A study of Genesis 1-3

This article is part of a series walking through the passages that come up most often in conversations about women teaching or leading men in church. The first three looked at parts of Paul’s letters. 1 Timothy 2:11-15. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.

But now we go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible. The very beginning of everything.

“To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’

To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat from it,” cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’”

— Genesis 3:16-19

Some take verse 16 to mean that God established male rule over women right here, at the beginning. This is how God wants the world to work. Before we look more closely at this important verse, let’s recap the Genesis story so far.

What’s the story of Genesis 1-3?

Genesis opens with God forming chaos into order. God separates light from dark, waters from sky, land from sea, and then fills what he’s ordered with life — plants and fish and birds and animals. Last of all, God makes humans, and he gives them a title: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (1:27).

The meaning of that phrase was well-known in the ancient Near East. Kings were called the image of their god. This title was given to a human representative ruling a territory on a deity’s behalf. Genesis gives this royal title to humanity. To a man and a woman ruling God’s world together.

Then God gives them a job along with it: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (1:28). One title and one task shared by two people — male and female.

Then comes a choice. God has defined what’s good and what isn’t, and now the humans have to decide whether they’ll trust God’s definition or write their own. You know how that went. Everything came apart. And then we come to Genesis 3:16.

A glaring inconsistency

Here’s the verse everyone quotes: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (3:16). Some argue the meaning is plain. God is clearly establishing a pecking order. Men lead, women follow. This how God wants it.

But this creates an inconsistency.

Notice that this verse sits inside a list that also says…

Childbirth will be painful
Thorns and thistles will choke the crops
Work will come through sweat and toil
Everyone will die and return to the dust

If that list describes the world God wants, then we need to make some changes:

No more epidurals. God wants painful childbirth.

No more weed killers. God wants your crops choked by thorns.

No more air conditioning or power tools. God wants men to sweat and toil at work.

And no more doctors or seatbelts. God wants you to die.

Nobody reads Genesis 3 this way! Every hospital, every tractor, every helmet is an act of resistance against this list, and we don’t feel a shred of guilt about that. We know this passage is describing the world our rebellion made, not the world God wants.

So why do we treat one line in the list differently? As a settled, unchangeable matter—as something God wants?

What did God want?

Back up to Genesis 2. God has made the man and put him in the garden, and then he says something surprising. In a chapter where everything has been called “good,” God sees a problem: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” (2:18).

In English, “helper” sounds like an assistant. The Hebrew word is ezer, and it doesn’t work that way. Most of the time ezer is describing God in the Old Testament: “My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth” (Ps 121:2). “We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield” (Ps 33:20). Moses named his son Eliezer, which means “the God of my father was my help” (Exod 18:4).

An ezer isn’t a subordinate. It’s the one who shows up with what you need.

There’s a second word in that verse also worth a closer look. “Suitable” translates kenegdo, which carries the sense of corresponding to, or facing, something like a counterpart. Translations handle it differently, and the differences between them are all capture the meaning a little differently. The ESV says “fit for him.” The NKJV says “comparable to him.” The NRSV says “as his partner.”

Then God parades the animals past the man, and not one of them fits (2:19-20). They are not knegdo. And that’s the point of the entire scene. The man needs something no animal can be to him. He needs an equal partner.

Two pairs

Now, let’s look at the clever wordplay in Genesis 2 that is missing from our English translations.

God forms the human, adam, out of the ground, adamah. Same Hebrew base word. The human came out of the ground. Then God forms the woman, ishshah, out of the man, ish. Same base word again. She came out of him.

So Genesis 2 sets up these two pairs. The human and the ground. The woman and the man. Each one came out of the other. Each one belongs to the other. Hold onto that.

Two pairs coming apart

Now read Genesis 3 again. God isn’t just announcing that life got harder in general after human’s rebelled. God is describing what happened to those two pairs.

The ground the man came from now fights him. Thorns, thistles, sweat. He’ll wrestle food out of the dirt until the dirt takes him back. And the man the woman came from now rules over her.

What was joined has come apart.

The one they came from now comes against them.

When God confronts them, the man blames the woman and the woman blames the serpent (3:12-13). They were once naked and unashamed (2:25), and now they’re hiding from God and from each other. The partnership God built is in pieces, and so is the good world that partnership was supposed to preserve.

This is not what God wants. It’s the world human rebellion made.

What about her “desire”?

We spend most of our time on the second half of Genesis 3:16, the part about the husband ruling. But the first half says something important about the woman too: “Your desire will be for your husband.”

Honestly, scholars don’t agree on what that means. The Hebrew word for desire is teshuqah, and it shows up only a few times in the whole Bible, which gives us very little to work with. Some read it as a drive to control, pointing to the next chapter, where the same word describes how sin desires to master Cain (4:7). If that’s the meaning of teshuqah here, then the woman now wants to dominate her husband, and he rules her instead. Two former partners in a power struggle neither can win.

Others think teshuqah here is more positive, the longing a woman has for her husband. Childbearing was good, and now it comes with pain. Her devotion was good, and now it comes with domination. Two good gifts, now spoiled by human rebellion.

Either way, one person ends up ruling the other. What was whole is now broken. And that isn’t what God wanted.

What is Jesus doing?

All of this points forward to Jesus. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). He was asking that what God wants would happen in the world we made. Then he did it.

He pushed back on pain and sickness, touching people nobody else would touch and sending them home well. He pushed back on scarcity, feeding thousands from a boy’s lunch. He pushed back on death itself, raising the dead and even walking out of his own grave.

And the broken partnership between men and women? Jesus taught women, traveled with women, and sent women out as the first witnesses of his resurrection.

Now, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). The differences don’t vanish. They just stop deciding who belongs and who’s in charge.

We pull weeds. We ease pain. We heal sickness and prevent death. Why wouldn’t we push back against men ruling women?

What Genesis says and doesn’t say

Genesis says that humans, male and female, were made to represent God together. They were given the job of ruling on God’s behald side by side.

When humanity rejected God’s definition of good, the human-divine partnership was broken and so was the world. Genesis 3:16-19 describes that world distorted by human rebellion. It’s a world of scarcity, sickness, death, and conflict. It’s not the world God wanted.