Ezer Kenegdo

In Genesis 2:20 we get the statement of lack which then spurs on the divine creative energy. It says here that “for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.”

With this, God creates Eve and with her interpersonal ethics and the pattern by which people will relate to one another, to the state and to God. That Eve was created as a “helper” has been a source of contention in the modern world. As such, I would like to take a quick overview of some modern views on Eve and try to separate them out from what the text actually says.

The largest (and loudest) voices who paint the Eve story as some form of subordination of women are to be found in academic feminism. Before I get started I want to make a very clear distinction. Early social feminists who were looking to even the playing field when it came to the societal equality of opportunity are not in the scope of today’s discussion. The feminists who fought for a society where equality of opportunity was the norm between the sexes did fantastic work. A society thrives when there is equality of opportunity and judgements are based on the most qualified candidate from the largest possible pool rather than based on race, gender or ethnicity. The people we are talking about today comprise the field of Feminism as construed as a subfield of philosophy and have had no such positive contributions.

I am very well read in philosophy, literature, theology and literary critique and I have a good grasp on psychology, physics, neuroanatomy, neuropharmacology and anthropology.  My reading of feminist theory is extensive and I can say, without hesitation, that if there is anything of value in the entire field of feminist theory it is only that it serves as an unerring guide for the exact wrong understanding of anything and everything it sets its gaze on.

I’ve spent a lot of time getting to the bottom of why it is that an entire academic subfield has produced nothing but awful scholarship and painfully wrong answers and my conclusion is that feminist theorists come at a problem with an answer and massage the world to suit their pre-concluded hypotheses. Philosophy cannot be done properly when you are looking for ways to make your answers fit any and every question. It is contrary to the discipline, a discipline which finds its center in wonder and fear rather than dogma and ideology.

Feminist theorists such as Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990), Hélène Cixous (The Laugh of Medusa, 1975), Luce Irigaray Speculum of the Other Woman, (1974), Donna Haraway, (A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985), Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror, 1980), Phillis Trible (Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, 1984), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (The Woman’s Bible, 1895), Carol Meyers (Rediscovering Eve, 2012) and Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949) are all so absurdly ridiculous that I do not feel a deeper diver is necessary. Not unlike Environmentalist Philosophy, Feminism is not a school of thought but an ideological vehicle for spite and resentment where there is nothing in the way of actual thinking…especially on such a nuanced topic as the most ancient stories of Genesis.

What is most astonishing is that these are not stupid people. When you read someone like Julia Kristeva or Luce Irigaray you need an enormous cognitive tool box. These are incredibly intelligent theorists who, owing to their commitment to ideology, have misused an immense capacity for complex thought in the service of making their conclusions fit by any means necessary. The folly of such a waste of talent is second only to the folly of such a waste of time with regard to the sadness of this body of theory. The harm that feminist theory and the foolish academics who promote it have caused is beyond measure.

Putting these clowns aside, I do want to separate out Elaine Pagels. The first thing you need to know about Elaine Pagels is that she is smart. She isn’t kind of smart or very bright. Elaine Pagels is terrifyingly smart. Moreover, and you can see this in her debates on Youtube, she is an absolute fierce debater who has an almost uncanny speed of thought. Like other feminist theorists, Elaine Pagels is wrong. I would not want to debate her about it in real time however. That said, as Socrates pointed out some twenty-three centuries ago, being an excellent debater is a fine thing when you want people to agree with your incorrect theory. Debate is an art form, but it is not truth seeking.

While I think Pagels is dead wrong when it comes to Eve, I do think she is wrong in a brilliant and useful way which separates her out from other feminist philosophers who are wrong only in a derivative, nonsensical and sad ways. With this in mind, I want to go through some of Pagels work on Eve (and as she is one of the foremost experts on this history of Satan we will come back to her again before we are done) and attempt to show where she went wrong.

Pagels looks at Eve from several different angles. The first I want to go over is her idea of Eve as a symbol of sin and temptation. Pagels claims that Eve is depicted as the weaker of the pair and as such more susceptible to succumb to the temptation of the serpent than Adam. Her support for this idea comes almost entirely from St. Augustine’s 4th Century works On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, City of God and On the Good of Marriage. Pagels points specifically to Book XIV in Augustine’s City of God where her reading is that Eve was more susceptible to temptation because she was created merely as Adam’s helper.

Pagels, in her analysis, does what so many of her feminist counterparts do. She cherry picks a very specific section out of context and then reads into it something which is not there but fits the ideology which she brought to the party. The reason Pagels stands out is because what she reads into it isn’t merely ludicrous, it just shows an incomplete understanding of the text. It is quite clear that Pagel’s understanding of Augustine came from reading feminist critiques of him and not going directly to the source material. If she had gone to the source material she would have seen that in City of God XIV.11, while Augustine does claim that Eve was more susceptible the reason is far more complex than Pagels considers.

Augustine’s claim that Eve is more susceptible to being beguiled by the serpent never mentions that it was because she was created as a helper. This is something Pagels reads into the text. A deeper analysis which takes into account the entire

work as well as other works where Augustine opines on this has to do with Eve’s matronly predisposition. Augustine, quite correctly, notes that women are responsible for the welfare of incredibly dependent children for a long period of time. As such, women are far more susceptible to the threats of predation, of which the serpent is the archetype. While Augustine didn’t know it at the time, some sixteen hundred years later neuroanatomists would come to the conclusion that owing to hormonal influences on the nervous system, brain plasticity, the autonomic nervous system — particularly the vagus nerve and parasympathetic system as well as evolutionary realities women’s nervous systems are not geared towards themselves but towards the mother-infant dyad. And of course it is this way. If women were attuned psychologically to themselves rather than to the mother-infant dyad civilization would never have got off the ground.  Augustine, and Genesis, just happen to be right.

The difference between Augustine’s claim that Eve would be more susceptible to the serpent because the serpent is predation as such and women will always be more susceptible and pay closer attention to the serpent owing to their biological realities and the necessity to keep vulnerable children from harm is a much, much different thing that Pagel’s idea that he is saying it is simply because she is a helper and as such inferior. That is not an idea anywhere in the Genesis text nor in any of Augustine’s interpretations of it.

Pagels goes on to point out that, owing to Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, Genesis shows her as subservient to him — again, incorrectly, pointing towards Augustine for validation. Pagels says that Eve’s role is complementary but inherently unequal. Pagels conflates two separate issues and is wrong on both accounts. There is the issue of what is going on in Genesis and the issue of how Augustine interprets it and Pagels’ claim that  the relationship is one of inferiority simply does not hold any water.

One thing, with reference to her misunderstanding of Augustine, that she fails to see is that for a fourth century bishop, Augustine was incredibly progressive with regard to the role of women. Leaving aside his musings in the Confessions (397 AD) that his mother Monica was solely responsible for turning him towards God and the important role she, mothers in general and women in general play Augustine, in On the Trinity (416 AD) goes out of his way to emphasize women’s equality in possession of divine rational faculties and being made in the image of God. This was absolutely unheard of in the fourth century. That Augustine should be dug up by feminists only to be stripped of his actual insights and used as a straw man for silly feminist “thinking” is truly a crime against scholarship itself.

Aside from being wrong on Augustine, Pagels is wrong with regard to what is depicted in the Genesis text itself. She frequently points to Eve being made as a “helper” and rather than investigate the context and language of the text merely reads a modern feminist interpretation into it and fails. The ancient Hebrew for suitable helper is ezer kenegdo. Kenegdo is a very interesting word. While ezer is fairly straightforward as helper, kenegdo means “counterpart” as well as “opposite” and “in front of.” Eve is, in a sense, an equal and opposite force. Words used for kenegdo are “fitting partner” and “equal counterpart” or “mutual helper.”

Just based on this we see that there is much more than subordinate breed mare going on. But then we can further enhance by looking at other uses of the word ezer. For instance, Moses names his son Eliezer which means “God is my helper.” In fact, other than its use for King David in Psalm 89:19 and its use for Eve in Genesis, the only times the word ezer is used is for God himself (Deuteronomy 33:7, Deuteronomy 33:26, Deuteronomy 33:29, Psalm 20:2, Psalm 33:20, Psalm 70:5, Psalm 115:9 Psalm 124:8, Psalm 146:5, Hosea 13:9). The word used in Genesis for Eve being a helper to Adam is the exact

same word the Moses and many of the prophets will later use for their partnership with God. It does not take much more than a cursory look at the actual text to completely unmask the feminist farce…as is the case with nearly every bit of feminist literature.

The idea that the term ezer, helper, a term used for God himself and his help for Moses and the prophets, could mean subordinate is just wrong. It is not a matter of interpretation. Any suggestion other than that Eve was created as an equal partner goes directly against the  word of the text and any suggestion that Augustine thinks this is the case goes against

any context and nuance across his works. However, more simply, if God was to create a subordinate being for Adam to dominate why the hell didn’t he just put her with the cattle for Adam to name. The creation of Eve is not the creation of one of the cattle that are created subordinate to Adam, but rather the creation of an equal being who can interact with Adam as a partner — one who is given a title that elsewhere in the Bible is reserved for King David and God himself.

Pagels also expresses that Eve, and with her women as such, are the scapegoat for all evil. She is wrong here too but I will save this for our discussion of the fall. In the end, what I was looking for here was to show two things. First that the postmodern feminist way of thinking has misunderstood this story, in the most preposterous manner possible, in such a way that a preconceived notion of sexism could be written into it as justification for a meta-narrative of power which has subordinated women and requires upending for a modern world. This is painfully false and the absolute definition of bad scholarship.

However, more important than the ridiculous musings of feminists on incredibly complex topics, the placement of Eve as ezer kenegdo is incredibly important. Remember, God, in the creation, is constantly separating out binaries which coexist in creative opposition. God creates man and woman the same as he creates night and day, land and sea and heavens and earth. Man and woman, in their prelapsarian state, are part of the divine creation. It will not be until after the fall that they stand apart in meaningful ways from the rest of the world and from God himself. In the garden they are separated as beings made in the image of God, but they still exhibit the harmonious state of being with the world around them that is characterized by their “walking with God.”