The Rape of Eve

A new reading of the myth of Eden

This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Next week: The ensouled city of Plato

THE BIBLICAL STORY of the creation of woman posed a question to which male theologians and priests have failed to offer an adequate answer: did God grant woman a soul?

Let’s retrace the moment in the Book of Genesis when He might have done.

The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (1615) by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Mauritshuis Collection, The Hague (Public Domain)

After breathing life into Adam’s nostrils so that Adam ‘became a living soul’, God thought: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’

Adam needed a ‘helpmeet’, God decided, to help the first man accomplish his daily tasks in Eden, such as inventing the names for God’s newly created plants and animals and watering the flowers. Adam couldn’t multi-task.

So God ‘caused a …