The “Curses” on Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Are Vexed Gender Relations, Meaningless Hard Work and Economic Oppression God’s Will?

God did not curse Adam and Eve when they sinned. He told them what the mostly natural evil consequences of their decision to live apart from him would be. In doing this, he did NOT decree any of these evil consequences as things as a part of his perfect will. Sexual and class inequalities are evil consequences of sin, not God's will.

After the first man and woman chose the knowledge of evil, their own “freedom” from God, over the knowledge of God, and, thus, sinned, God’s first response was to gently question them, seeking a confession which would allow him to restore them. When that failed–when they continued to choose to hide from him and to maintain their independence from him, God made four statements, one each pertaining to the serpent, to the woman, to the ground, and to the man, in that order. The only curse directly pronounced by God is a curse on the serpent:

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
¹⁵ And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

Genesis 3:14-15

The serpent was previously apparently an animal that was highly intelligent, walked on legs and was able to speak. It was not a snake. God had created all of the “kinds ” of animals, including snakes (a group of creatures that “move along the ground”), prior to the creation of humans and the temptation of the woman. Genesis 1:24-26. As an intelligent animal with the power to speak, it was able to yield itself to God’s spiritual enemy. God cursed the serpent to crawl out of its encounter with God on its belly like a snake, no longer able to speak. He also put an “enmity” between women and snakes. This curse also contains a prediction and implicit promise that some unnamed future “seed” of the woman will put an end to the serpent (crush his head).

The curse on the ground is less direct. God does not himself curse the ground, but states that “is” cursed “because” of Adam’s sin, that is, as a consequence of it:

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

Genesis 3:17

The curse on the ground is stated in the passive voice specifically, as a Qal Passive Participle)–a grammatical distinction Hebrew shares with English, though the significance of it can differ between the two languages–and not directly as something God is doing. This latter distinguishes it from the curse on the serpent, which, though also stated as a Qal Passive Participle, leads to God doing something immediately–i.e., making the serpent into a slithering, voiceless creeping thing. The implication in this verse is not that God cursed the ground because of Adam (which would be an example of the “divine passive”), but that when Adam, the one given dominion over the earth, separated himself from God, he had also separated the earth from God, and had thus brought the curse on the ground without any need for God to interject a curse of his own. (God is just as much the true source of the life of plants and soil microbes as he is the true source of the life of humans). When the curse on the ground is viewed in this way, the last line of the quotation becomes merely a statement of factual consequences rather than a curse–because Adam brought a curse on the ground, he (and all of his descendants) will have to put “painful toil” into the ground just to eat.

Note, also, that neither of these curses states any implicit social policy command for future humans to follow. We don’t have to do anything, individually or collectively, to make snakes crawl on their bellies–that is just their nature. We don’t need a law commanding women to hate snakes–most women do so, without being told to. We don’t have to command the land to be difficult to cultivate to make food; indeed, we make laws sometimes to prevent people from doing things we know will make the land less productive than it already is. And the promised “seed” of the woman only God could fulfil.

God’s words to Eve are often incorrectly said to have been a curse, that is, God judicially imposing a penalty on all women. The words to Eve are also often incorrectly understood to sentence all women to a permanent position of subservience and inferiority to men. But when the words are read more carefully, and in the context of the first human sin, it becomes clear that they merely declare an unavoidable natural consequence of that sin affecting sexuality and reproduction, not social status:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3:16 (KJV; but links are to the Bible Hub concordance)

Recall that, prior to their choice of idols in preference to the true God, God had given Adam and Eve only five instructions–to rule the earth and its creatures, to name the animals, to tend the Garden for him, to be fruitful and multiply (which was intended to be a way in which they would be like God–creating life–and a source of pleasure) and to refrain from eating the fruit of one specific tree.  Genesis 1:26-27, 2:15-17.  Adam had already named the animals. The first couple could no longer keep the command not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil–they had broken that one. They could no longer tend God’s garden for him–if thy had been left in it, they could have kept eating from the tree of life and lived forever in their rebellion and shame. Genesis 3:22-23. And they could no longer take dominion over the earth–one of the consequences of their disobedience was that the ground was cursed, so that, instead of taking dominion, they would have to do hard and exhausting work just to make the land produce enough to let them survive. Genesis 3:17-19.

Thus, the only commandment God had given them thus far which they were still able to keep was the command to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth–the single command that made them most like God, able to create new life in God’s image.  Genesis 1:28.  This command, and the aspect of their relationship to which it corresponded, was also given as a symbol–and, even more, a continual practical emotional and spiritual reminder–of the unity of God, the unity of God with his people, and their perfect unity with each other in him. Genesis 2:23-25; Matthew 19:4-6; 1 Corinthians 6:15-7:5; Ephesians 5:25-32; Revelation 21:1-22:5. See, also, “Humans ‘Male and Female’ and Marriage as Pictures of God’s Unity in Diversity; and V. Solovyov, The Meaning of Love. It is, therefore, very significant that the clothing the first couple made for themselves, and which God later replaced with more durable materials, covered the parts of their body involved in fulfilling this commandment. In their rebellion and in their own response to their shame, the main outward battleground between Adam and Eve, and between each of them and God, involved the only commandment that they could still fulfil.  Reproduction was no longer to be a pure joy done with God’s involvement, but the area of their lives they would hold most separate from God and from each other, the area in which they fancied all of the “choice” was their own, and an area characterized by  constant battle accompanied by great pain. 

This is the context of God’s words to Eve in Genesis 3:16. Most modern translations avoid the subject of sex in this verse by treating the first two clauses as if they were redundant, both referring to pain in pregnancy and labor. But they are not redundant. The first clause, in agreement with the King James, actually says the woman will have multiplied sorrow–literally, worry or anxiety (‘itstsabon}, and. by metaphorical extension, pain or toil–in the act of conception (heron) itself. This clause appears to indicate something more than physical pain will be involved–both because of the words used and because the physical pain of pregnancy and labor is the subject of the second clause.

Rather, in addition to the physical pain that will follow if pregnancy ensues, God says women will feel an emotional or spiritual pain (sorrow, worry, anxiety) not experienced by men resulting from the act of intercourse itself, regardless of whether the act is physically pleasurable, painful (as it is for some women) or a mixture of both. This emotional or spiritual pain or sorrow is, in fact, a direct consequence of the first couple separating themselves from each other through sin, and then discovering that their rebellion from God now compelled them to claim reproduction as the area of their lives they held most separate from God and from each other. This pain or sorrow is felt by women in a way it is not felt by men for the very natural reason that it is the woman’s body that is invaded in the process. God “gave” the woman this pain by giving her a body that would take this kind of invasion with pure joy only if she maintained her spiritual unity with the man that was invading her. (See, Humans Male and Female and Marriage as a Picture of God’s Unity in Diversity). But Eve and Adam had together voluntarily surrendered that complete unity {“one flesh”) to the serpent’s lie.

The second clause of this verse then declares a physical consequence of sin–pain in pregnancy and labor. the “bringing forth” (yalad) of children, will be done in toil and pain (‘etseb). It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word used for “pain” in this clause of the verse can also mean an “earthenware jar” (something to which all humans are frequently compared) or an “idol.” Perhaps the pain of childbirth is intended as a reminder of the consequences of our natural idolatry since the Fall?

However, it is the misreading of the third and fourth clauses of this verse as stating a social policy commandment that has caused the most mischief through the centuries. Properly read, both of these clauses relate to sexuality and reproduction, which is the subject of the whole sentence–and of God’s entire statement to Eve–and not to social order. The third clause declares that, in spite of Eve’s sorrow or spiritual pain at the act of conception and the prospect of pain in labor and delivery, she will still desire her husband. As several commentators have suggested, the word for desire here (teshuqah) also likely contains a connotation of desiring to control, just as it does in Genesis 4:7, where God told Cain that sin was crouching at his door and its desire (teshuqah) was for him. But in Genesis 3:16 it is used in in the context of sexuality, as is the subsequent warning that Adam will “rule over” (mashal) Eve in this matter. This is certainly a description of the way sexuality has normally been handled historically in this sin-cursed world, as current as today’s “#MeToo” movement. When combined with the “sorrow” (anxiety, fear, pain) and shame women now feel associated with the sex act itself, and the fear of the pains of pregnancy, this has led to a world in which women feel real fear when faced with anything that even subliminally reminds them of sex, or of anything that makes them suspect they have lost control of their man in this area–often things which seem to most men to be quite idiosyncratic and irrational. In reaction to this, men participate in the creation of social taboos to “protect” (and make more predictable) women’s sensibilities, but otherwise rebel at the insistence that they give up control in this one area by asserting more control in all areas of life. Women, then, predictably react against being further dominated, setting up a vicious circle of actions and reactions that plays out differently in different cultures, and tends to oscillate like a pendulum between strict male dominance and more female control, but which historically always seems to be present and to create strife. However, the important thing to understand is that all of this is a description of the evil consequences of sin, not a declaration of God’s perfect will. It certainly is not intended to invite the adoption of laws or social customs enforcing the inferiority of women. Instead, it is better viewed as a warning to both men and women to be aware that the process of dominance and reaction, whether in a marriage, in other personal relationships, or in society as a whole, is a consequence of sin and is not God’s will.

Finally, God’s words to Adam curse only the ground for his sake, as has already been said, they do not curse Adam. Instead, they declare the natural consequences of sin for him (and for the whole human race):

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you;
With hard labor you shall eat from it
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
Yet you shall eat the plants of the field;
 By the sweat of your face
You shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3:17-19.

The evil consequences of sin for all of us since Adam are living by hard labor, with constant frustration when weeds grow requiring more work and (by metaphorical extension) when our hopes and plans are wrecked by forces outside our control, until we all suffer physical death. This passage does not teach, as some through the centuries have said, that the natural division between the poor–who live by the sweat of their faces–and the rich–who live by the sweat of other people’s faces, is God’s will and must be assiduously preserved by law and social custom to avoid God’s wrath. In fact wealthy people labor even harder to multiply their wealth and to keep the poor out of it than the poor labor to make it for them. Compare, Ecclesiastes 5:8-13; James 2:6, 5:1-6. Moreover, the poor and the rich all go the same place–back to dust. Compare Ecclesiastes 3:20-22, 5:13-17 ; Luke 12:13-21. All of these things are evil consequences of sin, not reflections of God’s perfect will.

Return to “Idols = Gods We Can Manipulate (Do ut Des)“