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ETERNALLY EVE: IMAGES OF EVE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE, MIDRASH, AND MODERN JEWISH POETRY. By Anne Lapidus Lerner. Pp. xii + 238. Hanover, N.H.: Brandéis University Press, 2007. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $26.00.
Eternally Eve is not an exhaustive history of images of Eve through the ages but an organized set of feminist readings and intertextual explorations of carefully selected works. Lerner brings a literary sensibility to her readings in all three genres mentioned in the subtitle, the last including works in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish; her analyses are nuanced and often persuasive. The book fulfills its own stated feminist goals - indeed the author's skills at times seem to exceed the demands of this kind of feminist rubric. Regardless, the literary analyses stand on their own and together serve as a provocative but sensible guide and annotato of Jewish texts in a variety of periods.
The story of Eve eating a fruit from the tree of good and evil and the story of her creation are the central biblical texts in which Eve appears, inspiring a wealth of literary and visual art. To be more precise, the creation of woman described in Genesis 2 and attributed to J is the one most often attended, the more colorful and anthropomorphic of the two creation stories, in which man is created first and woman is fashioned from his side or rib. Each of Lerner 's three chapters is devoted to a different episode or period in the life of the biblical Eve - the creation, the Garden of Eden, life after Eden - each juxtaposing a number of texts from the three genres and periods. This organization based on the chronology of Eve's life rather than of the works read, supports the books goal of "interpreting biblical text in light of later texts" and of cultivating a "three-way conversation" (p. 2)....