Cheryl Schatz

Lin,
You said:

I think we hang a lot on ‘yet’ when other translations render it ‘and’.

Other translations render it ‘and’ and others ignore the word, but it is an important word that should not be ignored. The BDAG says of this word:

The use in Heb. shews that orig. (w) was not a merely copulative conj., but that it possessed a demonstrative force…is used very freely and widely in Heb., but also with much delicacy, to express relations and shades of meaning which Western languages would usually indicate by distinct particles…sometimes it introduces an idea which so exceeds or adds to what has preceded, that it is nearly equivalent to also
Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon

The same word that connects the pain in childbirth to her desire for her husband also connects her desire for her husband to his ruling over her. I think it is a serious mistake for comps to look at only the last connection but not to seriously consider that the first connection of the Hebrew (w) is from pain to desire.

Lin, you said:

If Bushnell is right and the original said “a snare has increased your suffering”, then the YET would give me this impression: “Eve, though you were tricked into this and you did not rebel against me, you’re going to make the wrong choice, which will result in Adam ruling over you”. In other words, I see God saying that in spite of the fact that He was not throwing her out since she had been deceived, she would throw her personal intimacy with God away by turning toward her husband for those needs and he would, in return, rule over her.

I don’t think that we can conclude this from the text. Did Eve indeed throw away her personal intimacy with God? The text says that she believed her child had been created with YHWH. Her faith seems to be strongly in the Lord God and any of us can know that we can be in this world and yet still have a personal intimacy with God.

Also God talks about the children that she would give birth to in pain. While she did not have to leave the garden to give birth to the Messiah, she did have to leave to give birth to children (plural). It apparently wasn’t a sin for her to leave and even though she had to make a decision between the garden and her husband she did not have to make a choice between God and her husband since God did not live in the garden nor was He restricted to revealing Himself there. But once she left she too was unable to get back to where she came from.

The bottomline for me is that our relationship with our Creator/Savior is to be much more than our relationship with our spouse, even in a one flesh union. This is where I think comps make an idol of the husband.

Lin, I absolutely agree with you on this bottom line. You are correct that comps make an idol of the husband and I would add that they make him an inter-mediator between his wife and God. He becomes the one who God must speak to, so that God’s will is only revealed through the proper ‘channel’ of the man. This is not scriptural at all.