other structuralists concerning how the story presents the woman. But Jobling’s study is not just another typical patriarchal interpretation. What he does with these conclusions marks his work as feminist. Ultimately, Jobling says, the story explains nothing. Superficially, the male dream world prevails (male only and immortal) but actually it fails to replace the real world of male and female. It is here that Jobling finds the possibility for a feminist reading of the story. This kind of deconstruction of the text, he says, permits us to see in the story the effects of the patriarchal mindset tying itself in knots trying to account for woman and femaleness in a way that both makes sense and supports patriarchal assumptions. Feminists, he suggests, should neither reject the Bible because it is wholly patriarchal nor deny that it is wholly patriarchal. They should accept that the Bible is wholly 039patriarchal and, through the effective use of deconstruction, expose it as an effort of a bad conscience trying to make sense of patriarchy.

Much depends of course on what Jobling means by “accept.” If he means merely that feminists should accept the challenge to expose the patriarchy of the Bible as an academic, intellectual exercise, then he is unquestionably correct. But if he is suggesting that feminists accept a patriarchal Bible as a spiritual resource, then his analysis has raised some fundamental hermenuetical problems. It has, after all, demonstrated that the centuries of patriarchal interpretations of the Eve-Adam story do not originate solely from the bias of the interpreter but are actually derived from the very structures of the biblical text itself. Jobling’s deconstruction of these patriarchal structures has laid bare their illogic and unsensibleness. (This is not unlike what Trible herself has done for stories like those of Hagar, the Levite’s concubine, and Jephthah’s daughter in her Texts of Terror.²⁰ But is patriarchy exposed as illogical and unsensible any more acceptable than patriarchy unexposed? If anything, Jobling’s work has made it even more difficult, if not impossible, to reclaim this biblical tradition as a positive spiritual resource for women.

These are those who suggest that the way around the problem is to recognize the sexist presuppositions of this story, indeed, of the whole Bible, but also to recognize that these elements are only descriptive of the patriarchal society from which they arose. They are not prescriptive for today. The challenge for us is to transcend the sexism of the biblical text.²¹

For a growing number of feminists, neither this suggestion nor Jobling’s approach brings much comfort. The fact is that there is little evidence to show that there is a great interest, either in scholarly or popular circles, in transcending the sexism of the text. Most studies of the Eve-Adam story continue to reinforce, even to sanctify the sexism of the text.

It seems that the recognition by many feminist interpreters, including Jobling, that the text itself is patriarchal and that its sexism cannot be fully overcome by rereading it from a feminist perspective has intensified the question of the Bible’s authority for women. We are now forced to come to terms with the idea that the sacred text is patriarchal and continues to communicate patriarchal values both directly on its surface and indirectly through its deep structures and narrative strategies.

If more feminists are not to choose rejection of the Bible and the faith traditions within which it is preserved, there will need to be better solutions to the dilemma than those that have been proposed thus far. It is not enough simply to ascribe the sexism to the ancient culture when the modern culture continues to preserve it with such dedication. It will be necessary to explore more deeply why faith traditions and biblical scholars remain so committed to maintaining and emphasizing the patriarchal aspects of stories such as Genesis 2–3 and why there has been such a blindness to the work of feminist scholars. It will be necessary to listen more sensitively to women who have suffered subordination and inequality throughout history, justified on the basis of such texts, to appreciate fully the inhumanity women have experienced as a result of the existence of such stories. This is not to say that the Bible is to blame for all the sexism and discrimination women have suffered. But it is to say that it is time we began to look much more honestly and directly at what it means to call apparently non-reformable patriarchal texts like the story of Adam and Eve “sacred.”

Scholars have identified two different creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, one in Genesis 1–2:4a and the other in Genesis 2:4b–3:24. The first is attributed to the “P” source (the Priestly tradition) and the second is attributed to the “J” source (the Yahwist tradition).a The two accounts differ in many ways. Their language and style are very different: The P account is repetitive and uses set formulas (for example, “it was evening and morning, the first day”; “and God saw that it was good”). The J account, on the other hand, flows along like a good story. […]