According to another
apocryphal text, the Life of Adam and Eve, Adam was busy in a different
part of the Garden from where Eve was, and when it came time for prayer, even
the angels who normally attended Eve left Eden to go worship God in the
heavens. In this brief moment, while Eve was unattended, the snake saw the
occasion for his approach and temptation. According to this text, Eve ate the
fruit on her own and later gave it to Adam. But the Life of Adam and Eve
does not seem to know a tradition that the snake had deceived and defiled Eve.
Where could this idea have
originated? No doubt the prime suspect for this understanding was Eve's own
attempt to exonerate herself. According to Genesis, Eve explained to God that
"the serpent deceived me and I ate." This verse had a large impact on
early Christian thought about original sin because of what happened to the word
"deceive" when it made that short but treacherous journey from its
original home in the Hebrew text to its exile within the Greek and Latin
Bibles.
In Hebrew, the word for
"deception" is somewhat rare but hardly ambiguous. It refers to an
act of representing something as what it is not. When it was translated into
Greek, however, the sense of deception remained but far more dangerous semantic
cargo was taken on board. The Greek and Latin Bibles allow us to construe the
verse as an act of sexual seduction. This fateful accident of
overlapping semantic fields allowed for the creation of a far more pernicious
picture of the deed Eve had wrought. Not only did she consume the forbidden
fruit, but she was seduced by the evil serpent and engendered the demonic
figure of Cain.
One could argue that the
theme of Eve's demonic conception of Cain is an older Jewish tradition that was
picked up by Christian writers who were looking for a suitable antitype to
Mary's virginal conception of the Son of God. Indeed a tradition like this can
be found in two Jewish sources: the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, an Aramaic
translation of the Hebrew Bible, and Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer. But both of
these sources are very late, having been written nearly five hundred years
after the Protevangelium. It is altogether possible that this tradition
of a demonic conception by Eve came into Jewish materials from a Christian
source. (Gary A. Anderson, The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish
and Christian Imagination [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001],
91-92)
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