From Hebraic Divorce to Loving Reconciliation: Adam and Eve like Milton and Mary Powell?

• In Event: Early Modern Christian Readings of the Hebrew Bible I: Milton and the Bible

Abstract

Milton’s Divorce Tracts develop a reading of Hebraic biblical texts that navigate between resentment and anger and love. This pattern would provide him with a code to live his own life by as well as an important theme in the relations between his Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. His principled readings of biblical texts in support of divorce balanced his understanding of the Hebrew Bible against a sense of the love that emanates from the gospels. This pattern of idealized divorce tempered by love underlies the way in which Adam moves from anger in Book 9 to the love and reconciliation with Eve later in Book 10. When he sees Eve and responds “with stern regard” (10.866) that becomes so angry as to sound almost comic, Eve’s weeping and love wins him over, an echo, perhaps of a more private scene when Mary Powell returned to Milton in 1645.

Author

• Noam Flinker, University of Haifa