PERHAPS THE MOST DIFFICULT biblical verse for contemporary readers is Genesis 3:16. Traditional translations understand it to mandate painful pregnancies and the domination of women by men. However, that four-line poetic passage can be understood in a different way.
In Hebrew the first line of the poetry has four words: harbah arbeh itz’vonech v’heronech. The first two words constitute a double verbal form that asserts that the following two words—subjects of the verb— will be more intense, more plentiful, or more numerous than would be expected. The present translation “I shall greatly increase” is a satisfactory rendering of the double verb.
The usual translation of the two nouns itz’vonech v’heronech—“your pains in [or: of] pregnancy”—is problematic. First, as stated, both nouns are objects of the verb “increase.” That is, the Hebrew speaks about two distinct conditions that are subject to increase, joined by the Hebrew conjunction “and.” Second, the word “pain” is inaccurate. For one thing, it suggests that pregnancy itself is painful, which is not the case in most normal gestations (in contrast to giving birth, which is often painful). Furthermore, the uninflected noun itzavon otherwise often refers to the “hard work” of physical labor, which it almost certainly does in the next verse in reference to the agricultural work of men: “through toil shall you eat of it.”
For these reasons, our translation for the first line of 3:16 is “I shall greatly increase your toil and your pregnancies.” Not only does this rendering better reflect the Hebrew wording, but also it reflects the agrarian life situation of the Israelites. The highlands of the Land of Israel were not very fertile or well watered. Therefore, the hard work of both women and men was required for households to survive. Moreover, children were needed for the family labor force. With as many as one in two children dying before the age of five, a woman needed to have up to eight pregnancies to provide the optimum family size of four offspring.
The other three lines of the verse expand on the theme of procreation. The second line (“in anguish you shall bear children”) conveys the difficulty of childbirth itself, that is, the mental and also the physical anguish of giving birth. The third line (“to your man is your desire”) refers to the passion—emotional as much as sexual—that a woman feels for her husband. Such passion allows her to succumb to the dominance mentioned in the last line: “And he shall rule over you.” In keeping with the focus of this verse on childbearing, that line probably speaks about a husband’s ultimate responsibility for his wife’s sexuality and not for her entire person. Because of the risks of death in childbirth, many Israelite women would have been reluctant to have numerous pregnancies. Yet, passion toward their spouses serves to prompt women to respond to male sexual urges and thus accept the possibility of another pregnancy. Indeed, some medieval commentaries understood it this way.
The translation as “rule”—though accurate in a limited way—remains inadequate because it implies general male dominance over women—and has usually been interpreted that way for millennia. Unfortunately, no single word in English precisely conveys the meaning of the Hebrew term in this context.
Like many biblical passages, Genesis 3:16 is an etiology, helping people to accept the difficult realities of life by viewing them as having been mandated by God. For Israelite women this meant hard work and many children as well as enduring the risks of procreation. Although their sexuality may have belonged to their husbands, women in other ways were autonomous individuals who controlled important aspects of household life.
—Carol Meyers