Genesis 3:16—Text and Context

Abstract

Genesis 3:16 is arguably the most troubling biblical verse for issues of gender relations and women’s roles. It figures prominently in later Jewish and especially Christian sources, and discussions in those texts have influenced subsequent understandings of the verse and of the Eden narrative in which it is embedded. This article engages in a careful reading of the biblical text in order to elucidate its meaning apart from later traditions. Recognizing the poetic character of the four lines of this verse is an important part of the analytical process, as is situating it within the Eden tale. Also, because no text arises in a vacuum, considering the Iron Age context—the world of the Israelite populace, that is, the world behind the text, a world vastly different from our own—provides the requisite socio-historical sensitivity. An awareness of that ancient context means openness to a suggestion about what Gen 3:16 may have meant to its ancient audience.

1. Introduction

Genesis 3:16 is part of a six-verse poetic passage embedded in the Eden narrative of Genesis 2–3. My goals in carrying out a careful analysis of this verse are to understand its Hebrew words, to identify its cultural and social milieu, and to consider its place in the Eden tale. This close reading entails an examination of the poetic text itself through a lexical analysis of individual words and also through a consideration of the syntax.1 But this study of the text must be preceded by a study of the context—first, the ancient context, the world behind the text, for, as scholars of ancient Hebrew poetry have emphasized, no text “exists in a vacuum”, and “every text…responds to and participates in a larger world.” (James 2022, p. 1). That ancient experiential context is the everyday world of the Israelite community that would have heard that verse and that might be called its target audience. Just as important as the experiential context is the narrative context—the Eden tale of Gen 2:4b–3—in which 3:16 is embedded.

2. Context

2.1. Ancient Context

Ancient Israelites—as many as 90% of them, even those who lived in walled towns—were agrarians. But working the land was not easy. Most Israelite settlements were located in the highlands of the southern Levant, which posed numerous challenges to agricultural productivity (Meyers 2013, pp. 42–47).

To begin with, water for agriculture and daily life was not always adequate. Perennial water supplies—streams or springs—were relatively few in the highlands, and annual rainfall was sometimes insufficient for the dry-farming techniques of the Israelite farmers. Moreover, the Israelite highlands were considerably less fertile than those of the neighboring riverine valleys in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The fertility of the dominant soil, the well-known Mediterranean terra rossa, is impaired by several factors; it is often shallow and stony, and it often has a high clay content—all making it difficult to plow at seed time and for the soil to absorb water in the rainy season. In addition, there were recurring challenges such as frequent droughts, massive swarms of locusts, and damaging hailstorms, all mentioned in the Bible. For example, terms for “blight” (šidāpôn), “locusts” (’arbeh), and other natural disasters, all imperiling the livelihood of people dependent on crops for their survival, recur. Similarly, the word for “drought” (ṣîyâ) appears frequently. The threats of punishment for disobeying God listed at the end of Deuteronomy include natural disasters familiar to the Israelites—“burning heat and drought” and “blight and mildew” (Deut 28:22; cf. Amos 5:12).2 Not surprisingly, the word for “famine” (rā‘āb) appears over 100 times in the Hebrew Bible and figures prominently in the ancestor stories in Genesis (e.g., Gen 12:10; 26:1; 42:5) and other biblical books (e.g., 2 Sam 21:1; 1 Kgs 18:1–2; 2 Kgs 6:25; 8:1; Ruth 1:1; Ps 37:19). These serious environmental problems made life difficult for men and also women, for the latter shared the many and often onerous activities necessary for producing food and other commodities in agrarian households, which were virtually self-sufficient (Meyers 2013, pp. 125–55).

In addition to their multifarious contributions to the household economy, women bore children, who provided essential household labor from a young age and eventually cared for parents who survived into old age. Yet childbirth was fraught with problems. Death in childbirth was common, as depicted for the matriarch Rachel (Gen 35:16–18) and the mother of Ichabod (1 Sam 4:19–22), making the average lifespan of women significantly shorter than that of men, perhaps as low as twenty to thirty for women and thirty to forty for men (Schloen 2001, pp. 122–26; Meyers 2013, pp. 99–100) (More on this below). However, despite the risks, multiple pregnancies were necessary for most women because of the high rate of infant mortality; in pre-modern societies like ancient Israel, as many as one in two infants died before the age of five.3 The average number of children in a nuclear Israelite family was probably three, which meant a woman might have had to have six pregnancies so that her family would have sufficient labor (Stager 1985, p. 18).

In short, most Israelites in the Iron Age (1200–586 BCE), the period of the Hebrew Bible, faced considerable agricultural and demographic constraints. Their everyday life was clearly quite different from that in the paradisiacal “garden in Eden in the east” (Gen 2:8), which is the setting for the narrative of Genesis 2:4b–3 that presents the beginning of human life as understood by the ancient Israelite narrator in light of the Iron Age context.

2.2. Narrative Context

Six poetic verses (including Gen 3:16) contain God’s words to the serpent, the woman, and the man after the humans eat fruit from the knowledge tree.4 These poetic verses are embedded in the Eden narrative, which is the second of two creation accounts in Genesis—the first being in Genesis 1 and probably post-dating the Eden narrative by several centuries.5 The Eden story is mythic, a traditional tale about something that was deeply important in the community in which it emerged and was told and retold. Myths like the Eden tale are found in folklore the world over. Like most such tales, it provides an etiology—an “explanation”—of how things came to be the way they are. Specifically, this etiological myth “explains” why the Israelites struggled agriculturally, whereas other Near Eastern peoples (notably those in Egypt and Mesopotamia) had more fertile and productive lands. The mythic “events” of Eden accounted for significant aspects, notably the difficulties, of Israelite reality, such as mortality and the real-world roles of women and men.6 Because it presents human life, the Eden tale uses temporal language, but its characters did not exist in real time. Rather, they represent the putative ancestors of the people experiencing the sometimes harsh reality of Iron Age life.

3. Text: The Poetic Section

The consequences for failing to heed God’s directive about food sources in the garden are specified in God’s words to the serpent, the woman, and the man, in that order, in a six-verse poetic unit (Gen 3:14–19). The shift from prose to poetry highlights this unit, thereby drawing attention to its content—the depiction of real life in the somewhat marginal ecological zone, as explained above, outside of Eden. The serpent’s fate appears in vv. 14–15: moving on its stomach and enmity with humans. The fate of Israelite men appears in vv. 17–19: cultivating Israelite lands will be achieved with difficulty—with “anguish” (3:17; NRSVue “toil”) and “sweat” (3:19). The difficulties facing Israelite women appear in v. 16.

Before examining that verse, it is important to note that, although the woman dominates the narrative action in the preceding scenes, in which all three characters—man, woman, serpent—appear, she receives the least attention in the poetic section.7 Twenty-three Hebrew words in two verses are addressed to the serpent (Gen 3:14–15), and forty-six Hebrew words in three verses are addressed to the man (Gen 3:17–19). But only sixteen Hebrew words in one verse are addressed to the woman. Moreover, that one short verse omits two things that appear in the verses addressing the serpent and the man. First, although the serpent is cursed in 3:14, and the infertile earth (hā’ădāmâ, 3:17) is cursed in God’s words to the man, the word “curse” (‘arûr) is not present in what God says to the woman. Second, God tells the serpent and the man—but not the woman—why there are consequences for not heeding God’s instructions. That is, God says “because (kî) you did this…” to the serpent and “because (kî) you listened…” to the man (even though the woman does not say anything when she hands him the fruit). By contrast, no “because” (kî), no explanation or reason, is given for what God mandates for the woman’s life in the real world. It seems that she bears no culpability! Note too that the word “sin” (ḥaṭṭā’t) is never used in the Eden tale, nor is “fall”, nor is “apple”.8

In turning to God’s words to the woman, the poetic character of that verse must be emphasized. They exhibit “the fundamental technique of biblical poetry, namely, parallelism” (James 2022, p. 55).9 Simply put, parallelism involves a correspondence between two (or sometimes more) poetic lines; the second line develops the meaning of the first or sometimes simply emphasizes or intensifies it. In its broadest, “parallelism is centrally concerned with correspondence,” using the logic of repetition (Dobbs-Allsopp 2015, p. 69). In the parallelism of Gen 3:16, the first two lines (3:16a and 3:16b) together present the difficulties the woman will experience in real life outside the garden, and the third and fourth lines (3:16c and 3:16d) together portray her relationship with the man outside of Eden in relation to what is depicted in 3:16a and b.

3.1. Genesis 3:16a

Genesis 3:16a is the first line of a two-line couplet. English translations of this line contain fifteen or so words, but, as noted, the Hebrew text actually has just four words—a double verb followed by two nouns that are the objects of the verb. (Hebrew has fewer words because pronominal subjects and objects of verbs can be attached to the verb, and possessive pronouns form suffixes of nouns.)

The double verb (harbâ ’arbeh) consists of the infinitive absolute (harbâ) plus the first-person imperfect (’arbeh). Both are forms of the root rbh, which means “to be big, numerous”. The use of the infinitive absolute before a form of the same verbal root is commonly used to strengthen the verb and create emphasis (Arnold and Choi 2018, p. 87). Because English lacks a syntactic equivalent to this doubling, translations typically express it here by adding an adverb; for example, the NRSV and NCB have “I will greatly increase”, and the NASB and KJV have “I will greatly multiply”. However, these translations (“increase” and “multiply”) are problematic because they imply adding to something (the objects of the verb) that already exists. A better rendering of the double verb is “I will make very great” (cf. NRSVue, “I will make…exceedingly great”)—that is, significantly greater than might otherwise be expected or desired.

The other two words in the line—the two nouns that are the objects of the double verb—tell us what is being made great. These two nouns (‘iṣṣābôn and hērāyôn) are joined by the common conjunction waw (“and”) prefixed to the second noun, and both nouns have the possessive suffix “your”. In modern translations (post-1800), the first noun (‘iṣṣābôn) is virtually always translated as “your pains” or “your pangs”, and the second (hērāyôn) is typically rendered as “in childbirth” or “in childbearing”. Both, in my view, are mistranslations and deserve a closer look, beginning with the second noun.

Translating hērāyôn as “in childbirth” is problematic for several reasons. First, it adds “in”, which is lacking in the Hebrew; second, it omits the “your” of the Hebrew. Some claim that these changes are permissible because the two nouns together form a hendiadys, with the first noun acting as a modifier of the second.10 This yields a prepositional phrase, “your pangs/pains in childbirth/childbearing/”.

However, hendiadys is not necessary here. For one thing, the oldest translations do not understand hendiadys but rather reflect straightforward grammar—two objects of the double verb. The Greek Septuagint (LXX), which is the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible, has a compound direct object, indicating that both those nouns will be “very great”. The Latin (Vulgate) does the same, as do the earliest English translations—the Wycliffe Bible (the first translation into English, fourteenth century) and then the KJV (1611)—both of which rely on the ancient versions as well as the Hebrew. This consistent understanding of the Hebrew in the oldest translations must be taken seriously. In addition, translating the second object of the verb (hērāyôn) as “childbirth” is unjustified. Biblical Hebrew has a nuanced vocabulary for the various stages of reproduction. It has discrete terms for intercourse, conception, pregnancy, labor, and parturition or childbirth. The Hebrew root (hrh) of that noun, always refers to pregnancy, not childbirth (Ottosson 1978, p. 458). Moreover, hērāyôn has cognates in Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Akkadian; in all those languages, as in Genesis 3:16a, hērāyôn means “pregnancy”, not “childbirth”.11 God is mandating many pregnancies for the woman.

Now, back to the first object of the verb, the noun ‘iṣṣābôn, virtually always translated as “pain.” But could “pain” really be a modifier of “pregnancy”? That would be unlikely, for several reasons. First, no biblical reference to pregnancy links ‘iṣṣābôn with pain;12 pregnancy may be uncomfortable at times but is not normally considered a painful condition (unless there are complications, of course). Second, ‘iṣṣābôn is never used in biblical childbirth imagery. Third, ‘iṣṣābôn appears only two other times in the Hebrew Bible: once in the next verse (3:17) addressed to the man, where it clearly means “toil” in reference to post-Edenic agricultural labor as developed in the succeeding verses (3:18–19), and once in Genesis 5:29, where it is parallel to “work”,13 refers directly to the cursed ground of 3:17, and plainly means arduous “toil” or “labor”.14 Therefore, its appearance in 3:16 surely has the same connotation.15 God is making great women’s work, her workload.

Thus, in 3:16a, God decrees what will be the reality of the target audience, Iron Age Israelites. “I will make great” is followed by two direct objects: hard work and pregnancy. “I will make great/many your work and your pregnancies”. These are precisely the two features that characterize women’s life in Iron Age agrarian households—the economic role, production, and the demographic one, reproduction (Meyers 2013, pp. 125–39).

3.2. Genesis 3:16b

In accordance with patterns of poetic parallelism (noted above), 3:16b is the second line of a couplet; it develops 3:16a by revealing the desired result of the multiple pregnancies. The three Hebrew words of 3:16b are a prepositional phrase (one word in Hebrew) followed by a verb and the object of the verb. The translations of the verb and its object are straightforward—“you shall bear children”. The verb is yld, which generally means to beget rather than to give birth.16 After all, men too have children as in the genealogies of Genesis, where some form of yld appears repeatedly, indicating that male ancestors “beget” offspring (e.g., Gen. 10:8).17 And the object of “beget” is bânîm, “children”.

The prepositional phrase that begins the line is typically rendered “in pain” (e.g., NCB, NRSVue, NJPS). The object of the preposition is ‘eṣeb, which seems similar to ‘iṣṣābôn (“work, toil”) of the preceding line. But ‘eṣeb, occurring six other times in the Bible, means mental anguish or suffering (e.g., Prov 10:10; Ps 16:4) and is likely from a separate root (as in Arabic) with the same three letters (‘ṣb) as the root of ‘iṣṣābôn (Meyers 2001, p. 279).18 It is preceded by the prepositional particle b, which can mean “in”; but here, as in many other texts, it is the “with” of accompaniment (Brown et al. 1907, p. 89).

Corresponding terms in parallel lines are usually not exact synonyms. In a wonderful wordplay echoing ‘iṣṣābôn = “toil” of the first line of the couplet, ‘eṣeb connotes the stress—the mental anguish (cf. KJV, “sorrow”) and exhaustion—accompanying motherhood rather than the physical labor otherwise associated with the root. This line is best translated as “with anguish shall you have children”. The mental stress of having children was arguably great for Israelite women, given the high rate of infant mortality mentioned above. Note that the eschatological hope—the hope for better days at the end of time—in Isaiah 65 is expressed in terms of the end of infant mortality; v. 20 reads “no more shall there be… an infant that lives only a few days”. Such a hope reflects the opposite reality; too few infants survive into adulthood.

3.3. Genesis 3:16c

The next couplet, the third and fourth lines of verse 16, is syntactically connected to the first couplet, and the lines are connected to each other because, although sometimes omitted in English translations, the conjunction waw (usually “and”) introduces both lines. These lines deserve close scrutiny, for translations, again, often misrepresent the Hebrew original.

Genesis 3:16c consists of three words in Hebrew and is typically rendered with eight words in English: “yet your desire/urge shall be for your husband” (e.g., NCB, NJPS, NRSVue). The first Hebrew word (’el), the preposition “to”, is attached to the opening waw “and” or “yet” (“and/yet to…”).19 The second word is ’îš to which the possessive pronoun “your” is attached. This common word ’îš, denoting a human male rather than the more generic ’ādām (often “human”), is appropriate for the context of this verse, which deals with human reproduction. Together the first two Hebrew words read “Yet to your man”.

But the third word, tĕšûqâ, is complicated. Because this line has no verb, its three words express an existing condition (tĕšûqâ) involving “your man”. Like the second word in the line, tĕšûqâ has the possessive pronoun “your” attached to it. This third word appears only here and in two other biblical texts (Gen. 4:7; Song 7:10 [Heb 7:11]), and it is consistently translated as “desire” or “passion”. Commentators have generally assumed that it means sexual desire or attraction. However, some interpreters now suggest a semantic overlap with the term tĕšûbâ (from the root šwb), giving a strikingly different reading—“your turning/returning” (Lohr 2011). In fact, this is what many ancient translations have (e.g., LXX, Old Latin, Peshitta, inter alia). The line thus reads “yet to your man is your turning [or returning]”. The woman turns, or returns, to her man, implementing the urge for pair bonding described in Genesis 2:24, where the man (’îš) clings to his woman (’iššâ).20 Whether it means “desire” or “returning”, or perhaps is a double entendre signifying both, the implication of marital union (i.e., sex) is present.

3.4. Genesis 3:16d

The last line in Genesis 3:16 provides nuance for the turning/returning (or desiring) of the preceding line in the couplet. Widely interpreted as signifying total gender hierarchy—male dominance and concomitant female subservience—this line is typically rendered “and he shall rule over you” (e.g., KJV, NASB, NJPS, NRSV, NRSVue) or even “he shall lord [sic] it over you” (NCB). But such translations may be unwarranted if we look closely at the three Hebrew words comprising this line.

The first word is straightforward—the pronoun hû’ (“he”) attached to waw (“and”), yielding “and he”. Note, however, that “he” is unnecessary, for it is part of the next word, the verb. Yet it is included because it balances the poetic line and provides emphasis to the man, the “he”, to whom the woman is turning/returning. The third word, bāk, consisting of the preposition “over” attached to the pronoun “you” and translated as “over you”, is unproblematic.

The difficulty comes in the second word, from the root mšl (“rule”), which appears some eighty times in the Hebrew Bible. It indicates dominion as exercised by a wide range of places or people, from God as ruler of all nations (Ps 22:28 [Heb 22:29]) to a human’s self-control (e.g., Prov 16:32).21 Despite this range, it is used chiefly for political dominance. However, it never depicts a woman–man relationship. Thus, its use in 3:16d to depict total male dominance can be disputed.22 Given the pregnancy/childbirth content of the first couplet (Gen 3:16a and b), this second couplet likely advances that theme. Thus, the typical translation “rule over” is arguably an overtranslation in implying overall or absolute dominance. Instead, the idea of a more limited dominance—male control of the woman’s sexuality—is more likely, given both the poetic context and world behind the text (Meyers 2013, pp. 95–97; Deutschmann 2022, p. 87).

The importance of the poetic context of Genesis 3:16d that has been emphasized in this article was pointed out decades ago by the eminent Semitist Edward Ullendorff (1978, pp. 428–29), who declared that this line “has always been conceptually separated from the preceding section” about the woman turning or returning to/desiring the man and that the passage has been “consistently misunderstood as an assertion of woman’s subservience to man, whereas it in reality the two parts of the second hemistich hang closely together”. Noteworthy too is that Medieval Jewish commentators reflect this view.23 The parallelism of Hebrew poetry thus entail understanding sexual rather than absolute dominance.

But why sexual dominance? This must be understood in relation to the demographic realities of Iron Age Israel. As noted above, agrarian families needed multiple offspring for household labor and also to care for aging parents. Yet pregnancy and childbirth were fraught with danger, and infant and maternal deaths were all too frequent, with as many as six pregnancies often necessary for a woman to have three surviving children. The world over, when repeated pregnancies are needed and when risks are high, pregnancy aversion—a reluctance to conceive—is not uncommon.24 Cuneiform sources, for example, include powerful accounts of the dangers of childbirth and the terror it held for women (Couto-Ferreira 2014, p. 292). Postbiblical and medieval Jewish sources have multiple references to moredot, women who refused to have sex with their spouses, with one reason apparently being their awareness of the dangers of childbirth (Decker 2023; Riskin 1989; Meacham 2021).25 If refusing sex because of pregnancy reluctance was an issue in Mesopotamia, in post-biblical Judaism, and among peoples everywhere,26 pregnancy reluctance in Iron Age Israel would be expected. Thus, motherhood for Israelite women was mandated in this couplet by stipulating that men would dominate sexually. This is a case of an adaptive strategy appropriate to demographic needs.

4. Concluding Comments

Genesis 3:16 has long been used to justify the subjugation of women in Jewish and Christian tradition by claiming that this gender hierarchy stems from a divine punitive curse. But a close reading of the text contests those justifications, which arose from the confluence of economic, cultural, social, political, theological, philosophical, and technological developments that post-date the Iron Age and the Hebrew Bible.27 Those postbiblical readings typically ignore the absence of causation in Genesis 3:16. “Because” appears in God’s words to the serpent and to the man but not in what is said to the woman in Genesis 3:16. Without “because”, the specter of punishment disappears (cf. Kelly 2022). Similarly, post-Hebrew Bible readings assume that the woman is cursed, although that term (‘arûr) does not appear in Genesis 3:16, nor, for that matter, does the word “sin”, which does not occur in the Bible until the next tale, of Cain and Abel.

Recent postbiblical interpretations of Genesis 3:16 not only overlook these absences; they also fail to take into account the verse’s parallelistic poetic structure and its experiential world, the world of ancient Israelite agrarians. Acknowledging those features allows us to read the verse as it was likely understood by its target Iron Age audience. According to the etiological dynamics of the Eden tale, that audience would have understood that the existential reality for women—arduous household labor along with bearing multiple children—was divinely mandated. Similarly, according to the conventions of parallelism in ancient Hebrew poetry, the stipulated male dominance in 16d is not all-pervasive male control but rather is related to the pregnancies and childbirth of lines 16a and 16b and to the sexuality implied in line 16c. Removing Genesis 3:16 from its ancient poetic and social context has led to harmful consequences for women. This reading, which considers the ancient literary form and also the socio-economic and demographic context, is a step towards freeing women from the devastating effects of interpretations that fail to consider these features.