For many years, scholars felt that the unusual elements in Genesis B exonerated Adam and Eve by portraying them as innocent victims of a diabolical deception. In particular, the tempter's apparent disguise as an angel, Eve's vision of heaven, and the consistent emphasis throughout the temptation scene on Adam's and Eve's wholehearted loyalty to God made it difficult to confirm their guilt or to identify their sin. For some time, therefore, Genesis B's sympathetic portrayal of the first parents was accepted as one of the poem's strange unorthodoxies, yet another puzzle in a maze of puzzles. However, the more recent studies of the poem have shown its treatment of guilt to be both less unorthodox and, at the same time, more complex than was earlier suspected. Rosemary Woolf, for example, suggests that Eve was motivated, not by innocent loyalty, but by pride ‘directed towards emulation and envy of Adam’; that she succumbed to the tempter's persuasions because she ‘listened with a willful credulity springing from nascent vanity’; and that the poet's insistence upon Eve's ‘wacra hyge’ and good intentions was an apology necessary to mitigate the impression of Eve as a nagging wife. For her, Genesis B thus portrays a variation on Genesis 3.5, which in familiar commentary was sometimes interpreted to stress Eve's desire to be like Adam.