One Hebrew word, three occurrences, given to the woman and to the man in consecutive verses. Everything the tradition did to it is visible in how the three were sorted.
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The word is itsavon, Strong's 6093, from the root atsab. It means hard work, the toil of effort, the labor that costs, and there is nothing female in it.
It occurs three times in the Hebrew Bible, all in Genesis. At 3:16 it is spoken to the woman, Eve. At 3:17 it is spoken to the man, one verse later. At 5:29 it names what Noah's generation is to be comforted concerning, the itsavon of our hands, with the cursed ground given as the reason. Two of its three appearances are unambiguously the labor of working ground, and the third is the one the whole doctrine of female suffering was built on.
[See EVE · DID GOD CURSE WOMAN · AKOL TOKEL]
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THE KING JAMES HELD THE TWO TOGETHER
Take the translation the tradition leans on hardest and read the two verses in sequence.
At 3:16: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. At 3:17: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. The same English word for the same Hebrew word, hers and his, one verse apart. And at 5:29 the same translators wrote toil of our hands, which shows they understood the word as labor and chose a labor word where the ground stood without a person opposite it.
So the parity is not a modern discovery and does not require any Hebrew to see. It is in the English that four centuries of the tradition read aloud.
[See TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS · THE FORGED WARRANT OF THE WORD]
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JEROME SPLIT THEM
The division enters the Latin around the turn of the fifth century and it enters in one verse.
Multiplicabo aerumnas tuas to her, and in laboribus comedes ex ea to him. Aerumna is hardship, tribulation, an affliction undergone. Labor is work, exertion, what a body performs. One word in the source became two in the Latin, and the two are not synonyms: one is something that happens to a person and the other is something a person does.
Be exact about what is being compared, because 3:16 carries two words and only one of them is the one at issue. Her verse has itsavon in the first clause and the shorter etsev in the second, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth, and Jerome rendered that second one in dolore. The comparison here is itsavon against itsavon, her first clause against his, the same noun in the same form one verse apart. That is the pairing the Hebrew sets up and it is the pairing the Latin breaks.
The Septuagint had held them together, rendering both with λύπη, so the Greek that the early church read preserved the identity. The break is not inherited. It has a translator and a date.
[See JEROME · THE LEXICAL TRESPASS · TESHUQAH]
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AND THE MODERN VERSIONS RUN JEROME'S DIRECTION
Set the stages out and the shape is a break, a restoration, and a second break along the first one's line.
Hebrew. Itsavon at 3:16 and itsavon at 3:17.
Septuagint. λύπας to her, ἐν λύπαις to him. Held.
Vulgate. Aerumnas to her, laboribus to him. Broken.
King James. Sorrow to her, sorrow to him. Restored.
New International, New Revised Standard, New American Standard. Pains and pangs to her, toil and hard labor to him. Broken again, in the same direction.
The English Standard Version holds the parity at pain and pain, which is worth saying. It shows the split is a choice available to be made either way, by translators working from the same text in the same decades, and that the versions which break it are not being carried there by the Hebrew.
[See CONTRA PROFERENTEM · THE POLARITY TREE · PRECARITY]
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AND THE SPLIT IS IN THE INSTRUMENTS, NOT IN THE WORD
This is the part that cannot be explained as a rendering decision, because it happens in the reference works that are supposed to establish what the word means.
Brown, Driver and Briggs sort the three occurrences into two senses. Genesis 3:17 and Genesis 5:29 are classed together and glossed, in the lexicon's own parenthesis, both of agriculture. Genesis 3:16 is classed separately and glossed of travail. Strong's summary line records the same operation in the versions it tracks: for the King James, sorrow, toil; for the New American Standard, toil, pain.
So the instrument that is meant to tell a reader what the word means has already sorted its instances by the sex of the person it is applied to, and the Hebrew offers nothing to sort them on. One root, one noun, one form, and a lexical entry in two halves.
Which means a reader who goes to check is handed the conclusion as the evidence, and goes away satisfied.
[See THE CONSCRIPTION OF THE ANIMALS · KEPHALĒ]
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WHAT THE DIVISION ASSIGNS
Name what each half of the split hands to the party that receives it, because the two halves are not of equal use.
Labor has a product. It can be seen, counted, compensated, bargained over, withheld, and refused, and the one performing it can be said to have done something. Pain has no product. It is a condition of a body, reported by the only witness to it, and a condition can be doubted in a way that a day's work cannot.
So the division does not grade the same thing into more and less. It hands him an occupation and hands her a symptom, and a symptom is the one kind of claim that requires somebody else to believe her before it exists.
[See SUFFERING · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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AND THE ONE WORD FOR A WOMAN WHO EARNS IS A WORD FOR A WHORE
The language that received the split already held a full vocabulary of earning, and it had sorted that vocabulary by sex before the translation arrived.
Merēre is to earn, to deserve, to serve for pay. From it comes meritum, the thing earned, which gives merit and meritorious. From it comes emeritus, one who has served out his time and is discharged with honor. And from it, by the ordinary feminine agent formation that the language applies to every other verb, comes meretrix, she who earns, which is the standard Latin word for a prostitute.
So one verb yields honor and honorable discharge in the masculine and a disqualifying status in the feminine, and Roman law attached infamia to her, a condition whose defining feature was that her word did not count for anyone but herself.
Set that beside the split and the two fit. His itsavon was rendered work performed, and work performed earns. Hers was rendered affliction undergone, and an affliction earns nothing, because it has no product to be paid for. Decline to register her labor as labor, and the one site where the register will acknowledge her earning is the body, and there the word waiting for her was already written.
The fit is not a plan. The praetor's edict is centuries older than the Vulgate and the two instruments have nothing to do with each other. What the fit shows is that the division left her no register in which her labor could be claimed as earning.
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
The objection is that translation is contextual and that this is ordinary practice. A word with a range is rendered inside its range according to what surrounds it, childbearing is painful, ground-breaking is toilsome, and nothing sinister is required to explain either choice.
That is true of each choice taken alone, and it is why the thing has never had to be defended. What a defense of the individual choices cannot account for is the direction of the aggregate, which runs one way across three languages, four centuries and translators with no connection to each other, and which no instance ever runs the other way: nobody renders his itsavon as pain, though breaking cursed ground is painful, and nobody renders hers as toil, though bearing a child is work.
A range exploited in both directions is a range. A range exploited in one direction is a reading.
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The word is still there and has not changed, which is the only reason any of this can be shown.
It was given to both of them, one verse apart, and it was given again to the generation after, of the ground and of hands. Three instances of one noun. What was done to the second instance was done in the reference works, by people who left the first and third alone, and it is recoverable by anybody willing to read three verses in a row.
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