But before we accuse the Midrash of anti-feminist tendencies, let us listen to another, more flattering, text:

A king met Rabban Gamliel and told him: I don’t know how to say this, but . . . your God—yes, your God—is nothing but a thief. Here was Adam sleeping the sleep of the just and suddenly God steals one of his ribs. —Rabban Gamliel’s daughter chose to answer the sovereign: Do you know what happened to me last night, Your Majesty? Thieves entered my house; they took all my silver and in its place they left me gold. — If only I could be the victim of such robbers every night, said the king. — Well, said the sage’s daughter, that is precisely what happened to Adam. True, God did take a rib from him, but in exchange he gave him a beautiful woman who helped him when he needed help, served him when he needed to be served and was silent when he talked.

But why wasn’t Adam consulted first? After all, it was a matter of some concern to him. If indeed there is an answer, I have been unable to find it in our legends. Perhaps God was simply unwilling to risk a refusal.

At any rate, faced with a fait accompli, Adam declared himself pleased and ready to comply. Whereupon the marriage was arranged: God officiated and the angels and seraphim took over both the technical and the artistic aspect of the ceremony. There was singing and dancing and joy in every sphere and celestial palace. Never since has a wedding been performed with such pomp or in the presence of such distinguished guests.

The bride and groom might have lived happily ever after, had it not been for the irruption on stage of a new character ushering in the second act.

With the arrival of the serpent, the action changes course. The plot thickens and the reader is caught up in the growing excitement. For the first time the couple faced a third presence. Something was bound to happen. Either Adam and Eve would become closer to one another than ever before or drift apart. Confronted with the serpent, they had to—and were able to—choose. They were in a situation of conflict; they were free—human at last.

The mechanism had been set much earlier. Remember? God had given Adam and Eve full freedom to roam through paradise, doing whatever they liked, eating whatever appealed to them, with one exception: they were not to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. God had warned them firmly: transgression would result in death. Neither husband nor wife could possibly know what it meant to die, yet they obeyed. And they would have obeyed to the end had not the serpent intervened. He altered the existing rules, and thereafter Adam and Eve were no longer the same.

A strange character, the serpent. Evil and cursed, mythical yet real. His role? One source assures us he was the angels’ emissary; they had concluded that man would represent too formidable a challenge unless he could be made to stray and sin. In those days the serpent walked and talked, he even talked quite well. He knew how to convince and get others to obey; he was king of the beasts. A gambler, and vain at that, he was easily persuaded to conspire against those humans, those potential rivals, who were eluding his authority.