Bell noticed that God was predicting (maybe even warning) the respective genders about what will turn out to be life-long, and transcultural sturggles.
Where as women will struggle with relationships with people, men will struggle with their relationship with work. (As symbolized by the farming/tilling imagery.) Men will not be codependent so much as they will shun relationships, relational thinking, etc.

Those are the three places where the word occurs in the OT. However, Kaiser et al, pp. 97-98 says:

“Of the twelve known ancient versions (the Grek Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Old Latin, the Sahidic, the Bohairic, the Ethiopic, the Arabic, Aquila’s Greek, Symmachus’s Greek, Theodotion’s Greek and the Latin Vulgate), almost every one (twenty-one out of twenty-eight times) renders these three instances of [tesuqah] as “turning,” not “desire.”

Likewise, the church fathers (Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Epiphanius and Jerome, along with Philo, a Jew who died about A.D. 50) seem to be ignorant of any other sense for this word [tesuqah] than the translation of “turning.” Furthermore, the Latin rendering was conversio and the Greek was apostrophe or epostrophe, words all meaning “a turning.”

They then cite the work of Katherine C. Bushnell, who they say “traced its [the rendering of the word as "desire"] genesis to an Italian Dominican monk named Pagnino who translated the Hebrew Bible . . . [and whose translation was] published in Lyons in 1528.”

After which Kaiser et al. go on to make the “turning from God to her husband” point, and the descriptive-rather-than-prescriptive point.

Again, all I can do is appeal to authority on this point. The talk of “turning” may seem awkward in some contexts, but there could be cultural/linguistic-distance issues at work (or perhaps the translation of the passages are being formed to fit the meaning of “desire” and would have turned out differently if the word had been translated as “turning”).

*ponders*

Thanks. :-) I can only appeal to authority on the desire/turning translation issue, so there’s not much more I can personally add on that point.

As to why it would happen that Adam would end up ruling over Eve:

I think that what we have here is a partial description of a “codependent relationship” (or, as I believe the current term is: “dependent personality disorder”), and I think that a fuller description would reveal that the ruling went both ways.

As one person turns to the other as a replacement for God, she or he places the other person in a dominant position. This has to do with the humans’ nature as images (they must be “of” something, and whatever they are “of” is what controls them).

One thing that would make the Woman in this situation more likely to turn to the Man (more often than the Man might turn to the Woman) and therefore make the male-over-female structure more prevalent — in their particular codependent relationship — is their relative ages.

In Genesis 2, God does some of what I see as teaching the Man before the Woman shows up. The Man, therefore, is the closest thing to God that the Woman encounters: he knows more, and therefore has more to teach her.

(Again, I see the Teacher-Student relationship between God and the humans as being highly important in Genesis 1-3).

(Also, the Woman is taken from the Man in Genesis 2. So it could be easy for her to confuse him as a kind of source with the kind of source that God is.)

Therefore, the Man will appear to the Woman as the best substitute for God. On the other hand, the Man has been taught to see the Woman as his equal, and therefore may be less likely to place her in God’s position. Not that he won’t (I’m sure he will, since she and he are the two most godlike things in Creation) but in relative terms, he’ll may be less likely to do so as often.

But I’m not sure that we can tell whether the Story is telling us that all human couples will tend to have the same (lopsided) codependent dynamic. I am sure, however, that it is not telling us that any human couple should have such a dynamic.

As for Ephesians 5:21-33:

Paul does cite the “one flesh” passage from Genesis 2, but I don’t think the power structures which come out in Genesis 3 are helpful in understanding what Paul is trying to say. I do think, however, that the two passages have been traditionally linked. But I think this linkage is faulty.

First, Genesis 3 is descriptive, not prescriptive. (The humans will develop dependent personality disorder not because they should, but because of how they have chosen to conduct themselves.) However, Ephesians 5:21-33 is both descriptive and prescriptive.

Paul appeals to the “one flesh” theme from Genesis 2 in describing the husband-wife relationship from the husband’s point of view. And certain “shoulds” flow from that.

Where he gets the headship theme from, however, I don’t know. This is especially complicated by the fact that he begins the passage by telling everyone to (effectively) treat everyone else as if they were his/her “head.”

In some ways, this passage is parallel to 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, on which I’ve written an article series. Hopefully said series will be published sometime soon, but till then I’ll just note the following:

In 1 Cor. 11:1-16, Paul is trying to give the Corinthian Church some “Christian” reasons for (temporarily) following a non-Christian custom so that they will be less likely to scare non-Christians away. He’s trying to help them maintain their new identity while not alienating themselves from society (is that proper grammar?).

And he’s doing so in response to some questions the Corinthians have asked him. In 1 Cor. 11:1-16 the question he’s answering was about head coverings, and how they do or don’t fit with not drawing divisions within the Church between its various groups (cf. Galatians 3:28).

In Ephesians, perhaps Paul is responding to a similar situation: “How should our unity in Christ effect the traditional husband-over-wife relationship from which we are coming as we ‘leave’ society and ‘enter’ the Church?”

But I’ll have to look into the issue more closely.

So is the argument, perhaps, that woman was subjected to man, not by God’s will, but due to inferior size and strength? Or is this linking up with Saint Paul in Ephesians?

And thanks Andrew!

Means a lot, both of you. :-)

On the passage Mr. Stevens quotes:

First:
As far as I can tell, there is no “I will” in the original. It’s a description not of something God is doing (”increasing sorrow” or whatever) but of the logical consequences of the humans’ actions.

But I’d have to go into more detail about how those consequences are “logical” (and about what exactly those consequences are). It has to do with the ontology/anthropology of humanity as images (representations, re-presentations) of God to the world.

Second:
The word rendered “desire” is a mistranslation which most translations have adopted. It should be “turning” “Your turning will be to your husband.” (Kaiser, et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible).

Again, God is simply describing the consequences of what the humans have done. And God tells the Man essentially the same thing he tells the woman in 3:17a .

They have turned away from God, and turned to each other instead. This will create unhealthy power structures between them, as well as messing up their relationship with the rest of Creation.

Tell your Wife “Hello” from us.