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Some centuries later, when Thomas Aquinas baptized Aristotle's biology, he concluded that woman was a misbegotten male, conceived when there were "defective" influences, such as an ill wind from the south. On the other hand, medieval theologians did exalt the Virgin Mary to near-divine status as Queen of heaven and mediatrix of God's graces, a development that Jung later extolled because it provided a powerful "metaphysical representation" of the feminine. The Reformation, however, toppled that image of Mary for Protestants.
How did such a male-oriented theology develop in the first place? Ancient Europe had no-gods, only the Great Goddess, wrote Robert Graves. She "was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent, and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought . . . Once the relevance of coition to child-bearing had been officially admitted . . . man's religious status gradually improved." While agrarian societies preserved the fertility goddess, often alongside later male gods, nomadic societies chose masculine kingly gods. When the two types of societies clashed—as when the nomadic Hebrews encountered the settled Canaanites—religious conflict was inevitable.
Earth Mother. It was more than loyalty to their own faith that made the Hebrews recoil from some of their neighbors' gods. Cybele, the Phrygian Earth Mother, was almost as ferocious as her Indian counterpart Kali. Male members of her priesthood often felt compelled to castrate themselves, then present their amputated genitals to her as a sign of their devotion—just a sample of the dark side of the Earth Mother, who eventually consumed whatever she bore. Small wonder that the Hebrews preferred the minor inconvenience of circumcision as a sign of loyalty to their God.
In any event, apologists say today, the Jews did not have the luxury of multiple divinities, male and female. Egyptians could have their Osiris and Isis, Canaanites their Baal and Anath, but Jews had to choose. Hebrew had no neuter pronoun. God was either "he" or "she," and out of their patriarchal past the Jews chose the masculine. But very early on, the rabbis were teaching what has come to be doctrine for Christian and Jew alike: that God is pure spirit, above and apart from any real gender.
Contemporary apologists also have explanations for the seeming male chauvinism in biblical passages. They construe Eve's origin from Adam's side—as opposed to, say, his foot—as a symbol of woman's equal partnership with man. As for Eve's culpability, notes Conservative Rabbi Seymour Siegel, it was Eve who had to be tempted; Adam failed even to put up a fight.