אֶֽל־הָאִשָּׁ֣ה אָמַ֗ר
הַרְבָּ֤ה אַרְבֶּה֙
עִצְּבוֹנֵ֣ךְ וְהֵֽרֹנֵ֔ךְ
בְּעֶ֖צֶב תֵּֽלְדִ֣י בָנִ֑ים
וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָתֵ֔ךְ
וְה֖וּא יִמְשׇׁל־בָּֽךְ׃
And to the woman [God] said,
“I will greatly expand
Your toil—and your pregnancies;
In hardship shall you bear children.
Yet your urge shall be for your husband,
And his will shall prevail over yours.”
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew text.)
God’s pronouncement of the consequences for the first woman surely would have been understood by the text’s ancient audience as a message with regard to overall gender roles and expectations—and therefore it fell under the purview of the RJPS project.
In the first half of this verse, the rendering follows the longstanding interpretation by Prof. Carol Meyers. She has cogently argued that what the audience would have assumed to be at issue here are the long hours required for subsistence farmers to eke out a living, and the challenges that typically accompany a woman’s becoming a mother. See further her 2013 book Rediscovering Eve.
Regarding the verse’s last stich, its trailing position in the pronouncement has the quality of an afterthought, which suggests that the husband’s control over his wife is intended to have a narrow application. That is, the intended scope appears to be circumscribed by the immediately preceding co-text. Along those lines, Prof. Meyers (pers. comm.) holds that the implied topic is childbearing: a wife is expected to be willing to get pregnant even in the face of her possible reluctance to do so. Similarly, Tamara Eskenazi has offered that the phrase applies somewhat more broadly to “situations in which desire is at work” (The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, 2008).
As for rendering into English, the NJPS ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; / in pain you shall bring forth children’ is unduly punitive; it focuses on physical pain and suffering. The new rendering puts the focus on extreme effort.
And at end of the verse, the NJPS ‘he shall rule over you’ has the serious disadvantage of connoting an unbounded domination that might well be arbitrary and capricious—and without regard to the woman’s will. Each of those aspects is at odds with the implications discussed above. The new rendering remains vague about the scope of control, yet seems less sinister.