Gerda Lerner

Western civilization draws many of its leading metaphors and definitions of gender and morality from the Bible.

The combined pressure of the need for agricultural labor in settling a desert environment and the concurrent loss of population due to wars and epidemics crisis in the very period when the rudimentary principles of Jewish religious thought came into being may explain the Biblical emphasis on the family and on woman’s procreative role. In such a demographic crisis women would most likely have agreed to a division of labor which gave their maternal role primacy.

David Bakan, in a highly original and stimulating interpretation of the Book of Genesis, argues that the central theme of the book is the assumption of paternity by males. When men make the “scientific” discovery that conception results from intercourse between men and women, they understand that they have the power to procreate, which previously they had believed only the gods possessed.