Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (186 page)

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undermines the story's later cultural valence. When Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden, in mourning they refrained from sex for one hundred and thirty years. During that time, he was visited by succubi
and she by incubi,
and both produced demon children (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 195). And indeed, the Talmud refers to the very ancient (see Milgrom 1988, 22629 and cited literature) "Lilin and Lilioth," both male and female demons of the nightboth male and female in incantations from the period as well (ibid., 231). By the Middle Ages, this motif has become, "Know and understand that when Adam separated himself from Eve for one hundred and thirty years and would sleep alone, the first Eve, that is Lilith, would find him and she lusted after his beauty, went and slept with him, and from here there went out demons, spirits and night demons" (Yassif 1984, 65 and literature cited there). A genderneutral statement of how demons exploit celibates has become by a subtle shift a representation of demonic female sexuality.

In the rabbinic period, such legends, fears, and terrors of women's sexuality apparently persisted below the consciousness of the official textuality and culture. The evidence for the existence of such legends in the rabbinic culture comes only, however, from their denial or repression in the "official texts." The rabbinic culture (understood strictly here as the culture of the Rabbis themselves) did not countenance them. But from the early Middle Ages on, they become well entrenched in rabbinic culture and official religion, paralleled exactly by similar changes in the discourse of menstruation from cultic disability to near-demonic contamination (Shaye J. D. Cohen 1991, 281 and 28485). The development of such demonized images of women and demonization of menstruation is, moreover, paralleled by a growing anxiety about sexuality itself in the Jewish Middle Ages (Biale 1992). We could argue, then, that misogyny was a latent and predictable effect of the disenfranchisement of women and even more so of the menstrual taboos themselves. We must not, however, read the texts of classical rabbinic literature through the fear and hatred of women characteristic of the later period, running the risk, by doing so, of further canonizing that misogynistic position.
²⁹In this domain it seems clear that the Rabbis are much closer to the biblical than


29. As a case in point, I would cite the notoriously misogynistic modern Hebrew poet, H. N. Bialik, who in his anthology of rabbinic lore on marriage cited extensively the most misogynistic texts and virtually nothing else (Bialik 1951, 48099).

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to the Hellenistic worlds. Once again, comparison of myths of female originsthis time, between Hesiod and the Bibleprovides an important key.

Eve and Pandora

Although Pandora is occasionally referred to as the "Greek Eve" (Séchan 1929), the comparison is somewhat misleading. The difference between these two myths goes back to the beginning, for as Froma Zeitlin has shown in a recent paper (Zeitlin 1990), the narrations are already sharply differentiated in the biblical version itself of Eve's origin.
³⁰Zeitlin has analyzed well the differences between this myth and the biblical myth of Eve: In the Hesiodic myth, woman is not a natural being, nor consubstantial with man, but an artificially constructed creature, "a technical invention, the result of a premeditated action, an artisanal product and even a work of artin short, an artifice in every sense of the word" (Zeitlin 1990). Next, "Woman is not created as a companion to assuage man's loneliness, as for example, the Biblical account of Adam and Eve tells us, but rather as a punishment." Third, woman is not presented as a partner in the "conduct of mortal existence,'' but as a drone and a drain on the man, sitting "within the house, 'filling their bellies up with the products of the toils of others' [
Th.
599]'' (Zeitlin 1990). This contrast between the production of Pandora and the creation of Eve extends to the respective representations of sexual life. Thus:

We note that in Hesiod, far from "cleaving together and becoming one flesh" as the Biblical account tells us, or even "mingling in love -(
philotês
)," as the canonical euphemism in Greek texts (and elsewhere in the
Theogony
) would have it, man and woman remain distinctive and disjoined entities, engaged in an unequal transaction by which woman actually steals man's substance, both alimentary and sexual, and by her appetites even "roasts man alive and brings him to a premature old age" (
WD
705). Her beautiful exterior, enhanced by those adornments which in Greek thought are externalized tokens of sexual allure, proves only to be a snare and delusion. . . . The dangers of sexuality as encroachment on the autonomous male body and the potential imbalance of its humors, the limitations/qualifications set to its unrestricted enjoyment, its separation from a specified love object, and the


30. I am grateful to Zeitlin for sharing a copy of this paper with me.

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unbridled (extravagant) sexual appetites attributed to women are characteristic and recurrent features of Greek attitudes. Later medical and philosophical texts will spell out the dangers to men's health in taking sexual pleasure . . . but the framework is already in place in Hesiod, particularly in the context of woman's creation as an
anti pyros,
a "fire" that takes the place of the one that was stolen.


(Zeitlin 1990)

Zeitlin makes another very significant point. The Hesiodic text manifests an extraordinary ambivalence even about the role of woman as producer of children. Nothing in the text suggests that woman has the function of fecundity, as would be found, for instance, in "orthodox Greek representations of fertility" (Loraux 1981). Perhaps the clearest marker of this difference in the stories is that Eve is referred to as "The Mother of All That Lives," while Pandora is only the ancestress of the race of women (
genos gynaikin
*). As Zeitlin remarks, Hesiod even reverses the meaning of her name from "Bestower of All Gifts,'' an epithet of Gaia, to "Recipient of All Gifts.'' Finally, there is no recognition of the woman's painful productivity in the bearing of children.
³¹

Zeitlin emphasizes that in the biblical story, for all of its gender asymmetry, the picture is entirely different. There, once the expulsion from the Garden has been enacted, there is a certain complementarity (if not equality) of the positions of the man and the woman. They are presented as partners, each toiling and suffering to continue human life. This distinction between Genesis and Hesiod becomes even clearer when the Genesis story is read in accordance with some important feminist interpreters, who have taught us that even Genesis 2, with its creation of Eve out of a part of Adam, is not necessarily a myth of origin to justify female subordination.
³²In any case, the sexuality of Adam and Eve is affirmed as the joining together of a single flesh, and the production of children is an unmitigated good, a blessing or even a commandment. Zeitlin goes on in her essay to inquire into the reasons both for the production of the wholly

31. Carol Meyers (1988, 100109) disagrees with interpretations of Genesis 3:16 that see it as mentioning the pain of childbirth; however, I remain unconvinced by this argument. I think that the man and his travail in bringing forth agricultural fruit from the earth is proposed as analogous to the woman's travail in bringing forth reproductive fruit. I do not believe that this slight disagreement significantly changes the meaning of Meyers's overall corrective to the traditional misreadings.