The Genesis of Desire

"The evidence demonstrates that the myth is about growing out of the childhood world of the garden (infancy [2.7-9], childhood [2.16-20], adolescence [2.21-3.12], early adulthood [3.13-21] and into the adult world that Adonai Elohim created to be populated and cultivated by mature human beings 93.22-24). It is about finding identity, which does not come from within the individual alone, but within the context of the community, including the earth and animals. It is about coming to grips with the inherent oppositional forces of life created by God in the beginning, and about coping with death as a natural and essential part of life. It is about maturation." - Lyn M. Bechtel, "Rethinking the Interpretation of Genesis 2.4b-3.24," Feminist Companion to Genesis, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

“The innocent Adam and Eve, content in an Edenic first home where everything comes easily and where their needs are effortlessly met, are admonished by a seemingly all-powerful parent to resist forbidden knowledge, even as God knows that eventually they will feel internally compelled to disobey. And compelled they are: first Eve is tempted by the promise of the seductive snake who tells her that by tasting the forbidden fruit she can be like her awesome parent and enjoy parental knowledge, power, and freedom. And just as male sexuality tempts Eve, she easily seduces Adam, who does not want to be left behind. Once the children have shown signs of sexual self-consciousness, God, the Father, has no choice, but to conclude with a sign, that these are children no more. The consequences are clear: it is time to expel them from this Edenic childhood home so that they can build a home of their own, facing the real conditions of life outside the garden of childhood.” - Lefkovitz, L. In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities (Rowman and Littlefield 2010)

Genesis 3:16 translated by Carol Meyers

I will greatly increase your work and your pregnancies;
With toil you shall give birth to children.
To your man is your desire,
And he shall predominate over you.

Purpose of Genesis 2-3, according to Meyers was "to enhance the acceptance by both females and males of the often harsh realities of highland life and to provide ideological sanction for large families and for intense physical toil in subsistence activities."

Ilana Pardes, "Beyond Genesis 3" (excerpts)

"Man has been officially allotted the position of master over woman, but this does not necessarily imply that she accepts his authority. The official hierarchy God-man-woman is never a stable one in biblical narrative. The capacity to transgress boundaries is one of the essential traits of the biblical character, whether male or female...

It is not you who created woman out of man (with divine help), she seems to claim, but I who created you (ish) together with YHWH!"... (182)

The story of creation does not end with the desires of God and Adam. The problem for both male authories [God and Adam] is that Eve rebels against her role as a subordinate of a subordinate in a field in which the female body has a prominent role. Through the naming of her sons, the primordial mother insists upon her own generative powers and attempts to dissociate motherhood [and womanhood more genrally] from subordination. To put it differently, by taking pleasure in her creativity she attempts to undo God's punishment in Gen. 3:16, to misread God's linking of female procreation with sorrow and with subjugation to man. (188-189)

"Aruru [the mother goddess], together with [itti] him [Marduk] created the seed of mankind," - Babylonian creation myth, as cited by Ilana Pardes

Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality

“The response of the woman to the serpent reveals her as intelligent, informed, and
perceptive. Theologian, ethicist, hermeneut, rabbi, she speaks with clarity and
authority. Although the divine words of prohibition were addressed to the earth
creature, she assumes responsibility for obeying them…Throughout this scene the man has remained silent; he does not speak for obedience. His presence is passive and bland. The contrast that he offers to the woman is not strength or resolve but weakness. No patriarchal figure making
decisions for his family, he follows his woman without question or comment. She
gives fruit to him, “and-he-ate.” The story does not say that she tempted him; nor
does its silence allow for this inference, even though many interpreters have made
it. It does not present him as reluctant or hesitating. He does not theologize; he
does not contemplate; and he does not envision the full possibilities of the occasion.
Instead, his one act is belly-oriented, and it is an act of acquiescence, not of
initiative. If the woman is intelligent, sensitive, and ingenious, the man is passive,
brutish, and inept. (p. 113)

Excerpts from Tikva Frymer-Kensky's In the Wake of the Goddesses

"The implications of Eve's act are enormous. In a bit, she has 'stolen' cultural knowledge, taking it from the sacred realm and bringing it to humankind...

Like Prometheus, Eve acts on her own initiative; like Prometheus, she transforms human existence; and like Prometheus, she suffers as a result of her gift to humanity. However--unlike Prometheus--Eve, the Bible's first culture bearer, is human. And she is female. This depiction of Eve as culture hero has an inner coherence and logic to it, for Eve's role in this primeval scene is the woman's role in the life of human beings, and that of the goddesses of the ancient Sumerian pantheon. The goddesses are figures of culture and wisdom just as women are the first teachers of cultured existence, the transformers of raw into edible, grass into baskets, fleece and flax into yarn and linen and then into clothes, and babies into social beings. They are the mediators of nature and culture in daily life and Eve the first woman is the first transformer who begins the change from 'natural' simple human beings into cultural humanity." (110)