Two critically different versions of women’s place in the world are given in the first book of the Old Testament, a book considered holy by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The first version is from the first chapter of Genesis, and a radically different version is from the second and third chapters of Genesis. The following quotes are from the King James translation of the Bible.
Genesis 1: 26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: …. 27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Then comes the rewrite to fit embedded Jewish patriarchal tradition at the time.
Genesis 2:7: ….the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. 18:And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
21: And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22:And rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
Genesis 3:11: …(God asks,) “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? (Adam then blames Eve; Eve then blames the serpent.)
14: And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle…16: Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
In the first chapter of Genesis, Eve is made in God’s image. In the second and third chapter of Genesis, Eve is literally made from and for man.
In Jewish law, the second and third chapter of Genesis are known as the writings of the Jahwist, or Yahwist, a strand of the Pentateuchal narrative (the Hebrew Torah) whose writer called God by the name of Yahweh. The existence of the Yahwist text is controversial. Many biblical scholars, especially in Europe, deny that it ever existed as a coherent independent document. Even scholars who believe otherwise concede that “among all source-critical theories about the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), the J (Jahwist or Yahwist) is the most unstable one” (Thomas Römer, The Elusive Yahwist: A Short History of Research, quoted in Thomas B. Dozeman and Konrad Schmid (ed.), A Farewell to the Yahwist, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006).
The two accounts present a critical difference. If Eve is made in the image of God, she has full personhood and full moral agency, able to decide her own fate. If she is made in the image of man, she not only lacks full moral agency, but, like a slave, does not even own her own body.
In America, the extreme far-right wing of the Republican party and the “Christian” Nationalists are firmly in the Yahwist Jewish tradition of giving men control over women. Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for the next Republican president, includes plans to revive the 1837 Comstock Laws that prohibit all contraception and plans to outlaw abortion nationwide (even in the case of a raped and pregnant 10-year-old girl whose parents had to sneak her out of Texas last year to get viable health care).
Now that the U.S. Constitutional protections of the past 50 years no longer pertain to women, we are once again at the mercy of the laws of man—laws that can change overnight.
Male and female believers in the teachings of Christ can rightly claim the first version of Creation, in which women were made by God in God’s image. To choose the controversial ancient Jewish teachings that take moral authority away from women is leading us to abandon the full promise of both the laws of God and the ever-changing laws of men.
Milton wrote in Paradise Lost the lofty and damning phrase, “He for God alone, she for God in him” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1674, Book IV, line 297).
It need not be this way. Women are not naturally subservient or inferior. It could be that the Yahwist scholar and Milton were both wrong. Perhaps man’s representation of the voice of God got it right the first time.