page_title: Eve
section_title: Creation
hierarchical_section_title: Eve / In Genesis / Creation
caption_attribution_description: Drawing; Drawings
context_page_description: Eve is a figure in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible as well as a figure in the Quran. According to the origin story of the Abrahamic religions, she was the first woman. Eve is known also as Adam's wife.
  According to the second chapter of Genesis, Eve was created by God by taking her from the rib of Adam, to be Adam's companion. Adam is charged with guarding and keeping the garden before her creation; she is not present when God commands Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit - although it is clear that she was aware of the command. She succumbs to the serpent's temptation to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She shares the fruit with Adam, and as a result the first humans are expelled from the Garden of Eden. Christian churches differ on how they view both Adam and Eve's disobedience to God, and to the consequences that those actions had on the rest of humanity. Christian and Jewish teachings sometimes hold Adam and Eve to a different level of responsibility for the fall, although Islamic teaching holds both equally responsible.
  Along with Adam, the Catholic Church by ancient tradition recognizes Eve as a saint.
context_section_description: In Genesis 2:18–22, the woman is created to be ezer ki-negdo, a term that is notably difficult to translate, to the man. Ki-negdo means "alongside, opposite, a counterpart to him", and ezer means active intervention on behalf of the other person. The woman is called ishah, woman, with an explanation that this is because she was taken from ish, meaning "man"; the two words are not in fact connected. Later, after the story of the Garden is complete, she will be given a name, Ḥawwāh (Eve). This means "living" in Hebrew, from a root that can also mean "snake". A long-standing exegetical tradition holds that the use of a rib from man's side emphasizes that both man and woman have equal dignity, for woman was created from the same material as man, shaped and given life by the same processes. In fact, the word traditionally translated "rib" in English can also mean side, chamber, or beam. Rib is a pun in Sumerian, as the word "ti" means both "rib" and "life".
  God created Eve from "אַחַת מִצַּלְעֹתָיו‎" (tsela), traditionally translated as "one of his ribs". The term can mean curve, limp, adversity and side. The traditional reading has been questioned recently by feminist theologians who suggest it should instead be rendered as "side", supporting the idea that woman is man's equal and not his subordinate. Such a reading shares elements in common with Aristophanes' story of the origin of love and the separation of the sexes in Plato's Symposium. A recent suggestion, based upon observations that men and women have the same number of ribs, speculates that the bone was the baculum, a small structure found in the penis of many mammals, but not in humans.
caption: William Blake's pencil illustration of The Creation of Eve in response to the line "And She Shall Be Called Woman". The object was created c. 1803–1805 and currently is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art[10]
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