To Love and to Cherish, to Desire and to Dominate

To Love and to Cherish, to Desire and to Dominate
Genesis 3: 16b

There is a Jewish story about the first human couple. Often such a Jewish midrash takes up a puzzling aspect of the biblical text and seeks to explain it or imagine something it might imply, using other scriptural material or material from elsewhere. In this case, the story takes up that odd fact that Genesis 1 tells us about the origin of the first couple, and then at first sight Genesis 2 seems to tell us about the origin of another couple. In the midrash, Adam’s original (Genesis 1) wife was called Lilith (the name comes from another puzzling passage in Isaiah 34:14; some translations have “night creature or “night demon” there, and outside the Bible there are various stories about such a creature). Like Adam and with Adam, Lilith was made directly from the dirt. Because she was equal to Adam in every way, having been made by God out of the same raw material and on the same day as her husband, she insisted on enjoying equal footing with him in the garden. She shared in labor and in its reward and worked side by side with him in tending the garden. She also expected to be his equal in lovemaking, sometimes lying on top of him, sometimes beneath him: were they not equal partners? But this was all too much for Adam, and he complained to God. “Is this why I have been created—to share everything with her? When I asked for a companion, I did not mean this!” When Lilith heard Adam’s complaints, she decided to leave the garden and make a new home for herself far away. Immediately, Adam was sorry he had driven her away, and once more he cried out to God: “My wife has deserted me! I am all alone again!” But Lilith would not come back on Adam’s terms, so out of compassion for him in his loneliness God made him a new wife, who was created from one of his ribs. And that was Eve...