RE:IJSNC, Issue 1, Volume 2, May 2012 - Ocean Seminary College

Deception: Lilith, Eve and Apples
Due to patriarchal ideals emphasizing domination
and related hierarchical structuring, the world’s
religious traditions relegated women to irrelevant
positions. It is a fact, that even in this sophisticated
time of technological advances and the like, suppression
of the female is still seen in many nations
throughout the world. Even though the U.S. tends
to take an ethnocentric view of being a progressive
model for the world, it is a fact that males seriously
out-number females in leadership positions, and it
is well documented that women will be paid less
for the same position as a man. 1 These patterns are
entrenched in old beliefs and related behaviors.
There are also many women (typically religious
fundamentalists of each religion) who simply accept,
without question, their demeaned stature.
One ludicrous example illustrating gender prejudice
against women occurred in 584 C.E. when the
Council of Macon met in Lyons, France. Sixty-six
men, the majority being Catholic bishops, joined
“to determine if women were human (or
beasts)” (Mijares, Rafea, Falik, & Schipper, 2007, p.
223). Thirty-one of these men decided women
were simply not human (that is almost half of these
influential men).
The scapegoating of Eve created an opening for
such ignorance. According to the Abrahamic traditions
of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Eve was
the first woman, created from Adam’s rib. We are
all more than familiar with the Judeo–Christian
biblical creation story blaming Eve for listening to
Satan and encouraging Adam to eat that apple with
her—the fruit of the tree of life. 2 (In the Islamic
version, Eve acts in unison with Adam.)
Few women know that according to earlier stories,
Eve was actually Adam’s second wife. Merlyn
Stone’s revelations, in her book When God was a
Woman (1971), opened our eyes to stories we had
simply never known. In early pre-Hebraic Sumerian
tales, Lilith is the “hand” of Inanna, Queen of
Heaven. In later Hebrew stories, the Sumerian Lilith
reappears as Adam’s first wife, but because she
refuses “to lie beneath him” and flees, she is demonized.
Her next appearance manifests in Kabalistic
stories, where she is portrayed as a female
demon. These stories tell readers that “Lilith,
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Mijares : Embodying Power and Beauty
Queen of the demons, or the demons of her retinue,
do their best to provoke men to sexual acts without
benefit of a woman, their aim being to make themselves
bodies from the lost seed”(Stone, 1971, p.
195). In other words, if it wasn’t for Lilith and these
demons seeking material form, men would not masturbate.
It is a twisting of tales to assure male dominance
of the “seed”—a seed that is solely for procreation
and assuring patriarchal lineage.
Many modern feminists think these stories are
somehow irrelevant in these times, but they fail to
see how these religious and mythological stories continue
to influence social structures, thereby both
damaging the feminine psyche, and, likewise, the archetypal
feminine within the male. 3 These stories
impact social consciousness at its core 4—a core that
is about to be rattled to its bones. If the later Biblical
myth of Eve being created from Adam’s rib automatically
relegated the feminine to a lesser position,
is it any wonder that Lilith metaphorically refused the
missionary position?
Sumerian myths reveal a very different understanding
of Eve and the rib. Sumerian scholar Samuel
Noah Kramer (1963) recognized that Hebrew Scriptures
had incorporated elements of earlier Sumerian
myths, beginning with the paradise legend. In Sumer,
Dilmun, was the “land of the living,” a land that was
“pure” and “clean” and “bright,” but in this prepatriarchal
version of paradise, the feminine does not
lose communion with paradise. Instead, she is a healing
force as seen in the following stories. One legend
tells what happens when Enki, the water god, notices
that Dilmun is without water. Enki asks the sun-god
Utu to draw forth water from the earth, thereby
transforming Dilmun into a garden filled with fruit,
meadows and the abundant gifts of nature.
Kramer (1963) also illuminates the Sumerian influence
upon the later Biblical version of Adam and
Eve being evicted from Paradise for eating that forbidden
fruit (of self-knowledge). It demonstrates the
ways that symbols and metaphor were changed to
support a new paradigm. In the earlier Sumerian version
(Kramer; Mijares 2003), Ninhursag, “the Great
Mother-Goddess of the Sumerians” (Mijares, p. 78)
caused eight special plants to grow in the garden.
Kramer explains that these sacred plants were able to
thrive due to an “intricate process of three generations
of goddesses” that had been conceived by Enki.