The Greatest Trick Man Ever Pulled
A famous movie line says “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The greatest trick man ever pulled was convincing women we need their approval.
Men love to talk about the “inerrancy of scripture” as if the Bible can’t be argued with. If the Bible is so “inerrant,” however, then why are there so many different versions of it? Perhaps even more importantly, why are there so many different denominations that all claim to believe in the Bible, yet all hold very different beliefs? The fact that it can be interpreted so many ways shows pretty clearly that while the scriptures themselves may be “inerrant” the men that interpret them are definitely not.
One of the things we are learning about coding is that coders literally code their own biases into computer programs. I believe the same is true of the Bible. Men have spent thousands of years now translating the Bible according to their own pre-existing biases and prejudices. But here's the great thing about living in the 21st century. We have amazing tools at our disposal. Now, with a just a few keystrokes, we can do in a matter of minutes what used to take hours and you don’t need either a fancy theology degree or be a master of linguistics to do a deep dive into the original Hebrew and Greek.
One of the many tools we now have is an online version of the Strong’s Concordance, which tells us a great deal about the original Hebrew and Greek the Bible was written in. For instance, it tells you what part of speech a word is, whether it is masculine or feminine, all the different ways that particular word has been translated and what other verses it is found in. There is also an amazing online tool called Biblehub.com, where you can compare dozens of different versions of the Bible to see how they translated different verses, as well as linking directly to Strong’s Concordance and other tools. (No, I am not being paid to promote that.)
Like almost every woman who was raised in almost any branch of the Christian faith, I have spent years struggling with the idea of all women submitting to all men as a whole. Not only is this a hard pill for me to swallow, it also doesn’t make sense to me. You see, I am a Mensan. Theoretically that means I am among roughly the top 3% of the smartest people in the world. While that is certainly arguable based on how one goes about measuring intelligence, the point is, I am almost invariably smarter than the vast majority of men that I meet - which includes most pastors and clergy.
Through the years and through many different circumstances and situations, I have also discovered that I am a gifted speaker, teacher and leader. So, why would God give me - a woman - these gifts if He/She/It/They did not intend for me to use them? This is a question I have spent most of my life struggling with.
The argument for male supremacy is that God literally made men superior, and therefore, it just makes sense that men should rule or have dominion over women as the “weaker vessel” (1Peter 3:7). The problem with this, of course, is that throughout history men have proclaimed themselves to be superior to women and then essentially set out to prove it was true by handicapping women. Time and time again, however, women have found ways to prove that it just isn’t true.
For instance, if you teach men to read but not women, then men can gain knowledge in ways women cannot. This can be construed as “superior wisdom” but it actually just means men are better educated. Just reading a lot of books doesn’t in and of itself make you smart but it does make you “well read,” which can be presented as superior intelligence.
Throughout history, however, women have found ways of doing what they needed to, even when it was forbidden by men. This includes getting an education. What we now know is that as women are achieving equal numbers in academia, they are outperforming men at every level. This completely lays waste to the notion men have promoted for centuries, which is that men are inherently smarter than women.
The other way that men have promoted themselves as superior is in physical strength. While this can’t be quite as easily disproven as intellectual capacity, the emergence of transgender women in women’s sports has the potential to thoroughly upend the idea that men are so physically superior to women that women can’t compete with them. Just like with education, the question is whether men are genuinely naturally superior or if women simply haven’t been given the same opportunities as men to develop the same strengths. A question men seem willing to go to great lengths to keep from being answered.
Although men have promoted the idea for centuries that they are in fact superior, every time women are given the same opportunities as men, they prove again and again that they are every bit as capable and qualified as similarly gifted men. The fact that men are not inherently superior proves problematic in a number of ways. It means that God might not actually intend for a woman who is innately more gifted and qualified to perform certain tasks to bow to an inferior man just on the basis of his maleness alone. Personally, I would find a God with those expectations to be very difficult to believe in.
There are two main texts that men use to support the idea of male headship. One is the letters of Paul to 1st Century churches but the other is Genesis 3, which is literally the Genesis of where this idea of male supremacy comes from. I went back and took a deeper examination of Genesis 3:16-19, which is where God supposedly “cursed” Adam and Eve. I believe this text has been severely mistranslated and misinterpreted by men for centuries to give themselves a position they were literally never meant to have.
According to the NIV, Genesis 3:16 states:
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.”
For comparison, here is Genesis 3:17, which details the “curse” God supposedly put on Adam.
And to Adam He said: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
The first thing to notice here is that to Eve God supposedly says “I will make [this happen]” while to Adam, God simply identifies what will happen (the ground will be cursed, not I will make the ground cursed). The problem with this is that the Hebrew word from which they are taking this idea that God “made” this happen is what is called an infinitive absolute. An infinitive absolute is a part of speech unique to Hebrew but it is called an absolute because it stands on its own as an independent grammatical identity. In other words, it doesn’t need to be “driven” by a pronoun.
It’s important to also understand that word order varies from language to language, so when translating something into English from another language, it is also common to change the word order. This can also have the effect of completely changing the meaning. Hebrew words in the Strong’s Concordance are placed in order based on how they were eventually translated in English, but that is not always the order in which they are originally found.
Therefore, if the words themselves are determined to mean something different than how they were translated, they may also be in the wrong order. As you can see here from the definition of the word, the “I will” doesn’t actually make any sense. A much more accurate interpretation of this passage would simply be “your pains in childbearing will become great,” rather than “I will sharply…”
While most people seem to believe God cursed Adam and Eve - meaning God caused these things to happen, I think God simply identified for them the natural outcome of their choice. For instance, let’s say you have a teenaged son and your bouncing baby boy goes out and gets drunk for the first time. You may say to your son something like this: “My precious baby. Tomorrow, you will wish for death and most likely spend the day praying to the porcelain god. Your eyes will feel like they are going to explode out of their sockets and every sound will set your head pounding.”
As we all know, this is called a hangover. You are not causing your child to experience pain and misery, nor are you punishing them with it. You are simply identifying the natural outcome of their choices. You may give them aspirin or your favorite hangover remedy (just as God gave Adam and Eve clothes), but you can’t take the hangover away. In addition, however, it is neither your will nor your intention for them to continue to live in this condition! If they keep drinking, they will continue to live under the “curse” of chronic hangovers, but they can experience freedom from them by not drinking. Hangovers are not our natural state, nor are they the condition in which God intended us to live.
So, I do not believe that God “cursed” Eve but I also believe it was very important for men to make it seem as if God did, because then what follows would be God’s will and not man’s. The next problem is that they literally added in the words “will be” as seen here because those words are in brackets. It means they added them in ostensibly so the verse made sense, but as I will show, I believe they added them in to make the verse mean what men wanted it to mean.
Another literary license was to used to translate the phrase “your husband.” The word in question can be translated in numerous ways, including simply “man” or even “person” or “mankind,” but they chose the much more narrow term “husband.” Since the word is a noun, they also added the modifier “your.’ It could have just as easily been translated “a man” or “men” or “mankind.” I believe “your husband” was chosen specifically, however, to communicate a relationship that I don’t believe the original author ever intended.
Similarly, the word “he” was chosen to fit in with the desired intention of the verse, but in truth, the word used could also easily be translated as “she” or even “it.” It is only a 3rd person masculine singular because they chose the word “he.” Had they used “she” it would have been a 3rd person feminine singular.
Notice that this next word uses what are known as “curly brackets” for the word “will” as opposed to the straight brackets above around the words “will be.” What this means is that they literally added the words “will be” while the “will” in this example is now simply implied by the way in which the rest of the sentence reads. Remember, however, that first “will be” was literally added in, which is why it is now merely implied to naturally pair with “rule.”
Last but not least, we finish with the word over. And this is where the liberties with translating this verse go just completely over-the-top and off the rails entirely. A second person feminine singular preposition is literally the word “you,” in reference to a female. Period. There is no “over” either implied or in any possible interpretation of this word.
Another key to this is that you will notice there is no reference number given for the Strong’s Hebrew. Every Hebrew word in the Bible is assigned a specific reference number so you can look up the number and see where and how it is used elsewhere in the Bible. Both of those sections highlighted in blue are links. When you click on them, they take you to an error page. Which essentially means this word literally does not exist.
So, when you take out the words that were added in and the words that literally do not exist, you end up with something like this:
“Your desire for man/humanity will rule (you)”
Or, to put it in what I believe is a much more accurate English form:
“You will be ruled by your desire for Adam.”
Obviously when “desire” is paired with the word “husband”, it is easy to assume this is relating to sexual desire, yet this same word is used in Gen 4:7, which says “sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you but you must master it.” So, I don’t think the desire here is a sexual desire so much as it is like a ravenous wanting for the entirety of something. I believe what God is identifying here is that Eve (women) will be ruled by a raging desire to be the center of Adam’s universe the same way an alcoholic is ruled by their raging desire for alcohol.
I think this also evident based on how often women are driven by a need for their father’s approval, or that of other male authority figures far more than we are driven to seek the approval of our mothers or other women. In fact, I would argue that we view our own mothers and other women as competition in our drive to be the center of a man’s universe. I think that it is this drive and need for approval that is also at the root of so much abuse.
When men figure out just how deep our need is for their affection, attention and approval, it is incredibly common for them to exploit it for their own gain. It is not that God intended for the Adams of the world to rule over the Eves but rather that our desire for the attention, affection and approval of the world’s Adams have largely made us slaves to them. The same way addicts essentially become slaves to the substance of their addiction. Unfortunately, men have also taken the natural outcome of our obsessive desire for their attention and approval as support for the idea that God intended for them to rule over us.
Addicts know they will literally do anything to feed their addiction, including things they never thought themselves capable of. I think the same can be said for many women when it comes to continuing to seek the attention or approval of almost any man that gives them a small amount of attention. That first little bit of completely undivided attention is like the first hit of cocaine to an attention-starved woman and it doesn’t take long to reach a point of doing whatever it takes to get more, more, more.
I also believe we set ourselves free from this “curse” in the exact same way that any addict overcomes any addiction. We find something to make greater in our lives than the substance of our addiction, which in our case would be the attention and approval of men.
Addicts can’t simply stop taking the substance of their addiction, they have to actually address the underlying causes of their need for those substances, which is usually some type of psychic or emotional pain. Some of the things they may need to do are to plant roots deep in a community, expose their darkest secrets to the light and to try and make amends for the harm they caused others. They also have to learn to love and accept themselves for who they are and to make something greater in their lives than the substance of their addiction. That way, when hard times come, they have something to run to other than the substance of their addiction. I believe these are many of the same things that we have to do to free ourselves of the “curse” of Eve.
Jesus said the whole of the law could be summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength soul, mind and your neighbor as yourself. Adam is your neighbor, he is not God. We set ourselves free of the “curse” by putting God back in His/Her rightful place above “Adam” (and all others). In doing so, we also come to understand that we need no one’s approval but His (or Hers). And that is what (I believe) men that desire to be worshipped and/or have power over others just cannot stand. Because it means the end of this.