Misogyny Revisited: The Eve Traditions in Avot de Rabbi Natan, Versions A and B

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study of gender in Avot de Rabbi Natan, using a theoretical frame from cultural anthropology, is an enterprise of feminist historiography. Focusing on ARNB's singular formulation of aggadic accounts of Eve's sin, it proposes a possible historical trajectory of Jewish women's experience and how that experience was perceived, manipulated and/or negotiated by the Jewish men who were the formulators and transmitters of rabbinic tradition. Generally speaking, traditions about women and gender in ARN demonstrate a stance on the natural, religious and social subordination of women to men, which I will designate “patriarchal stewardship.” Yet the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, go beyond articulating this androcentric stance on gender differentiation and social hierarchy; they negotiate a cognitive, religious problem: why do women, and women alone, suffer and die in the process of biological reproduction if “be fruitful and multiply” is a divine imperative in Genesis 1:28?