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The biblical story of Eve, the prototypical first woman, provided three of the world's great religions and the civilizations they shaped with the raw material from which an ideology of Woman might be constructed. The first three chapters of Genesis provide two versions of the creation of the first woman; in one, she is made by God simultaneously with the man, as a part of mankind ('adamah); in the other and far more influential tradition, she is constructed out of one of the ribs of the man in order to provide him with a “helper” ('ezer) who will alleviate his loneliness. In the paradisiacal garden in which they are placed, the woman dominates the drama in which a serpent, “shrewdest” of the beasts, facilitates her questioning and eventual violation of God's commandment not to eat the fruit of a special tree which confers the “knowledge of good and bad.” She gives the fruit to her husband, who also eats; they “perceive that they are naked” and are discovered and cursed by God with hard labor, sexual desire, pain in childbirth, and eventual death. They are expelled from the garden, to which they may never return.
This is the story which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were left to shape into a view of Woman, and from which they were to derive her nature and destiny. For each, the history of interpretation has been intertwined with the subordination of Woman by law, customs, and cultic rite, regarding her as weak, untrustworthy, and irrational and needing the constant vigilance of men to keep her in check. In Judaism, the Torah, the Midrash, and the Talmud hedge her about with special restrictions and regulations. Christianity, because of doctrinal considerations, specifically identified her in the New Testament as the prime mover in the “original sin” which precipitated the fall from grace; hence, she is the original sinner. Whereas the Qur'an does not specify her as the perpetrator of the original sin, Islamic tradition or hadith regards her as requiring special wat