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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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ity in this anthropology, although some texts seem only to identify illicit sexuality with the Evil Instinct. In contrast to this, there is another ideology in which humans are made of only one kind of Desire. Although sometimes this tradition uses the term Evil Desire, it uses it in paradoxical ways that subvert its association with evil per se and make it refer to the destructive aspects that are inseparable from sexuality along with its creative aspects. At times, in this tradition, we find even the disappearance of the modifier ''evil," and we are left with Desire alone, Desire that leads human beings both to enormous feats of creativity and love and to enormous deeds of destruction and violence as well. "To the extent that a person is superior to his or her fellows, to that extent will his or her Desire be greater also." Although the second (dialectical) tradition uses the language of the dualist tradition, it does so only to subvert it. For this tradition, the use of the term
Yetser Hara'
does not by any means mark desire as evil but only denotes a recognition of the potential for evil that resides within all sexuality and desire.

Procreation, then, is not the "purpose" or the justification or excuse for sexuality but its very essence in rabbinic thought. Just as, for them, the very essence of eating is to continue the life of the body, so the very essence of sexuality is to continue the life of the collective body. In neither case, however, are other values and purposes excluded or even marginalized. But there is a strong construction of desire as problematic and ineluctably dangerous as well. In this reading of desire, then, rabbinic culture fits neither with medieval Christian theological notions of the sinfulness of all concupiscence, nor with modern conceptions of the innocence of all desire, but somewhere else, all its own.

The "carnality" of rabbinic Judaism did not enable the faithful simply to bypass the sexual anxieties whose spiritual and social dimensions Peter Brown explores in his great work (1988). Rather, the solutions that Christianity came up with to deal with these anxieties were not available; the bodyand, specifically the sexualized bodycould not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage. This belief had the effect of binding men to women and women to men, making impossible the various modes of separation chronicled by Brown for Christianity and found also in various Hellenistic Judaisms. The commitment to coupling did not, however, imply any reduction of the radically unequal distribution

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of power that characterized virtually all of the societies of late antiquity. That inequality not only remained a fact of life for rabbinic Judaism but was confirmed in a whole conceptual apparatus, along with a complex tangle of emblematic stories, articulated in the talmudic literature.
¹⁶But, as I will argue in the next chapter, the male perception and treatment of women did not rest on a culturally based loathing of the female body.


16. Some of the language in the last few sentences was adapted from a letter from Stephen Greenblatt to the University of California Press, November 1991.

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3
Different Eves
Myths of Female Origins and the Discourse of Married Sex

Karen King has remarked that generally when male cultural products speak of women, it is sexuality that is the subject and not women. Men often think "with women" as a tool for thought about men's own bodies and their affectfears, desires, and ideologies about sexuality. Accordingly, a misogynistic representation of woman must necessarily include at least a component, if not more, of negation of the male body as well, a negation that in effect stigmatizes it as female. Such disavowal of the body may indeed be the dominant factor in misogynist discourse, and misogyny often goes together historically with misogamyhatred of marriageas, notoriously, in Juvenal and throughout the Middle Ages (Bloch 1987; Wilson and Makowski 1990). I propose to test this historical thesis here by comparing two complexly related cultural formations, that of Hellenism and that of rabbinic Judaism, which operates primarily as a sort of resistance movement against Hellenism. I will try to demonstrate some fairly intricate cultural negotiations between the Rabbis and the circumambient culture around ideologies of sexuality as signified in accounts of the first woman. In the course of the discussion I will propose that the accepted characterization of rabbinic gender discourse as monolithically misogynistic is imprecise and in serious need of nuancing.

There were two types of androcentric social formations in late-antique Judaism: Hellenistic Judaism(s), in which the flesh was abhorred and women and sexuality were feared as a central theme of the culture, and rabbinic Judaism, in which the flesh was greatly valued and women and sexuality were controlled as highly prized essentials.
¹Hatred and fear of women, as

1. The distinction between Hellenistic and rabbinic Judaism is, in my view, not geographical (i.e., not Palestine versus the Diaspora) so much as chronological. I see the rabbinic movement as in large part a rejection movement against the Hellenization of much of first-century Judaism, including that of Palestine. This Hellenization, unlike the Seleucid one, did not involve the adoption of the "hedonistic"


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such and as a central theme of culture, develop in Hellenistic Judaism out of a disposition toward procreation that can be traced to certain Greek cultural sources fundamentally different from the biblical one.
²Although contending forces were also present in Greek culture itself, the themes represented and canonized in Hellenismprimarily the story of Pandoraseem to emphasize the negation and disavowal of reproduction and thence of women.
³

Philo's Eve

A crucial key to all interpretations of the biblical account of the origins of the sexes is the realization that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have contradictory accounts, as shown above in Chapter 1. The former suggests that humanity was male and female from the beginning, while the latter seems to suggest that the first human was male, and the female came later. Most early commentators attempt to resolve this contradiction in one fashion or another, and the resolutions are ideologically significant to high degree. Philo opines that there are two different beings that the Bible calls "human," corresponding exactly to the two descriptions of creation in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The first is purely spiritual and androgynous in its incorporeal nature, while the second has a body and a gender that is male.
⁴This second, corporeal male human being required that a female

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sides of Hellenistic civilization so much as its dualist, spiritualist, anti-corporeal moods, as witnessed by figures as diverse as Philo, Josephus, and Paul, and by the Qumran writings. I hypothesize that as the cultural effects of this spiritualization became more and more apparent, particularly in the growing Christian movement, a significant reaction developed against it.

2. Judith Romney Wegner's excellent paper (1991), which was published after this book was substantially completed, makes the same argument from a slightly different perspective. This does not, of course, constitute an argument that misogyny is therefore not "really Jewish." Such arguments are endless, unfalsifiable, and bootless. It nevertheless helps to distinguish different cultural strands within late-antique Judaism to see which were adopting and which rejecting certain symbols and themes of Greek culture, and to evaluate the effect of all this on cultural practice.


3. For the prevalence of the Pandora story in late antiquity, see Panofsky and Panofsky 1956.

4. We will see that the theme of a purely spiritual androgyneboth male and female because it is neitherwill recur in some early Christian writings of various types. Herein lies my only disagreement with Wegner's paper (1991). She understands Philo to be suggesting that male and female are different species, taking "male and female created He them," as an entirely new sentence and not as the continuation of "in the image of God, created He him." To be sure, in the passage Wegner quotes,

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