The alarming resurgence of biblical speculation by the nuclear war-lords of the West in the last few years has drawn peace-movement Christians to sober biblical scholarship. New Blackfriars writers have pioneered the reclamation of ‘the most symbolically-rich eschatological language of the Bible, from Isaiah to Revelation, ... captured by abstentionist sects and a politically hostile movement’ and made ‘virtually unavailable to Christians who do not share those views about politics and God’s action in the world’.

The question I would like to explore here is: how, if at all, can this kind of investigation, which draws on academic exegesis but clearly goes beyond it, also help us to reclaim and wrestle with symbols and stories which superficially appear to be of a different kind, namely, the symbols and stories which speak of our earliest beginnings? With the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel? This might be termed the ‘pop’ culture of the Bible, not being seen as belonging to the specialist or to any political faction with a biblical axe to grind, but as the mythic heritage of all—timeless, beloved of Hollywood as the stuff of Epic spectacle. It is, however, the area which has long been of interest to the Western Women’s Movement, because it has come to reckon with the power of these foundational myths over our culture’s perceptions of gender. Feminists see these myths as captured and distorted by patriarchal religion and hence by patriarchal power in general.