Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil you will eat of it
All the days of your life.
“Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
And you will eat the plants of the field;
By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.”
Man's Easier Curse
As an isolated incident, the judgments as a whole make sense to me: both screwed up, both are punished in unique ways relating to their unique roles: Eve is punished via her role as childbearer, mother and wife, Adam via his (assumed) role as worker and provider.
But when you view the results of the curse historically - which is not only justifiable but crucial to an understanding of why we are the way we are - I find myself with questions.
We have come to understand the curses directed at Adam & Eve to be directly passed down through their genders, or species in the case of the serpent. From that perspective however, Adam's curse appears dramatically different from that of Eve's and the serpent's in terms of its directness.
Today, all serpents still crawl on their bellies and all women still experience excruciating pain in childbirth, but everyone is subjected to Adam's curse: Both genders work, are forced to "eat the plants of the field" and are subject to death ("for you are dust and to dust you shall return").
Sure you can make arguments that each gender is directly affected by the curse of their partner (as I noted in my post on Eve's curse) but in the end I don't think there's any avoiding - at least the impression - the disparity between man's curse vs. woman's and the serpent's.
(back to Genesis 3)
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One of the best ways I have heard this explained (though, as with all things when speaking about men and women it is a very wide generalization) was from my Pentateuch teacher at Cedarville, Dr. Richard Blumenstock. He suggested that each of the curses upon the man and the women struck at the core of who they were as created engendered beings.
A woman's greatest longing is for security and she tends to want to derive security from relationships. Hence, the curse is actually a blessing, because under the fall, these relationships will not provide her with the security she is longing for, and so she must first find her security in God.
A man's greatest longing is for significance and he tends to want to derive significance from his work. Hence, the curse is actually a blessing, because under the fall, work will not provide him with the significance he is longing for, and so he must first find his significance in God.
So each curse hit the man and woman "where it hurts" but also then protects the man and the woman from making either relationships or work an idol. The more we make these things an idol, the more we are hurt when they do not deliver the security or significance we are seeking.
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