The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Genesis 3:14-19 and 4:6-12

The story of the serpent, the woman, and the man and the story of Cain and Abel mirror each other in a variety of ways. The two narratives also differ from each other from a number of points of view. I began to explore commonalities and differences in a previous post. Interpretation which concentrates on similarities but overlooks differences runs the risk of missing the point of a particular passage entirely.

In the first narrative, the man breaks faith with God, and the soil is cursed on his account. It now yields goodness by dint of pain and exertion, and thorn and thistle abound. In the second narrative, after Cain’s crime, pain and sweat are no longer sufficient to allow him to eke out a living from it. It gets worse from there. He is banished not only from God’s presence, but from the presence of his fellows. But that is not the most basic point of the story. A red thread runs through the book of Genesis, a buried lede if you will.

אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ

בְּעִצָּבוֹן תֹּאכֲלֶנָּה

כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ׃

 

15 וְקוֹץ וְדַרְדַּר

תַּצְמִיחַ לָךְ

וְאָכַלְתָּ אֶת־עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה׃

 

16 בְּזֵעַת אַפֶּיךָ

תֹּאכַל לֶחֶם

עַד־שׁוּבְךָ אֶל־הָאֲדָמָה

[God to the man]

Cursed is the dirt on your account.

It by toil you shall eat

all the days of your life.

Thorn and thistle

it will grow for you.

The land's vegetation you will eat.

By the sweat of your brow

you shall eat bread

until you revert to dirt.
 

 10מֶה עָשִׂיתָ

קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ

צֹעֲקִים אֵלַי מִן־הָאֲדָמָה׃

 

11וְעַתָּה אָרוּר אָתָּה

מִן־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר־פָּצְתָה אֶת־פִּיהָ

לָקַחַת אֶת־דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ מִיָּדֶךָ׃

 

12כִּי תַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה

לֹא־תֹסֵף תֵּת־כֹּחָהּ לָךְ

נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ׃

[God to Cain]

What have you done?

The sound of your brother’s blood

cries out to me from the dirt!

 
From now on you are under a curse

from the very dirt which opened its mouth

to receive your brother’s blood from your hand;

 

if you till the dirt,

it will no longer gives its strength to you;

you will be an errant wanderer on the earth.

 

4:10-12 is, not, strictly speaking, a poetic passage. I divide it up into manageable syntactic subunits. A technical observation: the phrase וְעַתָּה 'from now on,' as discourse markers and function words like   כִּי often do in ancient Hebrew, governs a broad swathe of text, all the way to the end of verse 12.

According to both narratives, a break in the relationship of intimacy God and humanity are meant to have has profoundly dehumanizing effects. Human beings who break that relationship in favor of a relationship with the power of being able to disdain God pay a heavy price.

I’m reminded of a bon mot of Woody Allen, who famously said: "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. The worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever." It’s interesting that such a statement should come from Allen, a notorious overachiever in the sin department.

If seen as a seamless whole, Allen’s biography, I think, gives the lie to his statement. Allen’s art is forged in the crucible of an obsession with transgression and love and death. The art is a blessing to others, not because it encourages us to be like Allen (the opposite is true), but because it allows us to laugh at our own obsessions. Through his art he sometimes even gives us the strength to gain the upper hand with the overpowering obsessions of our lives. If this is true, even Allen’s overachievement in the sin department serves a purpose in (I speak as a believer) the divine economy. If so, God is not such an underachiever after all.

If a purpose is to be sought in the extent to which the law of cause and effect operates in the moral realm, perhaps it lies in that direction. That, at least, is a natural enough inference if Genesis 3-4 is read within the context of the larger whole of which it is a part. In the larger narrative of Genesis, sin is no match for God’s electing grace. That is the gospel according to Genesis. That is the red thread which runs through the entire book.

The language the twin narratives use to describe relationships blighted by broken intimacy with God is symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time.

וְאֶל אִישֵׁךְ תְּשׁוּקָתֵךְ

וְהוּא יִמְשֹׁל בָּךְ׃

 

וְאֵלֶיךָ תְּשׁוּקָתֹו

וְאַתָּה תִּמְשָׁל־בֹּו׃

[God to the woman]

And your desire will be for your man,

but he is able to dominate you.

 
His desire is for you,

but you are able to dominate him.

In Genesis 3, ‘your desire for your partner’ is a positive (as in Song of Songs 7:11) balanced by a negative ‘he is able to dominate you.’ In Genesis 4, a negative ‘[sin’s] desire for you’ is balanced by a positive ‘you are able to dominate him.’ Note the inversion of elements.

By translating ‘able to’ in both cases, I do not mean to suggest that the emphasis is on potentiality. In both cases, the emphasis is on certainty and potentiality. It is certain that he/you is/are able.

In Genesis 3, the outcome of broken intimacy with God is an abusive relationship between a woman and her partner. In Genesis 4, the outcome of broken intimacy with God is a relationship with sin and temptation in which the latter have the upper hand and destroy life’s goodness through ever-widening ripple effects.

But in both narratives, God puts limits on the damage broken intimacy with him brings in its wake. If it were not so, life would merely be hell on earth. The overabounding nature of God’s grace vis-à-vis human sin becomes fully manifest from chapter 12 of the book of Genesis on.

Comments

[Suzanne]

John,

What do you think of Waltke's analysis, expressed here in the words of Martin Shields,

Etymology, then, would suggest that the (unused) Hebrew verbal root שוק III should be connected to the Arabic sāqa, which leaves us to determine the possible semantic field for the feminine noun תשוקח . Waltke and O’Connor tell us that “a t-prefix noun usually designates the action of the verb it is derived from,”32 in light of which the most likely meaning for the noun would be something like ‘control, direction, regulation’33–so the text would indicate here that the woman will direct her control over her husband.

In that case the curse is a negative returned by an even greater negative.

[JohnFH]

The word in question,תְּשׁוּקָה, is not of uncertain meaning. According to HALOT it also occurs in DSS, Mishnaic, and Samaritan Hebrew with the sense usually given it: 'desire, longing.' Said sense seems plainly attested in Song of Songs 7:11.

The interpretation you remark upon I associate not with Waltke or a dubious Arabic cognate, but with another scholar: "Susan Foh (WTJ 37 [1974/75] 376–83) has, however, argued that the woman’s urge is not a craving for her man whatever he demands but an urge for independence, indeed a desire to dominate her husband. Such an interpretation of “urge” is required in the very closely parallel passage in 4:7, where sin’s urge is said to be for Cain, but he must master it. Here in 3:16 woman’s desire for independence would be contrasted with an injunction to man to master her. There is a logical simplicity about Foh’s interpretation that makes it attractive, but given the rarity of the term “urge” (תשׁוקה, apart from Gen 3:16 and 4:7 occurring only in Cant 7:11), certainty is impossible." - Wenham, Gordon J.: Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15. Dallas: Word, 2002 (Word Biblical Commentary 1) 81.

I'm not convinced by Foh's interpretation, but it would be worth re-examining the use of the word in question throughout Hebrew literature.

Phyllis Trible connected Gen 3:16 with Song of Songs 7:11 in a famous essay entitled "Love's Lyrics Redeemed," Chapter 5 in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978) 144-165.

If you haven't read it yet, you will find it enjoyable.

[Suzanne]

Thanks, John, naturally I was influenced by Waltke on this since I didn't know the background.