secondary status for women. At the same time, strong women are everywhere in the bible, from the matriarchs to the independent women of the exodus. Mothers protect their children, women seduce the enemy to protect their kingdom, matriarchs rule over nations and are considered the mothers of nations.
There are two creation stories in the Bible, and there is a striking discrepancy between the two, found in the first and second chapters of Genesis. In the first, God created the fishes and the birds and all the creatures of the water on the fifth day, and He created the terrestrial animals and man on the sixth day:
From this narrative we infer that man was the last to be created of all living beings on earth, and incidentally we gather that the distinction of the sexes, which is characteristic of humanity, is shared also by the divinity. . . (Frazer 1).
In the second version, God created man first, the lower animals next, and woman last, produced as an afterthought from the rib of man. The order of creation is clearly reversed in the two accounts.
The difference between the two versions is explained by the fact that they were produced by different writers and came from two different and originally independent documents. They were later combined into a single book by an editor who did not try to harmonize the two accounts. The first account of creation comes from what is known as the Priestly document, composed by priestly writers during or after the Babylonian captivity. The second account is from the Jehovistic Document which was written several hundred years before the other, perhaps in the ninth or eight century B.C. There are clear religious differences between the two accounts. The Priestly writer conceives of God in an abstract form as an entity withdrawn from human sight and as creating all things by fiat. The Jehovistic writer sees God in a very concrete form as acting and speaking like a man. The Jehovist...