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( Åὔá )
Eve was (according to J, Gen_3:20; Gen_4:1) the wife of Adam (q.v. [Note: quod vide, which see.] ) and the mother of the human race. (1) St. Paul recalls the story of her fall as a warning to his young and attractive, but weak and unstable, Corinthian Church, As God presented Eve, a pure virgin, to Adam, so St. Paul as espoused his Church to Christ, and hopes to present her as His bride at His speedy return. He fears, however, that as the serpent beguiled Eve in his craftiness, so the Church may be corrupted from the simplicity and purity of her devotion to Christ. St. Paul’s noun ðáíïõñãßá (craftiness) represents the Heb. òָøåּí of Gen_3:1 better than the adjective öñüíéìïò of the Septuagint does. It was apparently the teaching of the Rabbis that the serpent literally seduced Eve (4Ma_18:6-8; cf. Iren, c. Hœr. i. xxx. 7); and a Church which should let herself be drawn away from Christ, who has the right to His bride’s whole-hearted love, would he guilty of spiritual fornication. The identification of the serpent with the devil, which was far from the thoughts of the writer of Genesis 3, first appears in Wis_2:24, ‘But by the envy of the devil death entered into the world’ (cf. Rom_16:20, Rev_12:9; Rev_20:2).
(2) The writer of 1 Tim. (1Ti_2:13-14) uses the story of the Fall for the purpose of proving woman’s natural inferiority to man. He remarks that man was not beguiled, but that ‘the woman’-a word spoken with the same accent of contempt as in Gen_3:12 -being beguiled, fell into transgression. The writer appears to think, like Milton, that the man knew better, and sinned, not under stress of temptation, but in generous sympathy with his frail partner, whose fate he resolved, to share. This is, of course, a man’s account of the origin of sin, and happily the original story, with all the Rabbinical and other unworthy inferences that have been drawn from it, is no longer among the Christian credenda.
James Strahan.