Know Your Bible: Biblical Femmes Fatales - Episode One: Eve

Introduction

In this series of posts I will outline examples in biblical literature of the femme fatale, defined as a woman whose mysterious and seductive qualities ensnare males into dangerous and deadly lapses of judgement. But I will expand it to include, as well, biblical stories in which women directly kill for various motives.

We begin with the all-time classic archetypal Femme Fatale. The one who reportedly brought death itself into the world.

Adam and Eve, by Julius Paulsen

1. Eve

She has to be on this list because she has been blamed for the Fall of Man by theologians throughout the centuries. And it is not surprising that a patriarchal society would seek to blame all ills on a woman. But the actual biblical text indicates that this treatment is far from fair. At the base of it, Genesis 3 is simply an etiology for why snakes don't have legs and people wear clothes. And Adam fully shares culpability in the event.

The Original Text

Eve Tempted, by John Stanhope

The serpent in Genesis 3 asked Eve if they were allowed to eat of any of the fruit in the Garden of Eden. Eve told the serpent that they could eat of any fruit, with the exception of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They had previously been told that "on the day you eat of it, you will surely die ( ביום אכלך ממנו מות תמות )" (Gen 2:17).

The serpent told Eve that this was not true. He said that the reason God did not want them to eat of that fruit was that when they ate of it, Adam and Eve themselves would become like gods, knowing good and evil.

The text then states:

"She took some of its fruit and ate it. And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." (Gen 3:6)

Notice, the text implies that Adam was standing right beside her the whole time! If he was so virtuous, why was he not protesting this violation of the single command God had given them?

Anyway, the text goes on to say, "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves." (Gen 3:7)

God interrogates them and learns what has happened. Adam blames Eve.

God had given him Eve as a helpmate suitable for him ( עזר כנגדו ) (Gen 2:18). And when he saw her, he declared that she was "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" ( עצם מעצמי ובשר מבשרי ) (Gen 2:23).

The Fall of Man, by Peter Paul Rubens

But now he throws her under the bus and says, "The woman whom you put here with me--she gave me fruit from the tree and so I ate it." (Gen 3:12)

He's half implying that it's God's fault as well for putting her here in the first place!

Eve blames the serpent (Gen 3:12-13). God accepts no excuses. He curses the serpent to be a legless animal that must ever after crawl on its belly (Gen 3:14). He punishes Eve by declaring that she shall have now greater pain in childbearing (Gen 3:16). He punishes Adam by declaring that ever after he shall toil to raise food amidst thorns and thistles. And by the sweat of his brow shall he get bread to eat (Gen 3:18-19).

And the threat that they would die because of eating that fruit is realized:

"Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken. For you are dirt, and unto dirt you shall return." (Gen 3:19)


The Rehabilitation of "The Woman"

The Church came to view the Virgin Mary as an Anti-Eve. An example of this is found in the writings of St. Irenaeus of Lyon, who wrote:

For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith. (Against Heresies 3.22.4)

And so, despite the still somewhat patriarchal character of the historical Church (the Catholic and Orthodox Communions), we sing praises to Mary that far and away undo any denigration of our archetypal Mother Eve.

We sing to Mary every Sunday:

More Honorable than the Cherubim. And beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim. Without defilement you gave birth to God the Word. True Birth-Giver of God, we magnify you!

Know Your Bible: Cain and Abel - the Archetypal Fratricide

According to Genesis 4:1-2, the first two humans, Adam and Eve, had a son Cain, who was a tiller of the soil, and a son Abel, who was a keeper of flocks.

The trouble starts when Cain and Abel brought offerings from their efforts to the LORD (Gen 4:3-4). 

When the Lord looked with favor on Abel's offering--but not on Cain's--Cain was (somewhat understandably) discouraged. 

The LORD addresses Cain's resentfulness with an enigmatic statement (Gen 4:7):

If you do well, will not your head be lifted up? But if you don't, sin crouches at the door. It's desire is for you. You must master it.

הלוא אם־תיטיב שאת ואם לא תיטיב לפתח חטאת רבץ ואליך תשוקתו ואתה תמשל־בו׃

There is clearly background information original readers of this text knew that made this statement understandable. Without this knowledge, any interpretation of this verse is unconvincing speculation.

Peter Paul Rubens - Cain Kills Abel

But the rest of the story is pretty straightforward. Cain invites his brother out into the field (Gen 4:8). And he kills him.

The LORD immediately addresses Cain and asks him (Gen 4:9):

Where is your brother Abel?

Cain replies with the famous line:

Am I my brother's keeper?

The Hebrew original is a sing-songy rhyme:

השמר אחי אנכי

ha-shomer aHi anokhi?

Is Cain's response just an elusive dodge, or is it potentially a challenge to God himself? 

In Psalm 121:4, God is described as "Israel's Keeper" (shomer-Yisrael; שומר ישראל).

In other words, is Cain implying that God was Abel's keeper? And so, since Cain could kill Abel, why did God allow this?

As a result, the first sin described in the Bible already asks the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

Cultural and Historical Connections

The immediate point of comparison is with Romulus and Remus. According to the Roman historian Livy, Romulus killed his twin brother after Remus jumped mockingly over the nascent walls of the city Romulus was building (History of Rome 1.7.2). 

The half-sisters Elizabeth and Mary lived out their lives in mortal combat, the Catholic and Protestant religions serving almost as a pretense for a conflict actually based on their mothers' marriages to Henry VIII. By a delicious irony, the two are entombed side by side in Westminster Abbey.

To end on a positive note, Catullus' brother died while serving in Bithynia. This is not a fratricide. This is a touching tribute to a dead sibling. Catullus traveled to perform the rituals necessary to allow his brother passage to the afterlife. And he penned a poem on the matter, in which he bids his brother farewell.

He writes (Carmina 101.10):

And into eternity, brother, hail and farewell

atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale

And the elisions themselves speak a voice broken in grief:

atque'n perpetuum frater ave'tque vale

Getting Back to Proto-Human

It's been an exciting last couple years for people, like myself, who are deeply interested in paleolinguistics. I've already blogged about research that demonstrates that all languages are or once were of the basic structure Subject-Object-Verb, suggesting a common ancestor to all.

There is also now the assertion that the reduction in phonology as you move farther away from Africa points to a common ancestor.

I've coupled this observation, which I feel actually demonstrates that the ancient peoples who left Africa didn't have the phonological diversity that later developed in Africa, with the findings that Aborigines in Australia represent possibly the oldest people and culture outside of Africa itself.

I put it all together and argue in this video that traces of the original human language can be recovered.

What words from the original Proto-Human language might have survived in three major language families for 70,000 years?

Fire, eagle, and dead.

IN THE BEGINNING: Correcting an Ancient Typo in the Second Verse of the Bible

One of my Latin students recently asked my advice on how to charge up her Biblical Hebrew abilities. She's preparing for her Jewish Confirmation and hadn't been reading regularly since her Bat Mitzvah. I told her to take just a few verses and practice them very solidly and then build from there. We looked together at just the first three verses of Genesis. She reports that she's been reading them out loud every day and already feels her abilities are coming back nicely.

But something about Genesis 1:2 bothered me. If you've ever studied Biblical Hebrew, you are acquainted with the famous word pair tohu wa-bohu ( תהו ובהו ), traditionally translated as "without form and void." What struck me in this fresh reading was how the sing-songy quality of this pair just seems flippant within the grandeur of the overall Creation Narrative. I mean, tohu wa-bohu sounds like the ancient Hebrew equivalent of "splish-splash" or "teenie-weenie."

Linguists call these paranomastic and pleonastic doublets (meaning words that occur together, mean pretty much the same thing, and are playing off each other). And they're pretty common in languages.

But the appearance of one in a text of such gravity seemed out of place. I'm not required to like those words there, and just because they seem out of place to me doesn't at all mean that a native speaker of Hebrew in ancient times would have had the same reaction.

Even so, the experience made me look a little more deeply into the words in question. And this led me to the theory I'll explain here, namely, that the second verse of the Bible contains a textual error in the Hebrew. And the actual original Hebrew changes how the Bible describes Creation itself.

I'm not going to go into exhaustive detail about all the places in the Bible the words tohu wa-bohu ( תהו ובהו ) appear. If you want to explore all the uses of tohu, bohu, or the two together, click on the links I provide.

The main points are that the word tohu occurs a lot more than bohu, with the meanings "wasteland" (Job 12:24) or "vanity" (Isaiah 59:4). bohu, by contrast, occurs only three times and only with tohu (Gen 1:2, Jer 4:23, Isaiah 34:11). And there have been many explorations into possible etymologies of these words by comparison to Arabic, Akkadian, and other related languages.

At first glance, since tohu is a full fledged word that can stand alone and mean something to someone, we would conclude that bohu is the rhyming tag-along that fills out the doublet for effect. Kind of like how "super" is a real word that describes something good. The addition of the "duper" somehow makes the two together even stronger. But you couldn't really tell someone out of the blue, "Hey, you did a duper job on that project!"

Isaiah does make a word play in which he uses both. In 34:11 he describes the destruction of the land and writes "he stretched over it the line of vanity (qaw-tohu; קו־תהו ) and the stones of nothingness (abney-bohu; ואבני־בהו ). This would seem to be like saying "he did super in the morning and duper in the afternoon." It only makes sense because the two are being employed together.

And that's what we know about tohu wa-bohu.

So I'm looking at the phrase in context and something hits me. We have two small words, each ending in the letter waw and they're connected by the particle waw (which means 'and'). Almost half of the phrase is that single letter! Then I spot that immediately after the phrase tohu wa-bohu we have "and darkness" (wa-khoshek; וחשך ).

Now, we need to remember that the texts we have that were eventually turned into the Hebrew Bible were copied by hand for centuries. If you've ever tried to hand copy something a page or so long, you're amazed at how easy it is to make a mistake.

One common mistake that bleary eyed copyists would make is either omitting letters or words or copying them twice (called dittography). I catch myself making these kind of mistakes even while typing a simple email. I've gone back and, to my bewilderment, I typed the word "the" twice in a row.

Hebrew copyists did a remarkable job. But they made understandable human errors. One error was accidentally double copying the letter waw (the letter "w").

This is what happened in Hosea 11:3, where the Hebrew text says: "I taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in his arms (zero'otayw; זרועתיו )." The problem is that that makes no sense whatsoever.

Translations into Greek and Latin made in ancient times were clearly looking at a different Hebrew text than the one we currently have. The ancient translations are reading this as "my arms" (zero'otay; זרועתי). And when we realize that the very next word starts with the waw (wa-lo'; ולא "and not"), we can see what happened here. Some scribe accidentally copied the waw twice and then the extra waw was tagged onto the preceding word (which turns "my arms" into "his arms").

Back to tohu wa-bohu wa-khoshek. Let's imagine that the final waw of bohu ( בהו ) was a copyist duplicate from the following waw of wa-khoshek ( וחשך ) "and darkness." This made me suspect that this sing-songy little phrase wasn't originally two words at all. After someone accidentally added a waw, more could have been added later to try and make some sense of the resulting problematic word.

 So I looked at the possible original word, removing the vowels and all waw's: *t-h-b-h. A Semitic word should have three consonants that make up its root. This word looks to be a noun from the root h-b-w (since a final waw turns into h). And words prefixing a t- are common in Semitic languages. In Hebrew, for instance, we have tip'arah ( תפארה ), "beauty"; torah ( תורה ), "teaching"; tiqwah ( תקוה ), "hope."

Now, there are no other words in Hebrew with the root h-b-w. But the closely cognate Arabic language has preserved considerably more of the original Semitic base. So many times rare words in Hebrew are explained by comparison to Arabic.

It turns out that the Arabic root h-b-w means "dust." As a verb it means "[dust] rising in the air." As a noun, the root produces words like habwa (هبوة) "swirl of dust" and habaa' (هباء) "fine dust/dust particles." In the phrase habaa' manshuur ( هباء منثور), it means "atoms scattered in all directions."

And so, we can surmise that there existed a Hebrew word on this root, *tihbah (*תהבה ), meaning "[scattered swirl of] dust." And this makes a whole lot more sense suddenly than "without form and void."

After all, in Genesis 1:1 God created the Earth. And in the traditional understanding of tohu wa-bohu, that Earth God created is then called a "void."

What does it mean for anything to be a void? I mean, a hole is, by definition, a void. A hole describes the absence of the surrounding earth such that you can fall into it. But to call the entirety of the newly created Earth a "void" is ultimately senseless.

But for the original Hebrew author to describe the newly created Earth as a scattered swirl of dust is perfectly understandable. The rest of Genesis 1 will describe how God sorts out and divides the creation toward ever greater complexity and solidity. It makes more sense for him to be doing that from a starting point of a swirl of dust scattered in all directions than with a void.

Science tells us that after the Big Bang, energy becomes matter and slowly coalesces into the structures such as galaxies we observe today. Genesis 1:2 may now reflect a vision of Creation startlingly similar to what modern science has posited.