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The authors of Genesis, and other books in the Pentateuch, created their text by taking myths and stories that had arisen in various sections of their society at different stages of its development, and by means of a process of combination, re-arrangement and redaction, they re-wrote them to provide an interpretation suitable for their society in quite new historical circumstances. These circumstances were extreme — they were a people cut off from their homeland and their origins, exiles in the superior and sophisticated civilisation of imperial Babylon. In his account of the Creation and the Fall, the Yahwist historian (as scholars refer to this one of the two authorial narratives of Genesis) addresses himself to a people experiencing political subordination and alienation from the culture in which they are living. Hence, he takes up what would be an understandable preoccupation for them in such circumstances — a reflection on the origins of human culture.
Juliet Mitchell, in her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism embarks on a project that, in some sense, resembles that of the Yah-wist historian. ‘All questions relating to the position and role of women in society’ she says, ‘tend sooner or later to founder on the bedrock of “where did it all start”?’ This, too, is a question about the origin of human culture, and what it implies for the subordinate position that women find themselves in. By taking Freud’s psychoanalytical myth of the origins of patriarchal society, together with Engel’s historical materialist account of women’s subordination in the institutions of the family, private property and the state, she re-appropriates for feminism two of the most important critical traditions of our society
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- Copyright © 1981 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Here I'm following Timothy Radcliffe's dating of the Genesis texts from the exilic period, though I'm aware that many exegetes still opt for a Solomonic dating. If the latter were to be established, obviously this text would require some modification.
2 See the work cited by Inga‐Stina, Ewbank on p 130 in Women Writing and Writing about Women ed. Mary, Jacobus. Croom Helm, London 1979.Google Scholar
3 Cf Timothy Radcliffe's parallel argument about the Church on p 274 of his article The Old Testament as Word of God Canon and Idetity in New Blackfriars June 1980.
4 My observation here originated from Edwin Ardener's article, ‘Belief and the Problem of Women’in Perceiving Women, ed. Shirley, Ardener, Halstead Press, New York . 1977.Google Scholar
5 See article cited above in No 3.
6 Encounter with the Divine in Mesopotamia and Israel, HW Saggs, 1977.Google Scholar
7 I do not mean to imply here that Israel itself was a classless society which encountered class society for the first time in Babylon. Marked social stratification had been apparent in Israelite society since the 8th century BC (the time of Amos) and Israel in exile was only ‘classless’ because the lowest strata had never been taken into exile, and among those who were, other religious and social differences were rendered irrelevant by their new common socio‐economic situation as exiles.
8 See forthcoming article by Timothy Ashplant on The Eternal Present.
9 See Chap 11 ‘Eschatology and Politics’ p 232 of G Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation.
10 See Joan Bamberger's article, The Myth of Matriarchy; Why Men Rule in Primitive Society in Woman, Culture and Society, eds. Rosaldo and Lamphere, California 1979, for an analysis of the reactionary function of the matriarchal myth.
11 See Roger Ruston's unpublished paper, The Theology of Sexuality and Marriage.
12 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Fred Engels.