One of the most difficult verses in bible comes early in the text and seems to set the scene for those who want to prove that God loves the patriarchy and that the divine ideal is that women are to be subservient to the rule of men. I have lost count of the times that men have told me that women were cursed by God because of the culpable actions of Eve in the Garden of Eden, or the times when women have told me that there is nothing we can do to remedy the role our biology has cast for us. Calling attention to the earlier creation story in which male and female are created together in the image of God as one Adam/human being doesn’t seem to have the same power as the story called by Christianity “The Fall”. Indeed this verse seems almost magically forgettable as being the original scene setter of the creation of human beings – so I thought it was time to have a look again at the text that so conveniently can be read as “the sin of a thoughtless woman has led to her and her husband being rejected by God and evicted from paradise into a miserable existence.”

Reading Genesis 3:16, after God has asked the man who had told him that he was naked, and asked directly if he had eaten of the tree that God had commanded him not to eat, the man said “the woman whom you gave to me, she gave me of the tree and I ate”. God turns to the woman and asks “what is this that you did?” and she says “the serpent beguiled me and I ate”. God doesn’t ask anything of the serpent, but instead tells it “Cursed are you among all the cattle and all the beasts of the field. Upon your belly you will go and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put animosity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, they shall bruise your head and you shall bruise their heel”

Let us just note here some interesting moments. The serpent is described as being among the cattle and the beasts of the field – not a class we would normally associate with scaled reptiles, but definitely something we would associate with an agrarian world view.  And let’s note too that the antipathy is between

          בֵין זַרְעֲךָ וּבֵין

      זַרְעָהּ

your seed and her seed – the human descendants are described as the seed of the woman rather than of the man, obliquely but definitely introducing the idea of female childbirth in the future.

With this in mind, let’s look at the next verses.  God turns his attention to the woman, saying:

אֶל־הָֽאִשָּׁ֣ה אָמַ֗ר הַרְבָּ֤ה אַרְבֶּה֙

עִצְּבוֹנֵ֣ךְ וְהֵֽרֹנֵ֔ךְ בְּעֶ֖צֶב תֵּֽלְדִ֣י בָנִ֑ים וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָתֵ֔ךְ וְה֖וּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ:   ס

Now this verse is most painful for us feminists. It is most often translated as “To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pain and your travail. In pain you will bring forth children, your desire shall be to your husband and he shall rule over you”

But that is not the only way to translate it, and the clue is in the context of this passage. To begin, let’s look at the first half of this verse, in particular the word whose root it “etzev” ayin, tzaddi, beit and its noun form used here : itz’von. It is used only three times – twice here in relation once to Eve and once to Adam, and later about Noach.

The root has two major meanings – one is to to hurt/ to work hard and the second is to form/to fashion. The nouns are itz’von and he’ron, which look like a parallel is being used. Given that the second noun means pregnancy/forming a baby, then itz’von should also mean forming a baby/ pregnancy – in which case the phrase means “I will greatly increase your creating a baby and your pregnancy, and with hard work (labour) you will give birth to children.

Note that God does NOT curse the woman. Instead God informs her that she will be taking over the hard work of creation, it will be her seed as a result of the encounter with the serpent, so it will be her role to bring forth human beings in the future. God is done – having created everything else in the garden with the ability and seed to reproduce, now it is time for human beings to do so for themselves.

Let’s look too at the use of itz’von in relation to the man. And note too, that God does NOT curse him either.

וּלְאָדָ֣ם אָמַ֗ר כִּ֣י שָׁמַ֘עְתָּ֘ לְק֣וֹל אִשְׁתֶּ֒ךָ֒ וַתֹּ֨אכַל֙ מִן־הָעֵ֔ץ אֲשֶׁ֤ר צִוִּיתִ֨יךָ֙

לֵאמֹ֔ר לֹ֥א תֹאכַ֖ל מִמֶּ֑נּוּ אֲרוּרָ֤ה הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ בַּֽעֲבוּרֶ֔ךָ בְּעִצָּבוֹן֙ תֹּֽאכֲלֶ֔נָּה כֹּ֖ל יְמֵ֥י

חַיֶּֽיךָ

“To the man God said, because you heard the voice of your wife, and you ate from the tree which I commanded you saying ‘you shall not eat of it’, then cursed is the land on account of you, with itzavon/ (hard work/forming and creatively fashioning),  you will eat from it all the days of your life.” (3:17)

Both man and woman are now told that the hard work of creating is down to them. The serpent and the land are cursed, they are no longer going to be as they were first intended to be, the serpent loses its place in the agricultural world, the land too loses its place as a garden where growth is luxurious and abundant and does not require the hard work that any gardener or farmer will tell you is necessary today to create a crop of food or flowers.

What is the curse on the land? It is that it will bring forth weeds, thorns and thistles, the unintended and unwanted growth that any farmer or gardener will tell you comes as soon as you stop working the ground, hoeing out the weeds, protecting the young seedlings.

A curse is something that goes wrong, that is not intended in the original plan, that deviates from the ideal.  So it is particularly interesting that the human beings are not themselves cursed, their situation is not deviating from the plan. It begins to look like leaving Eden was always the plan, that creating was always going to be delegated, otherwise why put those tempting trees there?

The section ends with God telling the man that in the sweat of his face he will eat bread, until he returns to the ground he came from, and the man calling his wife Eve, because she has become the mother of all living. Both these again are references to the itz’von of each of them – she becomes creative in the area of growing children, he in the area of growing food. And God’s statement that follows “Behold, the human has become like one of us”, is then qualified in terms of knowing good and evil, but it also describes the attributes of creativity that each now have, attributes which until this point have been the dominion of the divine.

Now let’s look at the second half of the verse where the woman’s future is described. “Your passion will be to your man, and he will mashal  you (וְה֖וּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ:  v’hu yimshol bach)”

M’sh’l is one of two words for ruling over – the more usual being m’l’ch. It too has a second meaning – to be a comparison, from which we get the idea of proverbs/parables which show us a truth by virtue of a difference. The first time we have the word is in the creation of the two great lights which will m.sh.l the day and the night in Genesis 1:16-18. Are they ruling over the day and the night or are they providing a point of comparison? Is the man ruling over the woman or does he have a comparable function of creativity? Her passion is for him, a necessary partner for the creation of children. His comparable creativity is to work the land, to bring forth food alongside the thorns and thistles that grow there.  He is not described as her master/ba’al but as her ish/man, the equal partner of her status as isha.

Can one read these verses in this way, of the passing on of the ability to create through the seriously hard work of the two protagonists?

The next (and final) time we meet the word itz’von is at the birth of Noach, ten generations after Adam and the pivot to the next stage of the story, indeed the rebirth of creation after the earth is so corrupted that God chose to destroy it by flood.

We hear that Lamech, the father of Noach says

וַיִּקְרָ֧א אֶת־שְׁמ֛וֹ נֹ֖חַ לֵאמֹ֑ר זֶ֠֞ה יְנַֽחֲמֵ֤נוּ מִֽמַּֽעֲשֵׂ֨נוּ֙ וּמֵֽעִצְּב֣וֹן יָדֵ֔ינוּ

מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵֽרֲרָ֖הּ יְהוָֹֽה

“And he called his name Noach (rest) saying, this one will comfort us from our work and the itz’von/ creativity/  work of our hands, (which arises) from the land which God cursed” (Gen 5:29)

It is a deliberate reminder of the story of Adam and Eve and their given roles to bring forth new life (both human and plant) with as much creativity and manipulation of the environment as they needed. It is a reminder that God changed the role of the land through the curse, which gave humanity the challenge to provide themselves with food as creatively as they could. It is a signal that another creation is about to happen, Noach will be part of that change, though quite how that was to work out was not clear to his father Lamech. He was hoping for N.CH. for rest. He was hoping for the accompanying and phonically similar comfort. But this isn’t what God was going to do, as anyone who had read the earlier chapter would know. Creativity, forming new people and working the land is not a restful or a comfortable experience. It is backbreaking work physically, it is emotionally draining and challenging. Anyone who has worked so much as a window box will know how things grow that you don’t expect, how plants carefully fostered will not necessarily flower, or even if they do may not be the one you anticipated. Anyone who has nurtured a child will find that they are no blank slate, that they have their own views and their own desires. The children of Adam and Eve provide the first fratricide in bible – surely not something their parents wanted.

So – if we read this difficult passage in the light of the first creation story in the first chapter, where it is abundantly clear that God created humanity with diverse gender, equally, at the same time, and in the image of God, and we choose not to look through the lens of the patriarchy, then we can see that neither man nor woman are cursed, that instead they are blessed with itz’von the ability to form, to fashion, to manipulate and create in their environment in the same way that God had done. We see that the hard work of bringing forth the future is both challenge and blessing. We see that there are always problems – the thistles and the thorns among the grain, the children who learn very quickly to assert their own personalities and say no – and that it is our role to negotiate these problems and grow a good crop/teach good values to the next generation. We have taken the power to form and to fashion our world, for good or for ill. And after the new creation and the covenant with Noach God is leaving us to do it for ourselves. I am pretty sure that that did not include one gender dominating the other, or one people ruling over another.  We left Eden in order to create a world where we had ability and agency. As we start the torah reading cycle once more, it is down to us to use our creativity and our agency and work hard to make our world the best place we can.