Was Eve’s punishment for sin subservience in her marriage?

In the previous post, we established the fact that Adam and Eve were given equal status before the fall. Both were given the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28 NASB). God called Eve a “helper” (or “help-meet”) which is not a description of a lesser role. We see that word used in the rest of the Old Testament for God, who most certainly can never be described as lesser.

Adam recognized their mutuality by calling her “bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23 NASB). The Genesis narrator tells us, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24 NASB). Theirs was a perfect relationship, characterized by mutual respect and shared responsibility.

But it wouldn’t last for long. Satan moved in right away to destroy what God had created by introducing evil into the world. He put doubt into Eve’s mind as to God’s intentions for them and convinced her she could be like God with just one bite of the forbidden fruit. And in that moment, everything changed.

The introduction of sin would alter their lives and the lives of their offspring from God’s perfect work. “…through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and death spread to all men, because all sinned…” (Romans 5:12 NASB). Even the physical creation was altered: Paul writes that creation is now “groaning” and waits eagerly to be set free from its slavery to sin’s corruption (Romans 8:19-21).

God gives judgment for what has just been done in Genesis 3. He curses the serpent and He curses the ground. His judgment begins and ends with those curses. But He also has news for Adam and Eve: life would now be a struggle from the start. He tells Eve: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16 NASB).

Many interpret this to be a new mandate, God’s punishment on women because Eve influenced Adam to sin. That He took away the mutuality He for which He had created her, and from that moment on, woman is commanded to be subservient to man.

But this ignores the fact that God curses the serpent, and He curses the ground, but He does not curse Adam and Eve. Rather, he tells them how sin will impact them. In other words, what He tells them is not prescriptive, but descriptive. Because the ground is cursed, Adam will now struggle to glean food from his labors.

For Eve, the greatest effect of sin will be on her relationship with her husband. She would forever long for what they once had (“your desire will be for your husband’) but sin now tainted that perfect union (“but he will rule over you”). We see how sin has already affected their relationship in Adam’s first response to God. His gut instinct was to throw Eve under the bus: “The woman that you gave to me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12 NASB). So much for flesh of my flesh.

The husband ruling over the wife was not a new mandate. It was sin’s perversion of their once perfect union.

Consider how humankind has responded to the natural consequences of sin. We have made huge strides in lessening the work it takes to get fruit from the soil with machinery and fertilizers. The same with childbirth pain—medical breakthroughs have drastically decreased the pain women have to endure in labor. But for some reason, we have made Eve’s subservience (a direct result of sin) into something holy and good. And protect it at all costs. We are inconsistent at best in how we respond to Genesis 3. I don’t think that we can get there from a careful study of the text.