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Curses

             “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

 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.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:16-19)

Today’s passage is tough. We don’t like it. It doesn’t seem fair. The serpent was cursed with extreme and abject humiliation. The ground is cursed, making farming difficult. That’s the curse on the ground for man – and woman. It’s not as if men’s gardens would be thorny and women’s gardens would be Edens. Women are also cursed with painful labor, and desire for, and subservience to, their husbands. Granted, if a man has a heart, he commiserates with what the woman experiences in labor, at least to the extent that he can.

The thing about these curses may be that they are, so to speak, natural consequences of the change of their relationships with God and with other people. Man was created to be in relationship with God, other people, and the world in which they lived. They were already “farming” in an ideal setting. When God removed Himself from the equation, farming became harder. But just as importantly, man’s attitude changed. Our circumstances are God’s fault because He gave Eve to Adam. They are the serpent’s fault. They are Adam’s fault. It’s no longer just the way things are and we love it. Now, it’s all about us.

The same is true of the curse on women. Did Eve have no desire for Adam before the fall? If she had gotten pregnant, would the baby have had a head and body less than an inch in diameter instead of the average of about four inches for the head? Did God add nerves with overly active pain receptors? Or was the problem that women would be more focused on the pain and in her fallen mind, resent it more? And while her position as Ezer had not changed, her attitude toward that position had.

To make things worse for Eve, God had told the serpent that her seed would defeat him. So even with the warning that pain would be involved, the serpent would be defeated only through that pain. Jewish lore (not the Bible) says that Cain killed able with a rock. Did he effectively crush his brother’s skull? Was that how Eve saw it? That would have made Abel’s death even more tragic.

But one final observation. The word "cursed" is only found in one place in what God said to Adam and Eve. He cursed the ground - not Adam, and not Eve.

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