Question:  Dear Greg,

            Please clarify for me the scripture in Genesis 3:16 (the last part), “Then he said to the woman, ‘You will bear children with intense pain and suffering.  And though your desire will be for your husband, he will be your master.’”

            This was a curse on women.  Please share your thoughts.

            I work with Christian women who are in abusive relationships and this scripture comes into my mind as I see over and over again the power the husband has over her, and her great “desire” for him even at the expense of her own life or her children’s lives.  Does this scripture have any relevance to this situation?  How do you interpret its meaning?

            Thank you,

            Nancy

Answer:  Dear Nancy,

            We need to consider this passage in its context.  The context concerns what is called “the fall”—or perhaps we could say “the crash.”  We don’t fully understand what happened, other than to see that the Bible says there was a time before sin, before Adam and Eve sinned, when everything was different.

            Everything—from the nature of animals, to human relationships with animals, with each other and with the environment--changed.  The metaphor of the Garden of Eden, or Paradise, is given to depict an ideal much like the future Garden, the heavenly Paradise.  Humans started in Paradise, and in the end we can end up there—but in-between it’s a different story.

            Sin changed everything.  Adam and Eve were put out of the Garden—exiled.  They were not aliens.  They could not go back into Paradise.  They were not living somewhere else—in sin.  Sin is the environment, the state, and the place where we live.  We have sinful human nature.  We all sin in Adam (Romans 5).

            So, within this context, the original sin, God is telling Adam and Eve and all humans that their marital relationship (and the relationship between the sexes) has now changed.  What was it like before?  We don’t know—but of course we know what it is now.

            To your specific point.  Was God telling Eve that she was not cursed and that now she would experience pain in childbirth, whereas before childbirth was a walk in the park?  More is happening here.  Sin is the context.  The subtext is pain, bondage and suffering.  The specific topic is male/female relationships.  What was once “love and cherish” now becomes “desire, dominate and control.”  God is saying that all of this comes with sin—sin brings male and female into conflict.  What was originally designed as a harmonious union in an idyllic garden is now survival, every person for himself, in an inhospitable jungle.

            So—is God specifically cursing the woman here?  No.  He is simply explaining what sin will do.  God is saying, “You wanted sin and its fruit, you will have it.  You’re not in the Garden anymore.  Welcome to the jungle.”

            Now the relationship of humans will be based on lust, greed, jealousy—not upon love, joy, etc. (see the fruits of the Spirit and the flesh in Galatians 5).  Both men and women are cursed here—cursed because they will both be out for themselves, using their natural strengths to survive and to get what they want from others.

            Yes, control now became the issue.  With men, control is often physically expressed, but that is not to say that God was saying that only men would be able to “control” women.  Physically, as you well know, in many circumstances and cultures women have been and are, sadly, at the mercy of men.  But the passage is not commenting on that as much as it is about how sin drastically and negatively changed the basic nature of the relationship between men and women.

            In Christ,

            Greg Albrecht