in Christians like Tertullian and Clement.
36
In the midrashic text, not only are Eve's ornaments a positive gift of God to the man but they are invested with the most positive sumbolism that the culture can muster. The "you" in the verse from Ezekiel is Israel herself, here identified with Eve, and the time in the Garden is referred to as a sort of honeymoon period of God's relations with Israel. Female ornamentsi.e., sexualityare thus represented in a manner almost identical to the way that they were depicted above in the story of Rabbi Akiva, as, for the Rabbis, the very symbol of their sancta, the exact antithesis of their value in Hellenic and Hellenistic Jewish cultures.
37
For the rabbinic text, female sexuality is the image of Jerusalem, while for Clement, it is the image of a snake.
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In Tertullian, as in Jerome and many others in the Patristic tradition, Woman is identified with all that is artificial and merely decorative and thus counter to the purpose of God (Bloch 1987, 1112; see also Lichtenstein 1987):
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 | | That which He Himself has not produced is not pleasing to God, unless He was unable to order sheep to be born with purple and sky-blue fleeces! If He was able, then plainly He was unwilling: what God willed not, of course, ought not to be fashioned. Those things, then, are not the best by nature which are not from God, the Author of nature. Thus they are understood to be from the devil, from the corrupter of nature: for there is no other whose they can be, if they are not God's; because what are not God's must necessarily be His rival's.
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| | (Tertullian 1989b, 17)
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Familiar by now is the association of women's decorations with the devil. For Tertullian, indeed, the evil of women's adornment lies precisely in that it is inappropriate to the "ignominy of the first sin" (Tertullian 1989b, 14), that is, for her who is after all "the devil's gateway" (ibid.).
38
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| | 36. Tertullian seems aware of the contested nature of the topos, which he cites from the Enoch books and then remarks: "I am aware that the Scripture of Enoch, which has assigned this order (of action) to angels, is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon. . . . By the
Jews
it may now seem to have been rejected" (Tertullian 1989b, 1516).
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| | 37. Indeed, stimulated by a question of Froma Zeitlin's, I am led to speculate whether the number twenty-four for the jewels is not an allusion to the twenty-four books of the bible or to the jewels on the High Priest's breastplate, which were arrayed in rows of twelve, corresponding to the twelve tribes.
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| | 38. Cf. the similar remark of R. Yehoshua quoted above who (alone among the Rabbis) also relates aspects of women's dress to the "sin of Eve," however, paradoxically
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(footnote continued on the next page)
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