성, 여성, 죽음 –유대기독교문화에 나타난 뱀과 이브에 대한 논의를 중심으로

Abstract

The previous three thousand years of Judo-Christian imagination for Genesis and Fall were very much inured and accustomed to the notion that sexuality, especially that of women represented death. Even though the Old Testament made it clear that it was snake, not woman, which seduced Eve and then Adam, one was easily tempted to think the fall of mankind was because of Eve not simply because she was tempted first, but also because she was the one who gave death-inducing birth and life. To be phenomenological, one can say where there is life, there comes also death. Eve appeared too much with snake and people began to think she was herself snake through the so-called process of “co-extensiveness.” In the Aramic language, however, it was argued that Eve(hayya) and snake(hawwa) were, in their etymology, derived from the same root meaning “life”(hayat). It is St. Paul and St. Augustinus, among others who are mostly cited as the ones when one speaks of sexist Western culture. It will not be an over-emphasis that after them the tradition which identifies woman as sexuality, sin and death has been reestablished to be fortified. But the Bible makes certain that it is Satan who seduces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Besides, the fact that the resultive effect of the forbidden fruit is also knowledge and wisdom has not been given much critical reasoning and philosophical understanding. It brought about wisdom as well as death. Curiously however, the Bible also says the differentiation of right and wrong might prepare for the way of eternal life: “The Lord said, ‘These people now know the difference between right and wrong, just as we do. But they must not be allowed to eat fruit from the tree that lets them live forever’(Genesis 3:22).” It is now time to reinterpret the ignominious and ignoble Edenic fall: we fell to rise up again as Jesus died to regenerate. When the tree of knowledge and death blossoms, it also paves way for eternity, however serious and harmful the negative effect of reason and knowledge in the history of Western world. It is now therefore we recover the positive meanings of death whose purveyors are purported to be snake-woman. No death, neither life nor eternity. Death cannot be separated from regeneration and rebirth; it is the precondition of immortality.