Discovering Eve

The biblical image of Eve has powerfully influenced ideas about women for the past two millennia. Yet, as Carol Meyers argues in Discovering Eve, the image of the first of women as subservient and dependent does not represent some irreducible historical truth. Rather, it represents the androcentric constructions of a group of urban elite males (including, most notably, the Apostle Paul and Rabbi Yohannan) who had a decisive effect on the founding of Judaeo-Christian traditions. Meyers produces convincing evidence, archaeological, scriptural, and sociological, that ancient Israelite woman fulfilled a role very different from that of the biblical Eve. The real Eve, she demonstrates, was a figure of some social substance, a strong and important figure in the social and familial milieux.