EVE. – Progenitress of the human race. Eve was created so that man might have “a help meet for him” (Gen. 2:18–20). She was named by Adam (cf. v.) “Eve” (Heb. Hawwah) from the verb hajah (to live): hence “mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20).
That man might realize his superiority over all other beings, God ordered the animals of Paradise to come before Adam, who gave each its name according to its nature, or understood that no animal species was like unto man. Feeling himself alone, he desired a helpmate suited to him, or nearly his own image; and God, to whose creative work he turned, granted his request. “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam” (Gen. 2:21; Heb. tardemah), during which Adam was to know God’s intention, who formed the woman from a rib or from the flesh of his side (sella). The narrative, which is anthropomorphic, means that God, by His almighty will, formed the woman from a part of man. The sacred writer, as the very form of the narrative in a historical book suggests to us and as St. Paul confirms (1 Cor. 11:6), intends to relate a real fact. Metaphysically, it signifies the moral and social relations of the two sexes: man will love woman as part of himself, and woman will lean upon her husband as upon her head whom she loves and by whom she is sustained.
Origen, in reply to the sarcasms of Celsus, spoke of allegory; Cajetan believed it to be a metaphor, following the opinion of Aristotle that woman is a wounded man; Hummelauer, in a caprice as M.-J. Lagrange termed it, maintains that God did not actually take a rib from Adam, but only in vision; M.-J. Lagrange upholds the parabolic sense, by which one would insist only on the fact that man must love woman as part of himself. But all these few discordant voices, arising from having extended too far the anthropomorphic element, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, in moral unanimity, stand for the literal historical sense, which, according to the decision of the Biblical Commission (30 June 1909), cannot be doubted in the formation of the first woman from the first man.
The literary form of an apocalypse. From a phrase of Hippolytus on Eve (Philosoph., 5, 16), Harnack concludes to the use of the Gospel of Eve even by the learned.