Enoch’s Mortality
And I put sleep into him and he fell asleep. And I took from him A rib, and created him a wife, that death should come to him by his wife, and I took his last word and called her name mother, that is to say, Eva (Eve). 1 Enoch 30:16
Death should come to him – It’s pretty clear that the Genesis account of the Fall does not put the blame on the woman. In fact, if we pay close attention to the details in Hebrew, we soon discover that her involvement was the result of seduction, not deliberate rebellion. Paul says as much in 1 Timothy 2:14. How that happened is a study in Adam’s addition to the commandment and his silence during the seduction. However, when we read 1 Enoch’s account, things change. Now Adam is the perfect manifestation of God’s intention, emanating from the spiritual world. It is Eve who brings about his death, and death to all mankind. The woman is the villain. Listening to the fallen angel, Satan (Satanial), she plunges all of us into punishment, destroying the image of God in Adam. A new nature arises—the sin nature that keeps us captive to our appetites.
1 Enoch was part of the sacred material of believing communities in the first century. It was never canonized but it nevertheless had substantial influence. In fact, there are good arguments contending that Enoch’s view of “Son of Man” was more influential in Matthew’s gospel than the book of Daniel. But in Enoch’s account of the Fall, something alien to the Hebrew worldview appears, i.e., the shift of culpability from Adam to Eve. What’s particularly interesting is that this shift doesn’t seem to have influenced Paul. He follows that original Genesis account, finding the deliberate sin in Adam’s lack of responsibility rather than in the woman’s gullibility. Once again we discover that sacred material circulating in the first century presented many different views of the Hebrew text.
Consider the impact of the changes Enoch makes to the Hebrew original. First, of course, is the transformation of sēlāʿ(Hebrew: “side”) into the specific “rib.” Second, according to Enoch God’s intention was to create a “wife,” but the Hebrew text uses ʾiššâ, a word that can mean “woman,” “wife,” or “female.” Once again Enoch adds specificity. Now we come to the very strange phrase “that death should come to him by his wife.” This is thoroughly theological. There is nothing in the Hebrew text like this. In fact, “She is depicted as the physical counterpart of man, deserving of his unswerving loyalty. It is in this context (vv. 24–25) that the word is first used in the sense of ‘mate’ or ‘wife.’ The Bible holds woman in the highest regard and sets forth ‘graciousness’ (Prov 11:16) and ‘worth’ (Ruth 3:11) as womanly ideals.”[1] Enoch certainly does not hold this view. In Enoch the woman is the true source of Man’s physical demise. She may be “the mother of all living” in Genesis, but she is the harbinger of death in Enoch. You will notice that Enoch doesn’t call her “the mother of all living,” but rather simply “mother.” Since she is the reason all men die, it is hardly appropriate to call her “the mother of the living.” As we see in the following verses, she and Satan (hardly the equivalent of nāḥaš, “serpent”) account for the crime. Adam is blameless until he listens to her rebellion.
Why bother with this non-canonical story? We know that real account in Genesis. Why should we care if some pseudepigraphical work of the first century B.C.E. alters the text? The reason should be clear. If believing communities considered Enoch sacred, they accepted Enoch’s exegesis as God’s word. And the legend of the Fall became the original sin of the woman.
All ideas have origins. Perhaps our mistaken idea about the first sin belonging to the woman owes its origin to Enoch, not Augustine.
Topical Index: woman, sin, serpent, death, the Fall, 1 Enoch 30:16
[1] Mccomiskey, T. E. (1999). 137 אנשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 59). Chicago: Moody Press.
