Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 39:4 (Autumn 2025)
Article: Parenting In Exile: The Pain-Love Of Eve
Author: Karen Strand Winslow

PP 39:4 (Autumn 2025) p. 24

Parenting In Exile: The Pain-Love Of Eve

Karen Strand Winslow

Karen Strand Winslow holds a master’s degree from Asbury Theological Seminary and a PhD in Biblical and Jewish Studies from the University of Washington’s department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies. She has taught various courses on the Old Testament, early Judaism, Scripture formation and interpretation, and women in the Bible and the church in universities and seminaries, most recently at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. She is an elder in the Free Methodist Church. Karen’s publications are numerous, including contributions to Priscilla Papers.

My interpretation of Gen 3:16 is based upon its context in the Garden story (Gen 2:4b-4:24), the Hebrew terms that comprise it, and the parallelism of 3:16b with Gen 4:7. Because context is so important for understanding, we must look closely at what precedes and follows, even and especially when the story into which Yahweh’s (YHWH’s) address to the woman is embedded is well known.1

The Story

The Garden drama is the second, more earthy, creation story; it begins with the molding of the first farmer (adam) out of mud (adamah) and concludes with Cain’s struggle with sin and eastward wandering (Gen 4:1–24). With someone in place to till and keep the ground (adamah), YHWH planted the first orchard (Gen 2:7–9) but then realized that its keeper should not be alone (Gen 2:18). After YHWH shaped from the ground animals of wild variety and the man then analyzed and named them, they saw none was a match for him (Gen 2:18–20). This problem was resolved when YHWH drew from man material to shape a wife (Isshah). This made him not only a farmer, but also a husband (Ish). The first marriage was accompanied by exclamations of relief (“this at last”), equality (“bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”), and intimacy (“they were naked and not ashamed”). Indeed, they were of the same substance and a perfect match (ezer kenegdo, Gen 2:21–24).

Before the molding and naming of animals that ultimately resulted in the first marriage, two from one, Isshah and Ish, tension was foreshadowed when YHWH forbad the single farmer from eating from one of the trees (