God’s Ultimate Punishment:
The Power Dynamic between Men and Women
By Gina Arnold
Within the first three chapters of Genesis, each mention of man and woman serves to subtly reveal and explain the nature of gender relations. Upon a cursory examination of the text, the woman appears to be disadvantaged in every way from her very inception, but when one looks deeper it becomes increasingly apparent that the relationship between the male and female is more complex as the male has gender specific challenges of his own. The unequal relationship between the male and the female is, overall, mutually disadvantageous for both genders because the female loses her autonomy and the male is burdened with the task of ruling and supporting his spouse.
When God creates the man and the woman in both the first and second creation myth, they were made to be perfectly equal so that their relationship could be mutually beneficial. The first human God creates in both origin stories, is called ’adam, which is “a generic term for human beings” that “does not automatically suggest maleness.” The implication of using a generic term for the human is that the male isn’t immediately privileged over the female despite the fact that it seems to be that way when it is translated in English to the exclusionary word “man.” Furthermore, when the woman was made, she was made to serve as the man’s “sustainer” — connoting “active intervention on behalf of someone.” The original ’adam needed a sustainer that was indeed able to actively intervene on his behalf, and the only being capable of fulfilling this role was necessarily his equal for despite all the creatures God created for the human, “no sustainer beside him was found” (Gen 2:20). God gifted man and woman with an equal and simple partnership that would allow them to truly care for each other.
After the man and the woman disobey God by eating from the tree of knowledge, the woman loses her status as the equal counterpart of the man when she is implicitly sentenced to the specialized role of childrearing and loses her autonomy outright. The first part of her punishment: “I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children” (Gen 3:16) indicates that she will feel a pain separate from her husband because it’s specific to her anatomy. God could have chosen to give her the same punishment as her husband, but instead he chose to emphasize, through his gender specific punishment, the fact that she is expected to perform a different duty than the man is. God’s punishment hints at the very limited gender role — childrearing — that women have been expected to fulfill for centuries. The following two lines of God’s punishment are even more blatantly damaging for the woman’s relationship to the man. God pronounces, “…for your man shall be you longing, and he shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16). This second sentence seals the woman’s fate — she will feel pain whether she is with man or without one. While she is without the man, she won’t be able to help her own feeling of longing for him even though he is the one who can now wield power over her! Yet, while she is with him she loses her personal sovereignty. The repercussion of God’s punishment on the woman is that she is faced with two unsatisfactory choices while she remembers her ideal status before her punishment… now she can either choose to live freely and endure her longing for man alone or she can accept her relationship with the man and forsake her self-ownership.
While it may initially appear that the man is now completely privileged over the woman, his newfound power over her comes also with the burden of ruling. Just as the woman was given a particular role and pain, man also received a specific obligation. God says to the man: “Cursed be the soil for your sake, with pangs shall you eat from it all the days of your life” (Gen 3:17). The weight of the man’s curse is amplified now that his sustainer is set beneath him. She doesn’t receive the man’s punishment in conjunction with her birth pains, meaning that he must bear this burden for both of them. The line “God sent him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been taken,” (Gen 3:23) also serves to assert the man’s inexorable burden to provide for not only himself, but also the woman just so they can survive. The depth of the man’s punishment, however, lies in the woman’s punishment. The subjugated status of woman to man, particularly the unsatisfactory choices she has in how she relates to the man, is bound to cause her to resent the man for his paradoxical status as both her oppressor and the object of her desire. The man feels her resentment and likely comes to loathe his own status as her ruler because he can still remember when they were each the other’s equal sustainers and the feelings they had for each other weren’t complicated by a power dynamic. Man, the ruler, is oppressed by his own status as an oppressor.
The central result of God’s punishment on mankind was the creation of a power dynamic between men and women that is, in fact, unfavorable for both genders. Presumably, women are bound to long for men, while also believing that the moment they find one, their autonomy will be diminished greatly; men are faced with the pressure to provide for their women and are faced with subtle resentment from their women as they yearn for autonomy. But what if our fate wasn’t actually sealed? If we, men and women, are able to recognize the mutually damaging situation we’re in when we are in it, then we can aspire to be as we once were. Although we may have been exiled from a life of ease and plenty, we are not forbidden from reestablishing the perfect relationship man and woman once had. When we finally reject our specified roles and our unequal power, men and women can become each other’s sustainers again.
If you like what you just read, please hit the green ‘Recommend’ button below so that others might find this essay.
If you liked this essay, then you might like:
or…
