What creature is the serpent?

Interesting. I heard a pastor explain the Hebrew translated as “you will have increased pain as a result of having children” didn’t necessarily refer to the pangs of the birth process per se, but also the idea that bringing up children in a fallen world where there is war and murder will be more painful for a mother. It’s also interesting that the result is “increased pain”, implying there was was some pain there already before the curse .

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That is not a translation any Hebrew scholar who has recently worked on a major translation has come up with, so I’m skeptical. The word wə·hê·rō·nêḵ has to do with the physical aspect of conception/pregnancy and the Septuagint translation renders that word στεναγμόν ‘your moanings.’ I think the context is pretty clear that the pain is physical pain and the cause is the physical birthing (tê·lə·ḏî) of children. That verb refers to the physical act of delivering a baby and is almost always linked elsewhere in the Bible with what comes after conception/pregnancy. (“She became pregnant, and gave birth” is the typical English rendering.)

Could be, I don’t know Hebrew… I’ll see if I can find the original reference, I’m racking my brain but can’t recall exactly where I heard that idea. Thanks.

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Or really wide hips which got shrunk down after eating the forbidden fruit. :wink:

It is an interesting evolutionary question as well. It is not common in other species. Most of the few who do have something similar is rather different (i.e. covert menstruation, where it is simply reabsorbed by the body). One site I was reading connects it to a higher rate of aneuploidy because of a mechanism to detect such abnormalities and get rid of defective embryos.

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Hi Christy, I understand you are a linguist! Cool. I recall where I heard the alternate interpretation for the Hebrew for “Birth pangs”…It was a reference to a book by Carol Meyer. I hate to send you to a link (and no obligation) but here is a discussion thread about the meanings of the words in Hebrew, suggesting that the “pain” could be better translated as a general sort of “toil” related to various aspects of having children. Curious what you think. hebrew - Genesis 3:16 - "Pain in Childbearing" or "Toil and Childbearing" - Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange

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I studied Greek, not Hebrew, so I don’t know enough to evaluate the arguments. It doesn’t look like there is a Hebrew word for birth pangs though, that comes from English translation decisions about how to render words that are greatly / I-will-multiply / your-sorrow / conj-your-conception / in-pain / you-shal-bring-forth / children (from an interlinear gloss)

My instinct is to be skeptical of translations that propose some alternate meaning/translation that seems to go against a more straightforward traditional one, especially if it eases inerrancy concerns for some people. It just feels like rescuing the Bible from itself instead of wrestling with what’s there. I’m especially skeptical when it comes down to word studies on a single word. We should always be taking in the whole discourse context of the text.

When I briefly looked at the passage the other night, it seemed like the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew is pretty close to the typical English rendering. (The Septuagint is informative because it was translated by people close to that world culturally and bilingual in the Hebrew.) If it was intended to mean “I’ll make raising children harder work” you’d think that would be reflected in the early Greek translation. But it isn’t there, it’s something like “In multiplying (reproducing) I will multiply both your distresses and your moanings, in distresses you will bear children.” The word for bear children is the word for physically delivering a baby. That’s the verb the pain (or toil if you like) is associated with. So even if the word rendered pain or sorrow or distress means something closer to hard work, the activity in view is birthing, so I don’t really get how that gets extrapolated to raising a family.

Maybe @KJTurner can instruct us from the perspective of someone who knows Hebrew and OT scholarship.

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I agree with @Christy that the words themselves are pretty straightforward (“I will greatly multiply your pain and your conception // in pain you shall bear children”), but interpretation goes beyond word studies. A simple example is the conjunction and in the first clause ("pain and conception)–are these two things or a hendiadys for one thing? The parallelism suggests something of the latter. Also, is the “conception” and “bearing children” limited to the narrow denotation of those words, or are they a circumlocution for the whole childrearing experience? Both are possible (e.g., Walton takes the latter view), so it’s simply a matter of interpretation at this point. Nothing mysterious in the Hebrew itself.

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I have reason to believe it is speaking of the tongue as it pertains to language processes coming out of the cerebellum, which resembles a garden of trees. My reasoning is I experienced the flat movement of my tongue’s internally contained motor program across one quadrant of the “ground”. It is explained in more detail in chapter 5 of my soon to be released book, "The Boundary Between Light and Darkness: my 6-6-6 experience ". It would make sense, since Eve was deceived by the serpent, and Adam was deceived by Eve, and it all came from tongues. Money is not the root of all evil, our tongues are!

Thanks to you and to @Christy for such a thorough analysis. I gather, then, that there is a bit of greyness around the interpretation of the Hebrew words and no butchering of the text to suggest it might mean something broader than only parturition-pangs.

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Well, butchering the text in a translation is not the same thing as butchering an interpretation. I think if you decided to translate it as something far from “increase your pain in childbearing,” (something like “increase the toil involved with raising a family” you would be imposing your interpretation on the text and that wouldn’t be a good translation. You could argue that “increase your pain in childbearing” should be taken to mean “increase the toil involved with raising a family,” but arguing over the best interpretation is not the same thing as arguing over the best translation.

I recently heard something, and I don’t remember which podcast it was, that they believed the painful child bearing was not so much about pregnancy but the pain bearing kids as in the pain Eve , and mothers faced at bringing kids into a world full of evil and pain. Specifically for Eve and what would happen with Cain and Abel.

Thought it was neat to consider but have no actual opinion on it. I always just took it as some kind of belief where in the story birth was painless before then and became painful after. Though I also was like within the story when was their “pre fall” births. So I used it as a link to birth must have existed before then therefore there was other humans , such as the ones Cain feared lol.

Yeah, I get it, but then why use words that are specifically about conception/pregnancy/birthing instead of more general terms related to having a family?

It seems to me like the impetus driving this interpretation is not mainly the text or cultural context, but it’s that people are uncomfortable with the idea that the Bible says something that could be considered scientifically wrong (childbirth is painful because sin, instead of obvious facts of human anatomy) or sexist (female bodies are uniquely cursed) and they need a rescuing device. Oh, that’s not really what it means, it just means motherhood is heartbreaking. If you let go of the need for the Bible to be authoritative and perfect in certain ways, it’s easier to just take it at face value that the story was attributing the origination of painful childbirth and pesky thorns to Adam and Eve’s sin. If it’s not literal history, it’s not a big deal.

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Yeah…I think that’s similar to a sermon I heard…that a possible meaning could be “pain at bringing kids into a world of evil”, and where increased “pain and toil” in raising a family (in both its physical and emotional aspects) would be involved.

I do know whoever I am listening to is definitely not anyone who takes the story as literal. Though they did argue something about the thorns and in the same way laboring in the land was no longer a hobby but a struggle to feed a family. That the whole reason that Adam was working the land was because of the struggle of raising a family as well.

But I’m not invested in any of it because I’ve not studied any of it and seen how had it been used. But I also can’t help but to notice all the struggling with families afterward. Several brothers at war with one another and so on. Almost every brotherly relationship in genesis had almost murders happening it seemed.

I’ll hVe to find it again and link it but one thing they also brought up was the use of pregnancy and childbirth language in Jonah and how it’s almost as if the birth was a “mother” for Jonah saving him from death and “spitting” him out. But info remember it clear enough to remember how they were linking it to the story in genesis 3.

I take your point, and agree that care should be taken in any interpretation (and perhaps we need to hold interpretations here with a loose hand). I’ll just point out that I am not an “inerrantist” in the strict sense, nor a historical/literalist when it comes to Genesis, and neither were the people espousing this broader interpretation as far as I know (for example held by John Walton as KJ Turner mentioned), and so concordism does not seem to be the thing motivating that broader interpretation?

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Not inerrantist nor concordist, but Carol Meyer is a feminist Bible scholar and sometimes that branch of biblical scholarship is more interested in proposing feminist readings that work for an egalitarian society today than in recreating the meaning of the text in its cultural context. I think sometimes in response to the ways biblical passages have been used to oppress and subjugate there can be a tendency to want to over-correct in the opposite direction. It’s true that some Bible passages have been manipulated and used in sexist, racist ways that are probably foreign to the original meaning of the passage. But it’s also true that some Bible passages reflect a the patriarchal (or nationalistic) society in which they were composed I would say we need to wrestle with that, not simply propose new feminist or liberation interpretations of difficult passages. But I think that is because we are approaching the interpretation task differently. John Walton does affirm inerrancy and does believe the Genesis account of Adam and Eve is historical in some sense.

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Interesting to think about. I don’t disagree --the ANE culture of the biblical patriarchs was certainly patriarchal :wink: and the text certainly reflects that.

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Even a literalist reading assumes there was pain pre-Fall–the curse is that the pain will increase. Also, it does not say that there were no thorns an thistles beforehand (and certainly says nothing of the reality of what life was like outside the garden).

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Not necessarily. A search reveals that many if not most who believe there was no death before the fall also believe there was no pain before the fall. They will explain that going from zero to one is also described by the word “increase.”

But I think the truth is that the whole idea of a “literal” understanding of the Bible is bogus anyway. We cannot even see things or hear sounds without our belief playing a role of interpretation, so this is even more the case with reading a text where the meaning isn’t the word itself but completely in the mind that reads them. Those meanings are not even the same between individuals of the same time and culture, let alone the same in different cultures or over millennial spans of time.

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