Summary Of Lori Hope Lefkovitz's 'In Scripture'

One of the main goals of Lori Hope Lefkovitz’s book In Scripture: The First
Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities, is to critique sexual identities and the roles assigned to them based on patriarchy. Lefkovitz challenges the reader to imagine, or even believe that the creation account that we have become comfortable with reciting could be more culturally taught and believed because of the consistently concrete retelling over time rather than inherently actual. She wants us to see sexual identity as ambiguous; for example, Lefkovitz reads Genesis as presenting God as having both male and female attributes. Like God, Adam also brings life into the world, a role designated as the essence of what it means to be female. Eve and Lillith, on the other …show more content…
19). The fact that God gives Adam authority to name does not qualify him as the “giver of life”. To speak something to life means it is already there and the power of your words (God’s image) calls it forth, to give birth is to bring forth; Adam neither birthed, nor created. What Adam did was assisted God in the ordering process. The author asserts that Adam established ownership over Eve by naming her but I believe God was allowing Adam to affectionately associate himself with the creation that was there to walk beside him. I also believe that the way we have come to see gender roles in the story of creation is through the eyes of those who have created this patriarchal society we live in. What I see in the account of Eden is the way we now “romanticize” love, Eden was what and how we should be living now and not the power struggle that some may see. After the fall comes the true chaos, but in the garden I do not believe that Adam had to contend with Eve for