Kol Koleinu Breshit text study/Introduction to Textual Activism through Reconsidering Eve

"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)

2) 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 (Eve) 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 authorities [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 generally] 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)

“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)