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Eve — Description

Okay. Fuck me. At time of writing, I am completely laid out in bed for the next two days by that nasty little shitfuck stomach flu that's going around, because some stupid man in a stuffy suit somewhere decided that public health can eat cake. I cannot possibly think of a better time, therefore, to do my deep dive into the first woman to ever get so completely and thoroughly shafted by the patriarchy: my girl Eve. Unfortunately, that means I have to tease apart the Book of Genesis from a scholarly perspective, and goddamn that's a more Herculean effort than it should be. You'd think the first story in the whole Bible would by proxy be the most studied and dissected from the more archaeological and linguistic perspective that I prefer to examine, but no, most of my usually reliable Google Scholar results are over a century old and still hung up on whether the wacky events in this mythology happened irl or not. Guys, I'm pagan, I don't care, I just wanna study this thing externally as a work of literature. The best consensus I can give you guys is that Genesis was tentatively written somewhere around the 10th or 9th centuries BCE, a time frame which (please correct me if I'm wrong) is estimated by A: linguistic structure (you can easily tell if something was written in Shakespeare's time vs modern English, for example) and 2: the excessively polytheistic use of the plural word “elohim” when referring to the divine. Yes you can read it for yourself, the very first sentence in the foundational text of the most assertively monotheistic religions on the planet is, translated literally, “In the beginning the gods created the heavens and the earth”. That's no hangup for a polytheist like myself, nor would it have been for the Canaanite authors who'd ultimately pass this tradition down to the more henotheistic crowd of King Josiah's Judah, so attributing Genesis's authorship to a tradition established just after the Bronze Age Collapse makes the most sense. I'm not going to get into the brambles of the argument about how involved Moses was in drafting the Pentateuch, or… whether he existed at all, because I'm here today to talk about naked ladies like a good little lesbian.
It's going to make my job a helluva lot easier to give my summary of the original Genesis narrative first and then use that to transition into a discussion of Eve specifically, and because of the patriarchy, we have to begin the story of Eve with her husband Adam. By the traditional Hebrew Calendar, the date of Creation is placed at 3761 BCE, but this calculation is skewed by an incorrect date for the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, so accounting for that it's actually 4112 BCE. You can pull a fuck load of other numbers out of your ass (James Ussher's 4004 BCE is perhaps the most famous) because the Bible has worse canon oversight than Marvel Comics, so feel free to argue about it in the comments for my sick pleasurable amusement. It's really not important for today's discussion. Point is, by the sixth day of the gods’ new worldbuilding project, they decided they needed hands to till this fresh new planet they churned out, because Mesopotamian gods are notorious for disastrously lazy micromanagement. So they make a couple of primates in their own image, a male named Adam (the Hebrew word for “human”), and a female named… well most people automatically assume her to be Eve, which is probably the authorial intent, but there's a whole pedantic can of worms born from the discrepancy of two seemingly unrelated paragraphs about the creation of humans which I'll dissect on the day I cover Lilith.
Genesis 2, which in my Bible is on the same page as Genesis 1, then immediately retcons this narrative by saying actually, Steve (I call the Abrahamic god “Steve”, I swear there's an enduring inside-joke behind that and I'm not trying to be disrespectful to the god rendered in Hebrew as YHWH) created Adam on the first day, clicking and dragging his first Sim into his snazzy new Garden of Eden, where everything is sunshine and rainbows and my mom actually loves me. Steve warns Adam, however, that he may freely eat of every tree of the garden except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because if he does, he'll straight up die. I can only presume this was immediately followed with the freshly sculpted first human to ever live slowly blinking one eye after another because he has no clue what this word “die” means. “I… okay… it's probably not a good idea to leave you alone”, Steve rubbed his eyes, bringing Adam a sample of every species the evolution simulator has thus far produced. While Adam comes up with funny monkey sounds to call each of the critters, he doesn't find the frogfish or the aye-aye particularly useful as ranchhands, so Steve decides what Adam actually needs is the solution to all of life's problems: a bangin’ set of tits.
To create Adam's new wife, Steve puts Adam under some kind of magical anesthesia and extracts a rib from his torso xylophone. This rib is then extrapolated into a smokin’ hot babe, and Adam is understandably over the moon! I would be! “This at last is bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” the little man cheers, and then because he's still in charge of naming animals, he declares “This one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken”. There's actually a pun happening here which works in both Hebrew and English, coincidentally. Just like how English “woman” is just the word “man” with a bit tacked on, the Hebrew word for woman, “ishshah” is just the word for man, “ish”, with a bit tacked on, because we live in a dystopian hellscape run by the most egotistically inept half of the population.
Genesis 3 is really the main crux of Eve's story. This episode opens with a crafty little son of a bitch squamate who rolls up to the woman otherwise minding her own damn business, and asks her for a bit of totally innocent clarification: “Did the gods say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the Garden?’” To this, the woman responds, “We may eat of the fruits of the trees in the Garden, but the gods said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the Garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die’”. The lizard is all like mhm mhmm. That's bullshit ya know, you won't die if you eat that fruit, it'll actually brain blast you onto gods’ level, knowing good and evil. That's what they're actually afraid of, their funny little monkeys getting too smart. Well shucks, Eve figures, if it's not poison and it makes you smarter, then maybe we should eat it! Win win! So she plucks one for herself and one for her husband, they chow down, and instantly regret their decision, because they now have the capacity to egret their decision. They realize they've been naked this whole time and amend that embarrassment with a coverage of fig leaves, only for Steve to then show up like “Hey guys how's it-! Uhhhh… guys? Where is everyone?”
Adam and Eve then poke their heads out from what I can only imagine is comedically small foliage, because now they feel it'd be a tad rude to go streaking in front of the Lord Almighty. Now in fairness, it doesn't seem to be the nakedness in itself that freaks Steve out, it's the realization that they'd only know this was an issue if they'd eaten from the tree of sentience he expressly forbade. Oh Me, the other gods are gonna have my head if they find this out! Adam throws his wife under the bus, she throws the serpent under the same bus, and this circular argument just sorta pisses Steve off at everyone. To punish the snake, he removes its legs and curses its bloodline to be in perpetual, venomous battle with the human species, and to punish Eve, he installs the agony of childbirth into the female genome (duuuuude, uncool, that is not a measured response). Adam gets off the most lax, because of course he does, his only punishment is that he will die… eventually, of natural causes. Oh boo fucking hoo. Then, before the monkeys can break out of the simulation even further by eating of the Tree of Life, which would make them immortals, Steve kicks his bratty kids out of paradise and stations a cherubim with a flaming sword at the eastern entrance, barring humankind from the Garden of Eden forever. Not exactly having much else to do now, Adam fucks his wife and produces two shithead little mouths to feed: Cain and Abel, the latter of whom is murdered by the former out of jealousy. It's okay though, because at Adam's ripe old age of 130, his wife pops out a replacement son, Seth, and altogether they'd go forth, multiply, and continue to fuck the whole experiment up until… uh… what day is it? Tuesday? This is why Adam eventually comes up with the more proper name “Eve” (in Hebrew pronounced “Havvah”, meaning “Life”) for his beloved, because she was the mother of all living.
Ooooooor, there's another pun at play here, though if it was intentional, it's not obvious. I'm personally not convinced by this argument, because the Bible itself calls explicit attention to the etymology of her name being linked to this Proto-Semitic root for life, “*ḥyw”, but some nerd is gonna bring it up in the comments if I don't. There's a theory first proposed in a midrash (rabbinical commentary) dating to around the 5th century CE called the Genesis Rabbah which espouses that Eve's name is actually derived from the Aramaic word “hivya”, meaning “serpent”. Tantalizing, noteworthy, but a subtle pun at best and an annoyingly convincing coincidence at worst. Normally I wouldn't even call attention to a tangent like this, but it has opened the door to a lot of other wacky attempts to synchronize Eve with a bunch of other seemingly unrelated characters in Near Eastern mythology. The one that requires the smallest grain of salt is a link to a Punic goddess named “Havat”, purported by Facebook moms and similar pits of misinformative degeneracy to be an epithet of the snake goddess Tanit, but I couldn't find any primary source on this. I spotted a few academic papers name-dropping Havat as an invocation in… a Punic curse tablet, but they're stuck behind a $127 pay wall, so I don't have access to the context which might illuminate this explanation. Similarly, Wikipedia, my most bitter frienemy, spotlights a theory that the Hurrian goddess Ḫepat is either a riff on, or the source of, Eve's name, but Hurrian is completely unrelated to Hebrew, and as a linguistics student, I'm getting sick of all of these “well it sounds like” arguments. That is not how language works. Language is not Linnean, it's Darwinian. We have a traceable line of descent for both of these words in their respective, unrelated proto-languages. It's the equivalent of looking at a bat and going “oh well it has wings so it must be related to birds”, and it's pissing me off.
Okay fine you stuck up bitch, I hear you saying, maybe we are just frustratingly confined to an Abrahamic context. Don't worry, that doesn't mean we're confined to the Bible for lore. I make no promise that I'll hit every apocryphal fanfiction that's been written about these first humans over the centuries but I'll try to highlight the bits which I think are interesting takes on the original myth. Let's start with the snake in the room. Most people out there in the Western audience, myself included, grew up being taught that this specific snake is a disguise of Satan, but this is an extremely late retcon born out of the same Apocalyptic movement that birthed Christianity towards the turn of the millennium. The authors of the original Genesis would not even have a concept of Satan for another four centuries, that being something that was borrowed from Iranian Zoroastrianism. Textually, Genesis treats the snake as… just that, a snake, no different from any of the other crawling things Steve plants in his Garden, if a little wilier. The oldest identification of the serpent with a fallen angel doesn't show up until the Book of Enoch, circa 300 BCE. Chapter 69 (nice) pins the serpent not as the Big Bad Lucifer of Paradise Lost, but rather as an otherwise obscure fallen angel named Gadreel, who taught humankind the art of warfare. In this vein, there was another weak attempt by Marjo Korpel and Johannes de Moor to anachronistically synchronize the Devil narrative with a hypothetical Canaanite core but we're getting way beyond the scope of this blurb.
That being said, the snake-as-Devil interpretation is going to be central to this next extrabiblical story we're gonna go into, the uncreatively named Life of Adam and Eve (known better by its Greek title, the Apocalypse of Moses). This is a short Apocalyptic treatise drafted around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE which I actually think spins the original story into more interesting nuance, especially from poor Eve's perspective. In this cosmology, Adam and Eve were given separate sections of the Garden of Eden to till, assigned to govern the male and female animals respectively. When the angels who normally stand guard over the project get called up to Heaven for worship, Satan (locked out for obvious reasons) seizes the chance to manipulate the serpent into being possessed as his wicked mouthpiece, because honestly the serpent really has nothing better to do. This forked-tongue promises Eve that he'll bring the fruit of the tree down for her to eat, but only if she swears a binding oath to share the crop with her husband. Not having a concept of what an “oath” is yet, Eve says yeah man sure, eats the fruit, and within the hour her neurons awaken to the tune of “fuuuuuuuuuuck…” She doesn't want to screw over her husband's deal with Steve, but she's legally bound to do so now, and he too achieves the revelation of “fuuuuuuuuuuck…”
Steve rolls in, there's a chorus of “he started it!”, the kids are all punished, yada yada, and then the text goes into a frankly uncomfortably dragged out scene of the angels brute forcing Adam and Eve out of the Garden crying, resisting, apologizing, and begging for mercy. For the first seven days of expulsion, the humans wallow, and then they grow hungry, but this cursed Earth will not yield food to them so willingly as Eden. They have to forage, to hunt, to kill. Eve is wracked with guilt, this was all her fault, and she goes so far as to offer Adam the opportunity to kill her for it and maybe redeem himself in the eyes of God. Adam refuses though, for one sin cannot be healed with another. Murder is not the solution, instead they will seek repentance by submerging themselves in the great rivers of their world (Adam in the Jordan, Eve in the Tigris), praying forgiveness for forty days and forty nights. Unfortunately, Satan has a vendetta against these filthy, disgusting, sinful humans who tricked his God into worshipping them, so he slithers to Eve's shoreline in his angelic form, and in the sweetest voice commands her to emerge early, delivering the message that God has forgiven her wails. It's a lie, but Eve knows not the difference, and so is doubly damned. She can't look her husband in the eye after being deceived twice, but she is his beloved, and he finds her again. Eighteen years and two months after their expulsion from paradise, their child Cain is born in a fit of agony.
Sadly, the birth is not the only grief that Cain would pang his mother with. On the night he murders Abel, Eve awakes in a sweating fright, assaulted by a nightmare about Cain guzzling his brother Abel's blood, and when the parents go to investigate, the reality is proven true. The archangel Michael delivers them assurance that God will give them a replacement son, Seth, with thirty more sons and thirty daughters to boot, but none of them will ever be Abel, not even if they should live for 930 years. That time passes and Adam lays ill and dying, concepts frighteningly foreign to his children. Eve begs her husband to give her half of his pain, to alleviate his suffering, but Adam won't have it. Instead he asks his wife and Seth one request: to travel back to guarded gates of Eden and beseech the angels for a splash of oil from the Tree of Life. Of course they try, and they damn near get eaten by one of the wild animals they'd once been able to tame along the way, but it's a futile quest. It's not Michael's decision, it's God's, and God has already deemed that mankind will not know immortality until the day of resurrection. Little else to say, Adam calls for a gathering of all his children and their descendants to be with him on his final day. Eve is inconsolable, asking how she is supposed to keep living in a world where her beloved is dead before her. Adam tells her not to worry, for he knows she will follow him close behind, and then he dies. An angelic procession lifts his body, forgiven, into the Third Heaven where Eden is planted, and when Eve's own heart gives out six days later, God grants her wish to be buried right next to her husband in paradise. Angry and scared as he may have been of the consequences of his inattentiveness, Steve loved his kids more than anything, and forgave Eve too. It's… honestly a really bittersweet tear-jerker, and I think I'll be relying heavily on this version for my own worldbuilding.
Then we bump up against Gnosticism, which, while one of my personal favorite interpretations of Christianity, is an absolute clusterfuck of similar yet often contradictory philosophies which seem specifically designed to be as unparsable as possible. From what disparate translations of fragmentary Nag Hammadi manuscripts I could gather, primarily the Gospel of Philip and the Apocalypse of Adam, the Gnostics believed Adam and Eve to have once been one divine consciousness created by the false material god Yaldabaoth. Yaldabaoth is, at his core, an imperfect and egotistical tinkerer not dissimilar to one Victor Frankenstein, and like that mad mind also grew frustrated with his inability to recreate a living thing perfectly. In his rage, Yaldabaoth tore the being in half, trapping them into material bodies, one male and one female, each in his likeness but missing an essential part of their unified soul. It's therefore the creator's lack of imagination that seeds the fall of Man to sin, not Man's own disobedience. In fact, their submission to God in the Garden is portrayed as something they only do out of fear and enslavement, and eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is what enlightens the humans on the path to clawing their way back into Heaven where they rightfully deserve to be. Eve in this vein (I… I think…), is the human incarnation of Sophia (goddess of wisdom), and so her daughters and all of their female descendants thus assume this role of the fractured perfect feminine, something I can admittedly relate to. I'm not so certain I agree with the Gnostic conclusion that paradise will be achieved when our female souls are reunited with the similarly disembodied masculine Adam, though. Maybe that works for you, but I think boys are icky and I desperately need a girlfriend.
The Muslim tradition, while an even simpler summary of the Genesis narrative, stands out in one particularly interesting way: Eve (“Hawwa” in Arabic) is not the one who tempts the other human to eat the fruit, it's Adam. The equivalent Satan in Islamic cosmology is the djinn Iblis, who refuses God's order to bow before his new favorite creation, humankind, because man was made from the clay of the Earth, and djinni are made of superior smokeless flame. To prostrate himself before a lowly, disgusting, temptable human would be an insult to his own perception of God as the only being worthy of worship. So God casts Iblis out of Heaven, and Iblis swears revenge by turning all of daddy's new favorite toys to sin and wickedness. He starts with Adam. Verses 120 and 121 of the Qur'an's 20th Surah read: “But Satan whispered evil to him: he said, ‘O Adam! Shall I lead thee to the Tree of Eternity and to a kingdom that never decays?’ In the result, they both ate of the tree, and so their nakedness appeared to them: they began to sew together, for their covering, leaves from the Garden: thus did Adam disobey his Lord, and allow himself to be seduced.”
That is… such a breath of fresh air which caught my Christian-raised ass way off guard when I took my Intro to Islam class in college. When they make you crack open your Bible in rural protestant Indiana to read the first story in the book, it's always immediately followed up with an extremely toxic interpretation of “Original Sin”, an exclusively Christian doctrine which insists that sin is some kind of hereditary disease which God is still pissed at you for, small redneck child, despite the people who actually did the deed being dead as dirt for thousands of years. That's like you getting put on trial for whatever war crimes the Pharaoh Menes committed to deserve getting eaten by a hippopotamus. As you can probably guess, in this extremely patriarchal society, this ideology has often become further bastardized with the idea that it was really Eve's fault for being a stupid woman and all Adam ever did was listen to his wife, God forbid. So men have historically been cast as victims of the temptations of sinful, disobedient women, how convenient for them. That's what sucked me into religious scholarship in the first place. Maybe you're like me and you lost your old faith along the way, that's okay, in fact it can be liberating, examining these texts as literature, digging into archives and finding translations of works who took the same tiny nugget of a primary source and ran with it in wildly different interpretations. In this way, though I'm not a believer anymore, I've come to realize that it was the preachers who lied to me, not the gods. They kept me from expanding my horizons on the very books they were trying to teach me, and in submitting to their narrow-minded interpretation, I allowed myself to feel like I had to atone for something I now believe Eve's god has long since forgiven her for, if he ever blamed her specifically to begin with. Go out there into the world, everyone, tell someone you love them, forgive someone you shouldn't, and prove that your freewill is the path away from sin, not a tight rope over it. It doesn't have to be anyone's fault, not Adam's, not Eve's, the snake's, or God's. Eve is exactly where she wants to be, let her lie in rest.
Design notes, you know I have this running joke between my friends that goddamn, I'd be financially set for life if I just drew Rule 34 of historical/mythological babes, wouldn't I? I wouldn't have to worry about a dime ever again. There's just one problem: for as much of a vulgar, sacrilegious bitch as I can be, I'm actually a massive prude, because I grew up in rural Indiana and I've never been touched. This was my number 1 problem when I was still trying dating apps: no one wants to date, it's straight to the bedroom. Ma'am, do not get me wrong, I would love to explore your body, I just need to get to know the brain piloting it first. I need a woman who's five steps ahead of me. Gods I'm so fucking lonely. In this vein, I wanted to try to avoid sexualizing Eve as much as possible here. A lot of the classic romantic paintings done of Adam and Eve just ooze “repressed horn dog” off the artist, but they also do that weird Victorian thing where to highlight their “naked innocence”, they push Eve a little… too innocent, and it gives me the creeps. I wanted to draw a mature, emotionally traumatized Eve who's only gone all Naked and Afraid because she's had to. A woman with bags under her eyes, That's what I find sexy.