15 I will establish hostility
between you and the woman,
between your progeny and her progeny. (David L. Petersen, Genesis [The
Old Testament Library; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2025], 47)
[14-19] This poetic
section continues the conversation between God and God’s creatures. Now instead
of questions, the deity turns to a series of sentences for misbehavior by the
snale, the woman, and the man. It is difficult to know if this poetry was
created by the author of the narrative or whether it was adapted from another source.
(If the latter, the original narrative would have continued with banishment
from the garden as the sole punishment. As it now stands, the narrative
includes multiple punishments within the created order for the human’s
violation of God’s command.) What is clear is their etiological function.
Though couched as “punishments,” they really function as statements some
essential features about the world that humans inhabit: why the snake crawls
and strikes, why childbirth is painful, and why people have to work heard.
Several features require comment. First, diction of cursing begins (vv. 14,
17). The deity curses both the snake and the ground; the reason for the former
is clear; it is less clear for the latter. Second, the sentences regarding the
snake and the man both involves dirt/earth: the snake will eat dirt whereas the
man (and presumably the woman) will return to dirt. Third, the punishment of
the man (and presumably the woman) focuses on eating (verb “to eat” occurs five
times in vv. 17-19), action that constituted the infraction for which they are
being punished. Instead of picking something from trees, they will eat out of
difficult circumstances as with sweaty faces. Fourth, humans will be vegetarians
(vv. 17-19). This appears to be less of of a punishment than a description of
human life that the author knew. The negative quality in these verses has to do
with the hard work that will be needed to produce the flora humans will cultivate
in order to have bread to eat. The Priestly writer will incorporate the notion of
an original vegetarian diet into his account of creation. Fifth, proleptically,
since the humans will not have access to the tree of life, they will die and
return to the earth. Now they are like God in having certain knowledge, but,
since they do not have access to the tree of life, they cannot live forever,
nor were they created to do so. Seen this way, 3:19 is an etiology for human
mortality, not a claim about the loss of immortality. Westermann (1984, 267)
puts it well, “And so death . . . is not a punishment for man’s transgression,
but the term of his toilsome work,” humans’ arduous labor is now at an end. (David
L. Petersen, Genesis [The Old Testament Library; Louisville, Ky.:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2025], 50-51)
