The same consonants read as warning rather than curse. HRB ARB carries an ambush in it, and the verse that has been made the warrant for male rule sits one line after the promise that made the woman an enemy worth ambushing.
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Bushnell begins from a principle about fit. Scripture correctly translated fits, and a typewriter wheel cannot replace a clock wheel: too heavy, wrong rim, wrong cogs. It proves a misfit all around. So with a reading. If a reading creates misfits everywhere, the reading is wrong, and the traditional reading of Genesis 3:16 is a misfit all around.
Verse 15 has just given the woman the largest promise in the passage: her seed will crush the serpent's head. Verse 16 is then supposed to turn and curse her. First exaltation, then punishment, with nothing between them.
I will greatly multiply inserts a punitive God as the subject of the sentence. The consonants do not require it.
The word rendered conception is not spelled correctly for that meaning. The Hebrew for conception, herayon, appears at Ruth 4:13 and Hosea 9:11 and carries two consonants this word does not have. The lexical authorities call the form a contraction, or erroneous.
And desire for teshuqah has no ancient support at all before the Babylonian Talmud.
Misfits everywhere. The clock does not keep time.
[See KATHARINE BUSHNELL · GENESIS]
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THE CONSONANTS
Hebrew was written in consonants. The vowel points were added centuries later by the Masoretes. The consonants are the text; the vowels are an interpretation of it, and the interpretation was supplied by men who had already settled what the passage meant.
The traditional pointing of Genesis 3:16a gives HaRBeh AaRBeh, multiplying I will multiply. Bushnell proposes the same consonants pointed as HiRBah AoReB, a lying-in-wait has caused to multiply.
The consonants are identical: HRB ARB. The entire difference is in the pointing.
[See TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS]
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ARB, THE LYING-IN-WAIT
The word matters because it is not obscure. ARB appears fourteen times in Joshua and Judges alone, and in every one of them it means an ambush.
Joshua 8 uses it seven times in a single episode: lay thee an ambush for the city behind it; ye shall lie in wait against the city; ye shall rise up from the ambush; set them to lie in ambush; he wist not that there were liers in ambush; the ambush arose quickly; the ambush had taken the city. Judges 9 uses it five times of the men of Shechem, who set liers in wait, lie in wait in the field, laid wait against Shechem, and are named as the people lying in wait. Judges 16:2 has the men of Gaza laying wait for Samson all night, and Judges 20:29 has Israel setting liers in wait round about Gibeah.
The word means ambush. Snare. Lying-in-wait.
And the verse before has just declared enmity between the serpent and the woman. A reading in which the next sentence warns her that something now lies in wait for her is not a strange reading; it is the reading the previous verse prepares.
[See THE NACHASH]
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THE SEQUENCE RESTORED
Read the three verses together. At 14 the serpent is cursed: upon thy belly shalt thou go. At 15 enmity is declared: I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. At 16, on Bushnell's pointing: a snare hath increased thy sorrow and thy sighing.
Sighing rather than conception is not her invention. The Septuagint has it.
The shape is one the text uses elsewhere. Mary receives the exaltation at Luke 1:28, blessed art thou among women, and the warning at 2:35, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also. Paul receives the calling at Acts 9:15, he is a chosen vessel unto me, and the warning at 9:16, I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake. Exaltation followed by warning is a pattern; exaltation followed by curse is not.
The promise of verse 15 is what makes her worth ambushing. Her seed will crush the head of the one she has just exposed. The suffering is real and it arrives from the enmity rather than from the God who declared it.
[See EVE]
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WARNING, NOT COMMAND
The second half of the verse transforms on evidence of a different and much heavier kind.
Teshuqah appears three times in the Hebrew Bible: here, at Genesis 4:7 where sin's teshuqah is to Cain, and at Song of Songs 7:10. Twenty-one of twenty-eight ancient renderings give it as turning. The Septuagint, the Peshitta, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Old Latin, the Sahidic, the Bohairic and the Ethiopic all read turning; the Sahidic gives alliance. Only after 1528, when Santes Pagnino carried the rabbinic libido into his Latin at Lyons, did European Bibles begin reading desire.
So the line reads: thy turning shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And there is no imperative verb in it. He shall rule over thee is simple future. It predicts rather than prescribes, and the difference is testable: if it were a command, then the more carnal the husband the better he would be keeping it, since Paul says at Romans 8:7 that the carnal mind is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. A command no carnal man can disobey is not a command.
The sentence says what will happen. She will turn to her husband instead of to God, and he will rule over her as the consequence of the turning. Male rule is the Fall's consequence and not its design.
[See TESHUQAH · THE PARTIAL WITNESS]
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THE TEN CURSES
The curse reading has a source and it is not the Hebrew.
The Babylonian Talmud teaches that God pronounced ten curses upon Eve, and the list assigns them: greatly multiply to menstruation, thy sorrow to the rearing of children, then conception, then bringing forth in sorrow, then the desire to the husband and his rule over her, each glossed in language Bushnell declined to reproduce. She is wrapped like a mourner. She dares not appear in public with her head uncovered. She is restricted to one husband while he may have many wives. She is confined to the house as to a prison.
Bushnell's objection was not squeamishness. One would have thought, she wrote, that any portion of such a document would have been considered so debased by corrupt association as to unfit it for incorporation into Bible instruction.
The doctrine of women's subordination rests at this joint on the Talmud's ten curses rather than on the Hebrew text, and it settled the meaning of teshuqah against all the ancient testimony.
[See THE LIES THEY TOLD US ABOUT EVE]
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THE WARNING THAT BECAME THE WARRANT
He shall rule over thee became the authorization for male domination, when it was the prediction of a consequence.
Thy desire shall be to thy husband became the justification for controlling women's sexuality, when it was the misdirected turning.
In sorrow thou shalt bring forth became a reason to withhold pain relief in childbirth, when the same word describes the man's toil three verses later and the condition is shared.
And the snare disappeared from view entirely. The ambush was erased so that God could be made the source of what the ambush does.
[See DELIVER US FROM EVIL]
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The two corrections here do not carry equal weight and the entry does not pretend otherwise.
The teshuqah correction rests on twenty-one of twenty-eight ancient renderings, on seventeen centuries of church fathers reading turning, and on a datable Latin translation in 1528 that introduced the change. That is external, checkable, and does not depend on anyone's proposal.
The revocalization of HRB ARB is Bushnell's proposal. It rests on the consonantal text, on the misfits the traditional pointing produces, and on the fact that the pointing itself is a later interpretive act. It is a strong argument and it is an argument, and naming it as one costs nothing, because the first correction alone dismantles the warrant.
What remains after both is the shape of the passage. Enmity declared, then a warning. Not a sentence handed down on a creature who had just been promised that her seed would crush the head of the one lying in wait for her.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
