In one of the pioneering works of contemporary feminist Christian theology, Ruether critiques the traditional interpretation of the creation story in Genesis using a variety of techniques. In her interpretation, the creation story is an explanation for the creation and rise of agriculture and society from scattered hunter-gatherer bands. To her, the process by which men gained and maintained power over women continues to this day. This process is nothing less than giving women the burden of both productions and reproduction while men remain a leisure class. Here are several excerpts from her work where she discusses the creation story.

      "The establishment of this relationship between male and female spheres depends not only on males as definers of culture but also on the burdening of women with most of the tedious, day-to-day tasks of economic production. Males become a leisure class with relatively little to do but decorate themselves, sharpen their weapons, and prepare for the occasional great excursions of hunting and war. Confining some women to ornamental status is the luxury of a male aristocratic elite. The domination of women throughout most of human history has depended on the freeing of males for cultural control by filling women's day with most of the tasks of a domestic production and reproduction." page 74

      "Moreover, male culture symbolizes control over nature in ambivalent ways. The later priestly creation story of Genesis 1 may command Adam to "fill the earth and subdue it," but the earlier folkloric story of Paradise (Gen. 2-3) pictures a time of dependence on a fruitful earth that gave of itself without human labor. The human effort to control and define one's own life is seen as a revolt against dependence on God, precipitated by woman and resulting in a loss of the earth as a spontaneously reproductive paradise. Work, intervention, and struggle to control nature is the curse to which man is now confined. Woman is punished for her role by being subjugated to man. Male culture compensates for the sin of intervention in nature by picturing obedience to ultimate reality as abnegation of control, as "childlike dependence" on a power that controls and defines man." page 76

      "This biological tendency has been exaggerated by socialization into dominant and subordinate social roles. Dominant social roles exaggerate linear, dichotomized thinking and prevent the development of culture that would correct this bias by integrating the relational side. Women and other subordinate groups, moreover, have had their rational capacities suppressed through denial of education and leadership experience and so tend to be perceived as having primarily intuitive and affective patterns of thought. Thus socialization in power and powerlessness distorts integration further and creates what appears to be dichotomized personality cultures of men and women, that is, masculinity and femininity." page 90

      "The Hebrew myth of Eve has had much greater cultural impact than that of Pandora, since Christian theology has understood it to be divine revelation and hence has taken this rather odd folk tale with consummate theological seriousness. It is perhaps not insignificant to note that Hebrew thought itself, in the Scriptures and early Rabbinic writings, did not take this story very seriously. Although it appears as one creation story in the early Genesis material, it is never referred to at any other place in Hebrew Scripture as the basis of the etiology of evil. For Judaism, the primary myth of evil lies in the story of God's election of Israel and its subsequent apostasy from God by seeking idols. It is this drama of good and evil, and not the Eve story, that shapes Hebrew thought. . . .

      The Gospels likewise ignore the Eve story as the basis of the origin of evil. They share the late Jewish world view in which human decision making, for good or evil, is surrounded by powerful demonic influences that tip the balance to the negative side. But the etiology of the demonic power is not spelled out.

      Hence, it is Pauline theology, with its dualism of Old and New Adam, that lays the basis for a new theological seriousness toward the story of Adam's fall. In the post-Pauline epistle 1 Timothy, Eve's secondary position in creation and primacy in sin are used to justify the resubjugation of women in the Christian Church. Pauline theology raises the problem of sin to a dimension unknown in Judaism. While Judaism recognizes an element of collective historical evil as cosmic powers that pull humans to bad choices, it presumes that human freedom to choose good over evil remains fundamentally intact.

      Pauline theology, as it came to be interpreted by Augustine and his successors, saw the Adamic fall as obliterating human freedom to choose good. Humans become alienated from their own good human potential, which must be given back to them as a gift through the Crucifixion of Christ. Thus, the scapegoating of Eve as the cause of the fall of Adam makes all women, as her daughters, guilty for the radical impotence of "man" in the face of evil, which is paid for only by the death of Christ!" page 166

      "In the stories of Pandora, the Watchers, Lilith, and Eve the female is seen as the enemy of harmony, good order, and felicity in human affairs. These myths reveal a tremendous male fear of woman's suppressed power, which, having been once unleashed, overthrew original paradisal conditions and introduced disease, mortality, hard work, and frustrating struggle for survival in place of what was ease and happiness in the midst of spontaneous plenty.

      If this "original paradise" is recognized to be a mythologizing of early infancy, in which the mother provides the time of ease and plenty from her own body, then such male myths actually scapegoat women as mothers for the loss of the paradise which she had once provided but which is lost to the male, wrenched from childhood into the adult (male) world of harsh struggle. It is not accidental that figures such as Eve, Lilith, and Pandora, transformed into myths of the female origins of evil, are also ancient Mother-Goddesses. The Mother-Goddess who provided paradise is transformed, in male puberty rites, into the evil female who deprived the male of paradise." page 168

      Regarding Philo's interpretation of the creation story Ruether writes, "The creation of Eve, however, represents the separation of Adam's mortal, bodily lower half and his soul. With Eve's creation, Adam becomes seduced to his lower self through sexual desire, which "is the beginning of iniquities and transgressions, and it is owing to this that men have exchanged their previously immortal and happy existence for one which is mortal and full of misfortune." " page 169

      "Stories like the myth of Eve also enforce the continued repression and subjugation of woman, as "punishment" for her primordial "sin" in causing the fall of "man" and the loss of paradise. Because women are in fact not inferior, but full human persons of equivalent capacities upon whom all males, as children, were once dependent, the task of suppressing women into dependence on males is a never-ending struggle. It is not a "coup" accomplished once upon a time in some mysterious victory of patriarchy at the dawn of history. It must be reiterated generation after generation, by repeating the myths of woman's original sin to the young, both male and female, and by reinforcing laws and structures that marginalize women from power roles in society. Even then the task is not accomplished. Wives show an alarming lack of submission, an irrepressible tendency to assert shreds of autonomy and resistance. The whole range of coercive techniques, from brute force to contempt and ridicule to artful blandishments, is necessary to keep her in her "place." Religion is relied upon as both the foundation and the daily aid in this project.

      New myths and methods of terrorizing women into keeping their place are invented to suppress or eliminate those women who have somehow escaped becoming sufficiently docile to their own servitude." pages 169-170

      "The recognition of sexism as wrong, evil, and sinful brings about the total collapse of the myths of female evil. . . . Every aspect of male privilege loses its authority as natural and divine right and is reevaluated as sin and evil. This is deeply frightening to males. Consequently, they have been quick to slam the door on the slightest beginnings of such questioning and to mount counter-revolutionary campaigns of resubjugation of women whenever feminist movements have begun. But it is also frightening to women, They have to question all the ways they have traded a diminished humanity for dependent forms of security." page 173

      Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward A Feminist Theology, Boston, Beacon Press, 1983

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