Forming Femininity in Antiquity Eve, Gender, and Ideologies in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve

Vita Daphna Arbel investigates depictions of the emblematic Eve that are embedded in one of the most influential accounts of Adam and Eve after the Hebrew Bible, namely the apocryphal Greek Life of Adam and Eve (GLAE) from late antiquity. Treating the figure of Eve as a culturally constructed representation of ''woman,'' Arbel examines a crucial transformative stage in the literary/conceptual discourse of Eve with a focus on several pivotal issues that have not been investigated in previous scholarship. She offers a nuancedexamination of the GLAE's multifaceted and at times contradictory depictions of Eve and, by extension, women; situates these depictions in the hybrid Greco -Roman cultural world in which they emerged, and examines the extent to which they both reflect and construct contemporaneous overlapping andcompeting concepts and norms regarding Eve/women's standing, role, authority, and realms of experiences; and examines the immense impact of these depictions on later Jewish and Christian conceptualizations of Eve/women, which seem to interpret the figure of Eve in accord with the interpretive voicethat characterizes the GLAE, rather than with the biblical voice of Genesis.

Vita Daphna Arbel is Associate Professor of Biblical and Early Jewish Literature and Mysticism at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.