Eve

Genesis 2-3; 4:1-2; 2 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Timothy 2:13-14

  • Genesis 2:18-23 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”…So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

  • Genesis 3:20 The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living.

  • 2 Corinthians 11:3 But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

“Hommage à Apollinaire” by Marc Chagall, 1912, from Wikimedia Commons. 

When humankind is made in Genesis 1, male and female are created at the same time, both “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:1). The creation account in Genesis 2 is often read as God starting with a male human first, but God doesn’t actually begin with a man. God starts with an earthling. The Hebrew noun adam means “human” which is a pun on the word for “earth”— adamah. The name “Adam” isn’t, at first, really a name at all. The definite article is used throughout the Eden story; ha-adam or “the earthling.” In Genesis 2:21, God splits the earthling in two, creating woman and man. Eve isn’t made out of Adam’s rib. She’s made from one side of ha-adam. 

Eve has been linked to sin in religious tradition, but in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament itself, “she is not called a sinner in the Genesis 2–3 account. To be sure, she and Adam disobey God; but the word sin does not appear in the Hebrew Bible until the Cain-Abel narrative, where it explicitly refers to the ultimate social crime, fratricide” (“Eve: Bible” by Carol Meyers).

  • Eve’s name comes from the word “to live.” 

  • Eve’s the first human in the Bible to receive a name, and she names her son Cain. In the Bible, name-giving is almost always done by the mother.

  • Eve “created a man together with the Lord” (Gen. 4:1-2).  When women in the Bible give birth, they’re said to “bear children” not “create a man.” Though translations sometimes obscure the uniqueness of this verse, the word “create” is the same word used to describe God’s creative power.