Grief and Thirst (Gen 3:16)

Into and Out of the Garden

¹⁶ In grief will you bear children. בְּעֶ֖צֶב תֵּֽלְדִ֣י בָנִ֑ים

As we saw last time, YHWH has just told the woman that he will make her pregnancies “way more grievous.” The word that led me to “grievous” was עִצָּבוֹן itzavon, which we’ll see again in v. 17 and then just once more anywhere in the Bible. Now we have an obviously related word, עֶ֖צֶב étzev, which I translate here as “grief.” NJPS uses first “pangs” and then “pain” to show the relationship between the words.

Many translations and commentators (NJPS among them) want both the previous phrase and this one to mean that it will be painful for the woman to give birth. I think it’s better to take הֵֽרֹנֵ֔ךְ of the previous phrase at face value to mean “pregnancy.” The two phrases are describing two stages of the process.

Nahum Sarna writes in the JPS Torah Commentary:

Intense pain in childbearing is unique to the human species and generally unknown to other female mammals. It therefore calls for explanation. While the rigors of childbearing are presented here as a consequence of partaking of the tree of knowledge, modern biology traces the woman’s condition to the enlargement of the human skull that was entailed by the evolutionary increase in the size of the human brain, especially that part of the brain, the neocortex, that is associated with human intelligence.

Our big skulls are certainly a large part of the reason pregnancy can be so painful and even dangerous. Whether it’s true that humans are the only females who experience this, I’m not enough of a zoologist to know.

But I think this comment is missing what’s going on here. Even if the author of this story — who as we’ve said is certainly concerned with human wisdom — knew that our heads were so big that it caused birth difficulties, he did not know that the head was the source of our wisdom. There’s a famous anecdote about Carl Jung and an American Indian that tells us why:

At the Taos pueblo, Jung spoke for the first time with a non-white, a Hopi elder named Antonio Mirabal (also known as Ochwiay Biano and Mountain Lake), who said that whites were always uneasy and restless: "We do not understand them. We think that they are mad." Jung asked him why he thought the whites were mad, and the reply was " 'They say that they think with their heads … We think here,' he said, indicating his heart."

And that is where the characters in the Bible, God included (see Jer 7:31), think as well.