Giving Eve’s Daughters Their Due

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Great Women of the Bible in Art and Literature

by Dorothée Sölle, Joe H. Kirchberger and Herbert Haag
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 295 pp., $75.00

“Great! Women of the Bible in Art and Literature” is my emended reading of this title. There are 25 of them here, beginning with Eve and her shadow Lilith and ending with the Marys and Martha, the New Testament complement to aspects of the feminine archetype.

The very presence of Lilith (who is mentioned in Isaiah 34:14) and the constellation of Marys intimate with Jesus buoys our hope for directness and candor. These women not only figure in visual art 031from the early Christian period to the present—they leap into the postbiblical literature of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and then spread into the works of Dante, Goethe, Flaubert, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, to name only a few.

Each chapter has a fivefold structure: Relevant biblical passages are followed by critical commentaries by theologian Dorothée Sölle, by selections from ancient and medieval sources, and finally by selections from postmedieval literature, with the extrabiblical material handled by Joe H. Kirchberger.

The fifth element, sprinkled generously throughout the other four, is visual art on a grand scale—numerous full-page and even two-page reproductions in color, ranging from the sixth-century Vienna Genesis, the Moralized Bible¹ and various medieval Hebrew illuminated manuscripts to Renaissance art (extremely well represented) and such 20th-century artists as Chagall and Dali. These works are briefly identified and described by art historian Anne-Marie Schnieper-Müller.

Thanks to this fivefold structure, the reader gets a 032feel for the continuity of biblical motifs—a liberal arts education in a single package. In fact, despite the high cost of the volume, I may use it as a basic reference for a course on Bible, midrash^a and art from a feminist perspective.

Sölle’s theological commentary is personal, sometimes folksy and intimate, often sermonic. Aiming for a popular audience, she abstains from academic controversies. Considering the apocryphal story of Judith and Holofernes, Sölle compares Judith’s heroism (“There was no fear in Israel as long as Judith was alive”) to that of the controversial Nicaraguan diplomat Nora Astorga, who used her sex appeal as a weapon against General Vega and who, like Judith, gave heart to the poor people of her country. In another example, Sölle applies the story of Abraham’s second-class wife Hagar the Egyptian to the virtual slavery of black Brazilian women who feed and bathe the children of the wealthy while their own children scrounge in the garbage for potato peels. These are credible examples of how modern midrash is built: The biblical figure becomes a “type” for later application.

Although Sarah, Abraham’s first wife, bitter and childless for so many years, doesn’t win any popularity polls in these chapters, Sölle brilliantly chooses the Regensburg Pentateuch, a medieval manuscript dating to c. 1300, to show the akedah (the binding of Isaac) and the simultaneous death of Sarah (see illumination from the Regensberg Pentateuch). In the story, Isaac walks away from the altar and Abraham lives to marry again, to beget six more sons and to die at the ripe age of 175. It is Sarah, not consulted, not participating, whose death is recorded right after the akedah and who may have been the real sacrifice in the episode formally called the sacrifice of Isaac.

There are some curious omissions in the book. It skips from Mrs. Potiphar (Genesis) to Rahab (Joshua), neglecting the last four books of the Pentateuch as a source of strong feminine figures. Miriam would have been a natural, as part of a sibling triumvirate with Moses and Aaron, not to mention Jochebed, the mother of Moses, and the midwives Shifra and Puah, who play central roles in the birth narratives of Exodus. These women might have led Sölle to the third-century frescoes in the Dura-Europos synagogue, on the Euphrates River in Syria, the earliest-known significant cycle of biblical paintings, older by 200 years than any comparable Christian works. A large panel devoted to the rescue of the baby Moses features Miriam and the daughter of Pharaoh (see Dura-Europos synagogue painting); another panel depicts the widow of Zarapeth and Elijah’s successful resuscitation of her son; and a third panel features Queen Esther, who was a kind of tyche (the ancient Greek goddess of good fortune) of this Jewish community, which flourished for almost 600 years in the seams between the Hellenistic west and the Parthian east. Even Sarah may be present in the depiction of the binding of Isaac over the Torah niche. How remarkable—Sarah, absent for millennia from Genesis 22, actually present in one of the earliest extant visual works of the akedah!

One of the Bible’s most suspenseful and puzzling episodes, starring one of the gutsiest biblical ladies, is Genesis 38, the story of Tamar. After the death of her husband, Tamar, disguised as a kedashah (sanctuary devotee),² beguiles her father-in-law, Judah, into impregnating her when he fails to present her with one of his other sons as a husband (as was the normal practice in levirate marriages). Tamar then gives birth to twin sons, Zerah and Perez. Although this story is riveting, readers of the Bible have long wondered why the biblical narrator placed it right in the middle of the Joseph saga; Tamar’s story aggressively interrupts an equally riveting moment in Joseph’s life: when he is sold into slavery at the very instant that his father inconsolably mourns his death. The key to this narrative crux is Judah, who from the outset is involved in a web of concealment and recognition, as was his and Joseph’s father, Jacob, and their grandmother, Rebecca. The placing of the Tamar episode within the Joseph stories heightens narrative tension, invokes the principle of measure for measure (nothing happens out of context or without effect) and strategically identifies the genealogy of kingship. One of Tamar and Judah’s sons, Perez, is the direct ancestor of 033David, who in turn leads directly to Jesus.^b

Twenty-two pages of this fascinating volume are devoted to Eve, more than for any of her successors. And a third of the book is given to Genesis, perhaps because of our universal obsession with beginnings. As a graduate student, I learned from The Common Expositor, by Arnold Williams, a curious fact about Bible commentaries during the English Renaissance: No fewer than 40 commentaries on Genesis and 13 on the Pentateuch rolled from the presses of continental Europe between 1527 and 1633. Why Genesis, and why those years? Who lived then? In the visual arts there were Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, El Greco and Rembrandt—artists whom Sölle relies 034upon heavily; in literature, Shakespeare, Spenser, Cervantes, Donne and Milton; in science and theology, Copernicus, Galileo and Luther. During this period of great intellectual and artistic ferment, Genesis still seemed essential to an understanding of humanity.

The New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible does well with the creation of Adam: “So God created humankind in his image” (Genesis 1:27). Adam is related to adamah, Hebrew for “earth,” thus Adam means “earthling.” An error appears in the translation of Genesis 1:27b, however, which should read “in the image of God He created him” (not them, as indicated in the footnote) in order to preserve the ambiguity of the rest of the verse: “male and female he created them.” The ambiguity of “him” makes it unclear, contra Sölle, whether God created humanity as a single man and single woman or as a composite being who was both male and female, a hermaphrodite. The latter possibility, openly expounded in midrash and painted several times by Marc Chagall, is developed in the rib story of Genesis 2. Yes, Eve is created from the tsela of Adam. But tsela can mean “side” as well as “rib” (see Exodus 25:12, the tsela, the side/rib, of the sanctuary). Incidentally, the idea that the first human was bisexual is not exclusive to Genesis. Sölle mentions Plato’s Symposium, in which the original human is an androgynous being with four arms and four legs who leads the gods on a jealous chase until they slice him in two, with one half in hot pursuit of its mate ever since.

Yet a third possibility emerges from this wily ambiguity: that the woman created in Genesis 1:27 is not the woman of the rib/side, but Eve’s predecessor, Lilith, Adam’s first wife, begotten from an alchemical recipe of biblical wordplay and ancient pagan demonology.^c Lilith’s tale begins around 2000 B.C.E., as Sölle sparsely notes, in the Sumerian pantheon, with a naked, voluptuous, winged goddess with taloned feet who carries a ring and a staff, the tools for gauging the span of man’s life. In a tenth-century midrash called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith reminds Adam that they were created at the same time and from the same materials. She rejects gender inequality and departs for the Red Sea, where she creates a daily quota of hundreds of demon children, all by herself. Convincing the powers that be that she has no interest in reconciliation with Adam, she thus clears the way for the 035creation of wife number two: Eve.

Lilith later plots to get even with Eve.³ She comes back to the Garden as the female-headed serpent in three works of art included here—one by Raphael, another from the Bible Commentary of Nicholas of Lyra and the last in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, all 15th- or 16th-century works.

The restored Sistine Chapel painting, with its tantalizing bifurcated serpent, is spread out over two pages, but it receives skimpy treatment from Sölle. Michelangelo, as a young resident of the Medici household, had contact with Pico della Mirandola, a Christian scholar of kabbalah (Jewish mysticism). There he learned about the mythological Sirens, whose sexual promise threatened the lives of Ulysses and his sailors. And he learned about other death-bringers, Lilith and her male partner Samael, demons of childbed fever and crib death. These figures, whether Greek or Jewish, embody the fears and potentially lethal consequences of sexual allurement.

The critical feature of this two-part serpent is that she is two-in-one. The gender of the cherub with the sword who guards the garden is not clear. But when your eye extends the cherub’s right arm, you see that it too wraps around the tree of knowledge of good and evil, just as the serpent’s left thigh completes this corkscrew action. They are a pair, inextricably interwoven (as pointed out to me by my teacher and colleague, Professor Jane Dillenberger). As one tempts with the fruit, the other simultaneously expels from the Garden. The result of eating the fruit is sexual knowledge, with its oracular punishment of death. Here is the key. Sex produces babies, and cradling a baby in your arms gives you an unmatched sense of your mortality. That’s why the two halves of this Sistine Chapel painting, the Temptation and Expulsion, are simultaneous: The knowledge of time and the innocence of paradise are mutually exclusive. As soon as you glimpse your mortality, you are no longer in paradise. More than a Fall into sin, the garden narrative can be viewed as a Fall into time, or better still, a Rise into consciousness.

I agree with Sölle that the apple of Eden has not been a fruitful image for women. Midrashic references dwell on the fact that the biblical text says only “fruit.” It would have been delicious had this volume included the rendering by Van Eyck in which a slender, adolescent Eve is holding, not an apple, but an etrog, a citron (which is a play on the Hebrew verb ragog, to have a passion for). The word for apple in Latin is malum, which, alas, is also the word for evil—offering a wordplay that conveys more theology than do reams of learned tracts.

Midrash is not user-friendly, and some observations on co-author Kirchberger’s use—and misuse—of midrash are in order. “According to Jewish tradition,” the author states, “Eve ranks below Adam, for she was made from his body: not from his head lest she should be proud, not from his eye lest she should look around lecherously…but from a chaste part of his body.” No and Yes. These statements are taken almost verbatim from Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, which provides a fuller context: 036“The woman destined to become the true companion of the man was taken from Adam’s body, for ‘only when like is joined unto like the union is indissoluble.’ The creation of woman from man was possible because Adam originally had two faces…which were separated at the birth of Eve.”⁴ The midrash suggests that Eve’s creation from Adam’s body put her on par with Adam, torso to torso, as a corresponding or parallel helper (Genesis 2). But by selecting only negative statements from the midrash, Kirchberger emphasizes the misogyny. Kirchberger’s statement that Eve is inferior because she is an associate of the serpant also needs clarification. The Aramic of the midrash plays on the similiarity of the words “Eve” (hava) and “snake” (hivia) and the verb “to instruct” (havoh). Thus, in the midrash, God says to Eve, “The snake is your instructor, and you are the instructor of Adam.” The issue is not one of inferiority, but rather one of the mysterious nature of the Divine setup in which the serpant and Eve star.

Some additional remarks about the selection of visual art: Work by women is conspicuously absent.^d Enough idealized, idolized, glossy bosoms. Female scholars should know that women’s perspectives on the body and on interrelationships thirst for greater visibility, particularly in connection with the Bible, where the female voice is still an archaeological find. Naive, unschooled artwork is also not in evidence, except for one refreshing narrative strip from Ethiopia depicting the adventures of the Queen of Sheba in the Solomonic harem. We could learn more from art of non-Western and non-Christian sources, as well as art since World War II.

The most bewildering lacuna appears at the very end of the book, after my appetite was whetted. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is missing. Justifying 048their cop-out, the authors claim that the vastness of the subject is overwhelming, They say Mary is “too lofty, too set apart from all the biblical women. It would seem inappropriate to include her in the colorful sequence of women ranging from a whore to the Queen of Sheba.” What then shall we say about the countless visual works on her son Jesus? Is his sanctity diminished by the company he keeps?

The issue of imaging the divine is much more fundamentally problematic than is implied by the words “too holy.” Art history and church history have witnessed recurring periods of aniconism and iconoclasm. The church understands that figural images of the divine run the risk of fostering idolatry. Figural art gives us the illusion that we have captured the essence of something, as if in a butterfly net. Now we own it; it is ours. That is what idolatry is all about: mistaking the part for the whole. All images are only partial. A solution might be to use abstract art, another category not represented in this book. Non-objective art forces the viewer to create midrash, to read into forms and colors, to open worlds of ever-changing commentary and never to get stuck in dogma.

Great Women of the Bible is a good book. The lay reader will glory in its clear writing and rich visuals and will enter the classical world of midrash and the postmedieval world of art, literature and music with wonder and delight. And the informed will know how to fill in the lacunae and correct any errors.⁵

30 Great Women of the Bible in Art and Literature by Dorothée Sölle, Joe H. Kirchberger and Herbert Haag (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 295 pp., $75.00 “Great! Women of the Bible in Art and Literature” is my emended reading of this title. There are 25 of them here, beginning with Eve and her shadow Lilith and ending with the Marys and Martha, the New Testament complement to aspects of the feminine archetype. The very presence of Lilith (who is mentioned in Isaiah 34:14) and the constellation of Marys intimate with Jesus buoys our hope for directness and candor. […]