Wednesday Bible study: the "3:16s"

I am working on what I hope will be a series of Wednesday Bible Study posts, and the subject that has been chosen for me is one I have had playing in the back of my mind for a while now.  John 3:16 is well known to most of us, and I have noticed a handful of times that other books of the Bible have interesting 3:16 verses.  And so, I'm going to be looking at the Bible's various 3:16s, starting in Genesis.  Now, not all books HAVE a 3:16, and if there is some mystical reason for that, I'm going to do my best (though it be against my nature) to not try and beat a meaning from their absences.  Nor will I be looking for an overarching narrative in them- though who knows what we will find as we go?  With all that said, let's look at Genesis 3:16.

Gen 3:16  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. 

This is, of course the curse on "the Woman," whom I notice is very rarely addressed by her name of Eve.  Maybe another time we'll bring up that in the New Testament genealogy of Matthew, the only one of 4 women mentioned in that list not mentioned by name was Bathsheba- and her possible connections to Eve.  But I want to try to be a bit more directed here, and just look at the portions of this verse that nudged my interest.

First off, "greatly multiply thy sorrow AND thy conception..." I hadn't noticed before that this was "and" and not "of".  And I wondered what it meant- was Eve, and subsequent women after her, now to have MORE kids as a result?  I had to dig around the commentaries, some of which said plainly "it should be read as 'of'", until finally coming to the comments of Keli and Delitzch.  In them, I learned two new words- one which was helpful, the other not so much.  Their main point was that you could not figure it as meaning increased conception, because reproduction was to be both a blessing and a commandment from God ("Be fruitful and multiply"), so how could it be a curse?  Less helpfully, they noted that this phrase could not be what they called a hendiadys- where a modifier-subject pairing is separated by an "and", like, "nice and sunny."  They concluded that the line "thy sorrow and thy conception" were meant to parallel the line "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children"- a device which gave me my second new word, "apposition"- and this meant that sorrow was going to be increased throughout the process.  And you think about it, that makes sense.  The two "sorrow"s, while from the same root, are two different words;  the first one takes more of the emotional end, while the second has more to do with physical labor and pain.  The entire curse not only includes pain, but also "worrisome-ness".  So the gamut from PMS and its mood swings all the way through hormonal changes and post-natal depression all get their start right here.  Oh, and it hurt more.

Here, I'd like to speculate that there had to have been some distance of time between Eve's creation and the Fall;  why would you tell her that the birth-process was going to get worse if she had not had an "easy" birth at least once?  Perhaps this explains a bit more about Cain's fall into sin.  What if he was born to the un-fallen world, and Abel was not?  Could have been a whole different dynamic than we first see if so.  But, like I said, this is but speculation.

Second, " and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. "  This verse is stating that AS PART of the curse, a woman shall now be driven by desire for her man- and the man will often take advantage of that desire.  Which explains a lot about today's world, and why everyone has such a problem living by Ephesians 5: 22-25.  When we ask, "how does the woman being abused stay with/go back to her abuser", perhaps this is the reason.  Which made me wonder, "So how was it SUPPOSED to be?"  And you have to go back a chapter for that.

Gen 2:18  And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 

A helpmeet.  Take a look at what that is in deep meaning.  First, the word for "help".  It means "help".  Plain and simple.  But "meet for him".  That comes from a word that means "counterpart."  The woman was meant to be a counterpart, an "opposite" to "help."  No submission other than that she was brought forth from his body, except for the fact that God seems to have always went to the first-created man first.  He was obviously intended to be the leader of equals...

Eph 5 31 “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”[e] 32 This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. 33 Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

 Third, another commentator went through a long song and dance about the motivations of the order from which the participants were judged.  This commentator believed that the serpent was judged first because " first, because it is a mute, unreasoning animal in itself, and therefore incapable of judicial examination, and it was the serpent only that was palpable to the senses of our first parents in the temptation; and, secondly, because the true tempter was not a new, but an old offender."  Now I don't know that I buy that, because it's basically judging the snake as a snake- a "mute, unreasoning animal", and punishing it for something it couldn't have reasoned how to do.  And in the same breath letting Satan off because he'd already been judged when he was cast out of heaven. 

But what I do think happened- again, my speculation- was more like this:  the only way that the serpent "was more subtil (sic) than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made" (Gen 3:1) was that it WAS Satan in reptilian form, and not just a dumb beast that got possessed.  But since he chose to cause the Fall of Man "dressed" as a dumb beast, he was judged AS a dumb beast.  How better to humiliate someone who had so recently been "the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.  Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created..." (Ezek 28:14-15) than to tell him, "upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life"?  While much of that verse where he was being cursed (Gen 3:14-15) involved the prophecy of how he would fall himself at the hands of Jesus, I think part of it was a bit of, "So ya wanna be a snake? I'll treat you like a snake" from God.

And before you think that was all just a bunny trail, actually one commentator points out that judging Satan first was a big lesson for Eve.  After all, she had been taken in by the Serpent's charm, as well as his "logic"- a logic that would lead her from rationalization right on into sin- and now she had to watch while that oh-so-unassailable logic failed, and her tempter was shown far less wise than she thought.  She had been fooled, and now she knew how BADLY she'd been fooled, and knew she was in for it when God finished with the serpent. Because any defense she would have had would have been on the wisdom of the serpent, and, well...

1Ti 2:11-14  Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.   But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. 
 For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 
 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. 

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So you see, I'm trying to make this Wednesday project more of a "what if", and using the what ifs to either a) make us ponder the possiblities, or b) dig to see if we can find a truth to it.  Where Sunday message I try to be led by more of a "this is what God says" vibe, I want this to be more of a "what DOES God say, if anything?" vibe. What do you think?  This might not get far without YOUR comments! Next week, Moses and getting the elders of Israel all on one page... if he can!