(BA) Genesis 3:16

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1 August 2022 Navigate 'up to the Genesis index: index-genesis.

To the woman he said, Greatly will I multiply your pain and your conception; in pain you will bear children. And your desire will be toward your husband, and he will rule over you.

The nature of the "desire" Eve is to have toward Adam, and the precise implications of "he will rule" are the subject of extensive and often heated discussions, which I will not get into here. Suffice it to say that however you read the final sentence, some scholars will disagree with you.

The exact meaning of the phrase "your pain and your conception" is subject to more than one possible interpretation, one of which is that it is a hendiadys for the pain of the childbearing process. If they are read separately: that God is threatening to increase both Eve's pain and the number of children she conceives, there is a puzzle. Why would an increase in conception be a negative in a Bible that is generally very positive toward the having of many children?

Where the beginning of the verse reads in the Masoretic Text, To the woman, Kittel says that we should follow the Samaritan Pentateuch, Septuagint, and Peshitta in reading And to the woman.

The Hebrew word here for conception is heron, rather than the usual herayon. According to BDB, what we have here is either a contraction or an error. Where the Masoretic Text has heron, the Samaritan Pentateuch has herayon.

The word in the phrase "your pain" is itsabon, which occurs only here, the following verse, and Genesis 5:29. In what might just be an interesting coincidence of Hebrew and English, it is in all three cases related to labor, in this verse the labor of childbirth, in the other two agricultural labor. The word used in the phrase "in pain" is etseb, a somewhat more common word for pain, also strongly associated with labor. What shades of distinction there might be between the two, I do not know. The Samaritan Pentateuch simply reads itsabon both times in this verse.