Three Faces of Eve: What Went Wrong?

Biblical Eve eats of the Tree in the midst of the garden (Genesis 3:6), the tree which God described earlier as “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9, 16–17). How those acts are understood by three very different sources—in literature of the Late Second Temple period and beyond, in rabbinic thought, and in the view of contemporary/feminist thought—is the basis of this article.