Genesis 3:16 To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children… His sentence on the woman is, in part, a reversal of the first blessing, "Multiply and replenish the earth." God's blessing alone went out at first with the command to multiply, but now sortie drops of the curse are to be infused into it in remembrance of sin. The race was still to go on increasing; but henceforth it was to be in sorrow. The very perpetuation of the species was to be accompanied with marks of the displeasure of God. The dark cloud of sorrow was to take up its station above each man as he came into the world. And, kindred to these pangs of her corporeal frame, are the other varied sorrows which overshadow her lot — the weakness, the dependence, the fear, the rising and sinking of heart, the bitterness of disappointed hope, the wounds of unrequited affection — all these, as drops of the sad cup now put into her hands, woman has, from the beginning, been made to taste. The sentence falls on her specially as woman, not as one with the man, and part of the human race, but as woman. The things which mark her out as woman are the things which the sentence selects, It is as the mother and as the wife that she is to feel the weight of the sentence now pronounced. A mother's pangs (which otherwise would have been unknown); a wife's dependence (which, in all save Christian countries, is utter degradation); sorrow, not joy, in that appointed process through which the promised seed is to be born into the world; inferiority, instead of equality, in that relationship in reference to which it had been said by her husband, "bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh"; not henceforth the husband "cleaving to the wife," as at the first (Genesis 2:24), but the wife cleaving to the husband, and the husband ruling over the wife. Such are the sad results of sin! (H. Bonar, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. |
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