nd's expulsion from the Utopia. In the creation story, the satisfaction of both God and human are at stake. God aims to realize his will in the world, and the happiness and the content of humanity hinge on God's ability to realize his plan. Eve is created to complete Eden. But, instead of conforming to God's plan, she is a stumbling block to the construction of the divinely conceived universe. The idea that God is striving to create an ideal world recurs in Genesis. And in many instances, as in the case of Eve, it is a woman who impedes the fulfillment of God's vision. However, disobedient actions are not always the mode of obstruction. Sara and Rachel threaten God's plan with their infertility. Although the text does not explicitly blame the matriarchs for their inability to conceive, they are involuntarily liable for not propagating. In every instance, it is the women, rather than their husbands or God, who are passively the physical barriers to conception. God, the narrative explains opens wombs when he so chooses. But closed wombs are never stated to be the result of God's initiative. And, even if conception is perceived as God's intervention, it is significant that infertility in the text is always a result of women's, rather than men's, faulty anatomical equipment, making infertility an inescapable female problem. Propagation is a central these in Genesis. In the Noah story, which is God's attempt to reconstruct the world after the first few generations of humankind have proven incorrigible, God commands Noah "to be fruitful and multiply" (9:1) immediately after Noah emerges from the ark. Clearly, the production of offspring is integral to the divine conception of this world, just as it was in Genesis 1. And later in Genesis, when God sets out to build his chosen people, part of his blessing to Abraham is to make his offspring as abundant as "the dust of the earth" (13:16). Women are the obvious vessels necessary for the...
