You Are Not Worthless - Marz and a few words on Genesis

Marz with a great word for all of us

Part of the text (Genesis 3: 15-17)

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
They will strike at your head,
while you strike at their heel.

16 To the woman he said:
I will intensify your toil in childbearing;
in pain (see below) you shall bring forth children.
Yet your urge shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.

17 To the man he said: Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree
about which I commanded you, You shall not eat from it,
Cursed is the ground* because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.

Some common mistakes to avoid in our reading:

1. God did not curse the woman

2. "Painful child-bearing" is not in the Hebrew text

3. "Pain" is not a good translation. "Effort" would be a better translation. And the good word here is that children are coming.

4. "Urge" or "desire" are hard to understand here. The Hebrew word can have many meanings and is not sexual in all cases (Genesis 4: 7, for example). But the important point here is that desire is not bad.

5. Read "rule" as a warning and not as a command and think about how that changes your understanding of what is happening. The order of things has changed quickly from the Garden to a state of despair, and now something else is occurring. People are beginning to live in history and the contradictions that drive human development forward are appearing. This is the beginning of time, not the end-point or an all-times-and-forever sentence.

6. The man is not told to rule over the woman.

Genesis is important to how we see ourselves and our world whether we are believers or not. Particular understandings of Genesis have come into many of our cultures and impact everything. This is where many of our self-doubts and our work ethics, and often our sense of doom, comes from. The most dismal views predominate because those views serve certain political and economic and social interests, and perhaps these are being put aside and something even worse is taking their place for many of us. It doesn't have to be like this.

More from Marz

I got lots of help for this post from a few sources but I lost the citations. I hope that I can find them and post them.