The Mother of All Femmes Fatales: Eve as Temptress in Genesis 3

Abstract

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, not to read the Bible through a veil of received interpretation, a proposition demonstrated with particular forcefulness in the case of Genesis 3. Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit (whether understood literally or figuratively) is popularly regarded in Christian cultures as signifying the primal sin, the ‘first disobedience’, which ‘[b]rought death into the world, and all our woe’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.1, 3). Allusions to the story of the Fall regularly assume Eve to be the archetypal femme fatale: she tempts Adam to participate with her in a divinely forbidden act in order to gain illicit knowledge, thus luring him to his death, and with him, the rest of humankind. Biblical scholarship has vigorously protested against this characterization; and, especially since the second half of the twentieth century, feminist scholars in particular have employed a range of methodological approaches to refute the notion that the Bible represents Eve as a temptress.