Have you ever needed a translator? Picture yourself surrounded by people who speak a different language from the one you speak. You find you urgently need to tell them something, so you look for a translator.
The translator won’t need to come up with your ideas. The translator will only need to operate on the level of a technician who takes the thoughts you are thinking in the words and expressions of one language and accurately puts them in the words and expressions of the other language.
Modern Bible translators do this type of work. They don’t interact with the interpretation of the original text of the Bible. They are skilled technicians who move the content of the Bible into a new language using its words and expressions.
These translators don’t make decisions about what a Bible passage meant originally. They dutifully translate what everybody in their language already knows the Bible is saying.
But what about the situation where what “everybody knows” is demonstrably incorrect?
That is what has happened to the very first words of Genesis 3:16.
In those first words God did not judge the woman imposing on her something that had the force of a virtual curse! Suppose God had done that. It would have meant she had deserved that kind of treatment.
But she deserved no such thing. She did not rebel on purpose. She disobeyed when she ate the forbidden fruit. But she was deceived into doing that. When given the chance, she realized what had happened to her and she rightly condemned the tempter for deceiving her.
So when God judged her there was no frightful condemnation. There was no rearranging of the way things were for her. Instead God dealt with her in the matrix in which she found herself.
First, God foretold that when the ground was cursed because of the willful rebellion of the man she too would experience the sorrowful toil that he would in their fieldwork.
Second, God completed the announcement of the Gospel for the very first time. This meant crushing defeat for the serpent tempter. This meant she would be able to have the conception that would lead to the coming of the promised victor over her deceiver.
If this is not clear to you please let me email you a review copy of my wife’s book, Man and Woman in Biblical Unity. It is a condensation of her doctoral dissertation on Genesis 2-3 with a focus on Genesis 3:16.
Please contact me here: Bruce@Tru316.com
You can also order it directly online. Joy Fleming, Man and Woman in Biblical Unity.
