Endnote 35 – No Promised Land: Rejecting the Authority of the Bible

David Jobling questions the whole notion that in a patriarchal society like ancient Israel anyone was capable of writing a story as feminist as Trible claims Genesis 2–3 to be. See David Jobling, “Myth and Its Limits in Genesis 2:4b–3:24” in The Sense of Biblical Narrative: Structural Analyses in the Hebrew Bible 2, JSOTSup 7 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986), pp. 40–43.

I picked up on the structuralist work of Jobling and others to argue that even if we could learn to read the surface features of this text in a more woman-positive way the deep or mythic structures of the text convey a message of binary opposition, which has influenced centuries of misogynist interpretations and is likely to continue to do so. See Milne, “The Patriarchal Stamp of Scripture: The Implications of Structuralist Analysis for Feminist Hermeneutics,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, (JFSR) 5 (1989), pp. 17–34. David Clines examines Trible’s interpretation of ‘ezer (helper) and finds himself unable to support her feminist conclusions. The only task in which Eve helps is procreation, and this, too, seems to support patriarchal readings of the text. See Clines, “What Does Eve Do to Help?” pp. 25–48.

Susan Lanser challenges Trible’s reading of ha’adam as a generic term. She points out that a reader infers masculine grammatical gender and sexual identity from the term because the text uses masculine pronouns with it and presents it as a human being. See Susan Lanser, “(Feminist) Criticism in the Garden: Inferring Genesis 2–3, ” Semeia 41 (1988), pp. 67–84. Mieke Bal, although she agrees with some of Trible’s arguments, emphatically rejects the idea that the story is either feminist or female-oriented. See Mieke Bal, “Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character” in Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 104–130.