Eve’s Punishment

Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child (Divided) arguably confronts us with a stark subversion of traditional artistic representations of the Holy Mother, Mary, and Child, Jesus.

The work might be described as a bisected mother cow and her calf, separated for eternity, preserved at a painful distance from one another, suspended in formaldehyde. These are unavoidably mortal bodies, representing both the potential of life in their parent–child connection, but also the inescapability of death. Yet, in creating this visceral and moving piece of work that could be interpreted as challenging idealized images of holy maternity, Hirst seems to produce a profound meditation on maternal suffering that in many ways embodies the experience of the first mother, Eve.

This image appears to speak of the fracturing of community, love, and identity that is central to the story of the first human couple in Genesis 2–4, and in particular for the first woman as she is described in Genesis 3:16 and 3:20. In these texts, following her consumption of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Bad, Eve becomes alienated. She is alienated from the man who is with her: he will now ‘rule over her’. She is alienated from her maternal body: she will now give birth in pain. And she is alienated from God: she is now barred from his Garden.

In particular, I believe Eve’s ‘pain in childbearing’ (v.16) is illuminated through Mother and Child (Divided). Although traditionally the pain that she is to endure during childbirth has been associated with physical labour, the Hebrew word issabon—from which the translations ‘pain’ or ‘pangs’ are taken—is more closely associated with the existential struggle of motherhood. This is the kind of sorrow that is alluded to in Genesis 4 when Eve’s first son, Cain, murders her second son, Abel. Although the biblical text provides no details of the pain Eve would have endured at this rupture in her family, reading this chapter of the Bible alongside Hirst’s image might encourage us to empathize with the first woman.

References

Manchester, Elizabeth. 2009. ‘Mother and Child (Divided)’, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hirst-mother-and-child-divided-t12751 [accessed 26 October 2018]

Meyers, Carol. 1988. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press)

Pregnant with possibility, Louise Bourgeois’s Fragile Goddess is a striking sculpture that resonates with a long history of visualizing the fertile female body. Yet, the phallic form at the top of the torso also suggests a blurring of gender identities, allowing the artist to question concepts of masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and power. For Bourgeois, the mother’s body was the source of both triumph and trauma. While the mother was, according to Bourgeois, integral to the human psyche, she was also often displaced and dominated by the father. Consequently, the mother represented in Fragile Goddess is a source of power, but also a site of repression.

This liminal representation of motherhood is found in Genesis 3:16 and 3:20. Woman is condemned to suffer in childbearing, but she is also praised as the ‘mother of all living’. When Adam names the woman in Genesis 3:20 he chooses the name chavvah or ‘Eve’, which probably means something like ‘life-giver’. This name, and the epithet that accompanies it, stand in stark contrast with the preceding punishment of v.16.

Where does this celebration of maternal power come from?

One possibility is that the language used by the Bible about its first woman draws on language used of the 'fragile goddesses' of the ancient Near East. Such goddesses (Eve’s ancient neighbours) were often responsible for earthly fertility and life. One Canaanite goddess in particular shared a similar epithet to Eve, albeit even more celebratory: Asherah was recognized as mother of the pantheon, the ‘mother of the gods’. 

Perhaps, then, in the figure of chavvah, we have evidence of the Bible’s efforts to diminish divine feminine power by attributing the impressive title of ‘mother of all living’ to a human female whose maternal body had already been shown to be under the control of God.

References

Bernadac, Marie-Laure. 1995. Louise Bourgeois (Paris: Flammarion)

Wallace, Howard N. 1985. The Eden Narrative, Harvard Semitic Monographs, 32 (Atlanta: Scholars Press)

Wyatt, N. 1999. ‘Eve’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd edn, ed. by Karel van der Toorn, Pieter W. van der Horst, and Bob Becking (Leiden: Brill), pp. 316–17

‘I have created a man with the Lord’. So says Eve with the conception of her first child.

Or at least, that’s one way we can translate the Hebrew text of Genesis 4:1. In this verse, Eve claims considerable creative power and places herself alongside God in the making of new life. But pride comes before a fall. The man Eve has created is Cain, the child who will go on to murder her second son, Abel.

This detail has been lost in translation for many interpreters of Eve’s experience of motherhood in Genesis 4. For others, the influence she as a mother had over the moral character of her children, and thus subsequent generations of humanity, remained a concern.

In these vividly coloured panels from the Ashburnham Pentateuch we encounter domestic scenes the artist has imagined in the lives of the Bible’s first couple. Interestingly, Eve is represented twice, on both occasions seated beneath a bower, with a child in her lap. The green register includes some Latin text incorporated into the image which makes it clear that here Eve has her son Cain with her, suggesting that perhaps the damaged scene in the orange register would have originally depicted the first mother with Abel.

Further details from within the image support this reading—particularly noticeable is the difference in dress between the two scenes. In the lower image of Eve with Cain, she is clothed in ornate garments by comparison with the more sombre outfit above. This has led some to wonder whether the artist has here judged Eve against the standard of motherhood found in 1 Timothy 2:12, where women are apparently exhorted to be modest mothers if they are to achieve salvation. So, Eve the mother of Cain the murderous son is presented as materialistic and vain in her rich attire, while Eve the mother of Abel the innocent victim appears more subdued and humble. Perhaps, then, this artist held Eve responsible not only for the first sin in the Garden, but also for the sin that was waiting at the door for Cain.

References

Bokovoy, David E. 2013. ‘Did Eve Acquire, Create, or Procreate with Yahweh? A Grammatical and Contextual Reassessment Of qnh in Genesis 4:1’, Vetus Testamentum, 63.1: 19–35

Pardes, Ilana. 1992. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University)

Verkerk, Dorothy. 2004. Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnham Pentateuch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)