Scripture nowhere applies the word to Eve. The reading that God cursed her requires God and Satan to have worked for the same result, on the same day, against the same woman.
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The question is not a matter of Hebrew. It can be settled by anyone who reads the chapter in order and asks who would want the outcome.
In Genesis 3:15 God names Eve the enemy of the serpent and the progenitor of the one who will crush his head. One verse later, on the traditional reading, God turns and lays on her pain in childbearing, craving for the husband, and his rule over her. Katharine Bushnell put the objection in God's Word to Women, 1923: We are sure that if anyone would curse her under such conditions, it would not be God, but Satan, her enemy. Surely God and Satan would not unite to curse.
The traditional reading does not merely make God severe. It makes God and Satan collaborators.
[See KATHARINE BUSHNELL · SOPHIA]
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THE WORD IS NOT THERE
Search the chapter for the word. Verse 14, to the serpent: thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Verse 17, to Adam: cursed is the ground for thy sake.
The serpent is cursed. The ground is cursed. Eve is never cursed, and the word is never applied to her anywhere in the passage.
That is not a subtle point of construction. It is the text. The claim that God cursed Eve is an interpretation laid over a passage that does not contain it, and the interpretation has been read back into the passage for so long that its absence from the words now reads as an omission rather than as the finding.
[See THE OFFICIAL RECORD · SUPERSESSION]
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THE ABSURDITY
Set the two verses beside each other and the sequence does not survive.
Verse 15 gives Eve the highest destiny assigned to anyone in the chapter: enmity with the serpent, and a seed that will destroy him. Verse 16, read as curse, immediately takes it back: her motherhood turned to suffering, her turning bound to a husband, her husband set over her.
Bushnell: What could be more unnatural than for God to first repose that greatest promise of all the Bible in a person, and then in the next breath pronounce a terrible punishment upon her? The reading asks the same speaker, in consecutive sentences, to appoint a champion and then cripple her.
[See THE HATRED OF THE COMPETENT WOMAN]
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WHO WOULD WANT HER CURSED
Ask the forensic question instead of the devotional one. Who benefits.
The serpent has just been told that this woman's seed will crush him. What would he want done to her? He would want her crippled so that she could not contend with him: her motherhood turned into suffering, her activities hampered, her voice silenced, and the person living closest to her, the one with the strength to do it, incited to hold her down.
That list is not speculative. It is precisely the content the traditional reading assigns to verse 16.
Bushnell's sentence is the knife: Now all this, which common sense tells us Satan would most certainly wish to do, most Bible expositors tell us GOD DID. The doctrine attributes to God the exact program its own account of the adversary would predict, and calls the coincidence revelation.
[See THE SCAPEGOAT MECHANISM · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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THE REWARD FOR ADAM
The same reading has a second convergence in it, and it runs through Adam.
Adam's answer under questioning was to accuse the one who made him: the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree. He blamed God, and he blamed her, and he said nothing of the serpent. He sheltered the one who had actually done it.
On the curse-reading, what he receives for this is government over her: authority over her body, and the power to set how much she suffers. A reading that hands the man rule as the consequence of blaming God and shielding the serpent has to explain who rewards that, and the honest answer is not God.
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THE ATONEMENT QUESTION
The curse-reading also costs the Gospel, and Bushnell pressed this as a Christian woman rather than as a critic of Christianity.
If women remain under a curse pronounced in Eden, then the redemption does not reach them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law is either true of half the church or it is not the claim the church makes. Bushnell refused the position: she would not take up the work of serving out Eve's curse, because doing so would concede that the atonement was partial.
A doctrine that requires women to remain under a curse requires the atonement to be insufficient, and no one preaching that doctrine has been willing to say so in those words.
[See THE ESTABLISHMENT · THE MISSING STAIR]
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WHERE THE READING CAME FROM
The curse-reading is not native to the text. It was imported, and the import is documented.
The Babylonian Talmud carries a tradition known as the Ten Curses of Eve. It is not biblical text. It is later commentary elaborating what was held to have fallen on women after the Fall, and its fifth item is sexual craving. In 1528 the Italian Dominican Santes Pagnino, translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin, followed that tradition rather than the Septuagint and the fathers, and rendered teshuqah as libido. Coverdale followed Pagnino in 1535, and the King James followed Coverdale in 1611.
The import was a Christian act and the enforcement was a Christian institution's. Whatever a rabbinic commentary speculated about Eden, it was a Dominican who put the speculation into the Latin, translators who carried it into English, and a church and then a state that ran four centuries of law and doctrine on the result. A tradition that was not scripture became scripture by being translated as though it were.
[See TESHUQAH · THE FORGED WARRANT OF THE WORD]
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WARNING, NOT SENTENCE
Bushnell's own description of the work was that theology had left women no road through the chapter except into a curse, so a road would have to be cut: we must do some sappers' and miners' work, and hew a hermeneutical and exegetical road for ourselves.
What the road reaches is a verse in a different grammatical mood. Not I will greatly multiply thy sorrow but a snare hath increased thy sorrow. Not thy desire shall be to thy husband but thy turning shall be to thy husband. On the restored reading God is not sentencing Eve, God is telling her what the adversary will do: that her turning, which belongs to her source, will be caught and redirected onto the husband, and that his rule will follow from the redirection.
That is a warning about a hunter. It describes a consequence rather than issuing a command, and it leaves the serpent as the author of what follows rather than making God the author of what the serpent designed.
[See THE SNARE · MISFIT ALL AROUND]
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Everything turns on which reading is admitted. If God cursed woman, then God and the adversary worked for the same result, male rule is divine design, women's suffering is divine punishment, and the redemption is partial. If God warned woman, the adversary is the enemy, the rule is a fallen consequence rather than an ordinance, the suffering is an attack rather than a sentence, and the redemption is whole.
The first reading requires God and Satan to be allies. The second keeps them opposed. Scripture nowhere says Eve was cursed, and the doctrine that says it does has to borrow the word from somewhere.
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