We saw in chapter 2 that Adam was taken from the ground and Eve was taken from the man’s side. We saw how that explained their gender-specific tasks and that this included not merely distinct biological structures, but distinct psychological outlooks. Now if you don’t believe that—the devil is content, because he knows it and will exploit it all the more in the space given to him by that naïveté. This is what we saw at the beginning of chapter 3—namely, that the serpent went straight to Eve, and as the man passively abdicated his ground, the woman quickly stepped into it. We saw that further affirmed in God going to Adam first to establish that chain of command in their conviction. Now, even in the manner of what is cursed in 3:16-19, the punishment fits the crime because the crime first “unfit” them from their place.

• Taken from the side, the woman is cursed in its fruit.

• Taken from the ground, the man is cursed in its fruit.

Doctrine. The curse affects the totality of human life, and man and woman distinctly.

Taken from the side, the woman is cursed in its fruit.

The most obvious part of the curse to the woman is this. ‘To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children’ (v. 16a). Hamilton makes a great point which is so simple that it’s easy to miss: “that the woman is not cursed with infertility, which would have been the result had God promised the same curse on the woman as he did on the serpent. Childlessness is not her lot.” On the other hand, he says, “At the point in her life when a woman experiences her highest sense of self-fulfillment (according to OT emphases), she will have some physical anguish.”1

To put it in Hamilton’s language again—are these consequences of sin descriptive or prescriptive? “In other words, are these negative consequences engineered directly by God, or is God simply informing the woman the way it is to be from this moment on?”2 Look at the second part of this curse again.

“Your desire shall be for [contrary to] your husband, but he shall rule over you.”

The ESV revision “contrary to your husband” has the advantage that one possible rendering for the preposition אֵל is “against” and not just “for” or “toward” or “into.”

More into the real key of the meaning, look closely at the two words here signifying a constant state. Those words are “desire” (teshuqah) and “rule” (mashal). They are used again in Genesis 4:7, and the word for “desire” is only ever used again in Song of Solomon 7:10. That’s crucial because there are other more frequently and therefore more ordinary words for desire. Now in that latter place teshuqah is used in a positive way, with love between a man and a woman restored, “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” That is perfectly consistent with what we have been seeing because, remember, all that is distorted is first designed. So these are good things gone wrong.3

The real key is that in 4:7, when the Lord addresses Cain, it is not simply that the same two words are used. It is that they are used in the same mirroring fashion.

“And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for [contrary to] you, but you must rule over it.”

How is personified sin desiring Cain? Is it desiring Cain’s good? Of course not. One might say that it has a “mind of its own,” but it is more specifically to be the controlling principle in Cain’s life. That is why the proper remedy is for Cain to establish his reign over the force of sin. Now the point is not to compare the woman to sin. Sin is always a “bad influence,” whereas the woman was designed to be the man’s helper. So the “ruling over” here done by man that is described in 3:16 becomes a sinful rule. Note well the word I just used—“becomes.” The man’s imperative to rule is righteous; that he will do so sinfully is unrighteous. So test your thoughts about that—“Originally the rule was good; now, in sin, it is not good.” No. Go back. You need to make finer distinctions.

Waltke gives a good summary of the whole curse:

“The woman is frustrated within her natural relationships in the home: painful labor in bearing children and insubordination toward her husband. Control has replaced freedom; coercion has replaced persuasion; division has replaced multiplication.”4

In sin, the natural tendency for the marriage relationship is to sink into a fight for control.

Taken from the ground, the man is cursed in its fruit.

Note the same punishment fitting the crime for Adam as for Eve—all the way to his death, as we not from the last words of verse 19 and reflected in the speech at funerals. The man from the ground, is now exiled to the ground.

“And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (vv. 17-19).

What are the basic elements of this ground-curse? There are three exchanges that occurred: (i.) an exchange of a forbidden fruit for a rotting fruit, which is far worse; (ii.) an exchange of joyful labor for painful toil; (iii.) an exchange natural abundance and ease for a natural resistance and futility: i.e., ‘thorns and thistles’ (v. 18). In other words, the ground will resist you. Those you attempt to lead will be ungovernable, and those you coordinate will march to their own beat. Those to whom you extend a helping hand will turn to bite you. Whatever you do better that might benefit others will be envied and slandered and called oppression. No good deed will go unpunished. And the ground itself will swallow you whole.

The place that was supposed to be his joyful project are now his prison walls. Oh, sure, in our youth we are filled with plans of how things will be different for us than for our parents. But there comes a point when x amount of accomplishment, x amount of money, x amount of affirmation, is never enough.

“Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecc. 2:11).

There are perhaps many reasons why the Tenth Commandment—that against coveting—comes last, but an observation could be made about the way that sin and the curse orients us toward coveting at the root of every other sin. As Adam went from “more than enough” to “never enough,” so do all in Adam. Here is how James puts it:

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (Jas. 4:1-2).

When we move from God’s design to our distortion, we always move from “more than enough” to “never enough”—from gratitude and contentment (a kind of sanctified “ignorance” of want, it never occurring to us to run away from home) to a place of clawing and grasping for our own and coming up completely empty.

But what is the real scope of this curse? Recall that dominion over the ground or earth was not confined to gardening or even the animals—as if man was primarily a zoologist! This was a type of man’s total stewardship from God. This includes the entire vocational and cultural and educational and political life of man. So, when reflecting on this curse of that total ground, Schaeffer comments,

“It is interesting that almost all of the results of God’s judgment because of man’s rebellion relate in some way to the external world. They are not just bound up in man’s thought life; they are not merely psychological. Profound changes make the external, objective world abnormal.”5

This is the drumbeat of that curse section in Deuteronomy 28. Cursed are you in what and where? In everything and everywhere!

PRACTICAL

Use 1. Correction. One of the categories that the Bible diagnoses our idolatry is by this view back into the beginning. If, as Calvin said, we are “idol factories,” then this is true about us coming off the assembly line after the original prototypes of our first parents. We can see idolatry in this genesis of gender psychology. If the place that the man and the woman were taken from explain their whole psychology, then it will explain their fallen psychology as well. Before the fall, the man was a glory-seeker for God, but he sought that glory in the ground, by shaping the earth; the woman was a glory-seeker for God, seeking that glory at the man’s side and shaping new souls. What do you think their orientation is in the fall? It’s with the same stuff, but now seeing their own reflection in that ground and in that side—no longer God’s glory. So their strength becomes their weakness. Their God-given orientation becomes their God-deflecting idols. And you know, in the Bible, that false gods do not deliver.

“They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths. Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 135:16-18).

The man with the god-complex, attempting to reverse the curse on his own steam, or rebuild the world after his own image—he becomes like the devil who first exalted himself. He pounds at the ground and the whole world and becomes a ground-eating monster, or, the opposite, shrinks back in what we call effeminate, blaming the masculine mandate. The woman with the man-complex, turns into that side and revs up her anxieties that the man has his back turned and the children will become this or that, and she pounds in all the more, with nagging and when she ascends to the throne or the podium, becomes a shrill copy of the genuine article, debasing every male and female around her.

The side for the woman and the ground for the man are now sought as idols—no longer to glorify God in our proper activity, but to horde a private glory, and ultimately to complain to God that the place of our origin is not producing.

Use 2. Exhortation. We saw that in sin, the natural tendency for the marriage relationship is to sink into a fight for control. This is why Paul tells Christian husbands and wives what he does in Ephesians 5:22-33. Because of the work of Christ and the power of the Spirit, Christian marriages are called to paddle the other way, upstream, against this natural current of the man’s passive abdication of godly rule and the woman’s aggressive usurping of that rule. That is why the words of “love” differed both in the Greek and contextually when the husbands were called to agape their wives, and wives called to phileo their husbands. Husbands, love your wife in such a way that her cultivation of relationships is honored and liberated. Wives, love your husbands in such a way that his cultivation of the ground is honored and liberated.

Use 3. Consolation. Both the giving of birth and the yielding of a harvest tell the gospel, so that the words of Jesus that are meant in the extreme about His own death, have spread types and shadows through men and women across time and space: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn. 12:24). Or in Paul, “ It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory” (1 Cor. 15:43). Even that which is under the curse, for the Christian, is redeemed, is given a new bent, is made to tell another story.

Childbearing is pain. Work is pain. Life is pain. In the fall, even love is pain. And yet Christ is that Seed that falls into the earth and dies. We know this because John’s goes on to say in that twelfth chapter, “He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die” (v. 33).

Our toil is not redeeming in itself; but in Christ, the Apostle says that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).

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1. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, 200.

2. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, 201.

3. Hamilton makes one more point that we may take a step further. He says, “Interestingly, in all three instances the LXX has hē apostrophē, ‘return,’ apparently reading təšūbā for təšūqā. Perhaps the LXX failed to understand the Hebrew word correctly” (201). Perhaps. Or perhaps to “return” in this sense calls attention to the woman’s going “back into” that place from which she was derived, not in adoration of the man, but in anxiety to take the place he has vacated—a sort of perpetual recapitulation of Eve’s original deceived ambition.

4. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary, 94.

5. Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time, 95.