Genesis 3:16 – The rule of masculine over feminine
Genesis 3:16 records one of the critical consequences of the Fall—the domination of the masculine over the feminine which laid the patriarchal foundation for what we call civilization, and which underpins the whole of Christianity:
“Then the Lord said to the woman, ‘You will suffer terribly when you give birth. But you will still desire your husband, and he will rule over you.’” (CEV)
He will rule over you.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard anyone preach on, question, or unpick those five monumental words. I’m going to examine them through the prism of Edwin Longsden Long’s 1875 painting, The Babylonian Marriage Market.
Long’s painting is monumental in its own ways. Firstly, in size: the painting measures 10 feet by 5 feet 8 inches. Secondly, in value: in 1882 it sold for £6,615, at that time a record price for a painting.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it provides a window through which the abstract concept of the rule of masculine over feminine comes into focus.
The Babylonian Marriage Market
The Babylonian Marriage Market provides what writer Bobette Buster calls a ‘gleaming detail’, a vivid, heart-wrenching moment that pierces the fog of emotionally distant abstraction.
Herodotus describes these markets in his Histories: “They used to collect all the young women who were old enough to be married and take the whole lot of them all at once to a certain place… An auctioneer would get each of the women to stand up one by one, and he would put her up for sale. He used to start with the most attractive girl there, and then, once she had fetched a good price and been bought, he would go on to auction the next most attractive one.”
The stage was eventually reached when a woman received no bids, i.e. no man thought her desirable enough to pay for.
As all women had to be under male control—he will rule over you—the authorities stepped in and offered money as well as the bride.
Imagine
Imagine for a moment being one of the women in Long’s painting—perhaps the second woman from the left, who stares into a hand-mirror whose reflected light plays on her pensive face, unsure if she is desirable or whether she’ll be sold to a man whose only interest is her dowry.
The women wait for the nerve-wracking—and life-altering—experience of being auctioned in their own ways. Why do they await their fate so passively, perhaps even expectantly? Because their laws require it, or the men will become violent? I doubt it. Brave women throughout history have shown no fear of either.
Since the rise of patriarchy, the feminine in all its forms has been suppressed, repressed, shamed and demonised through trauma.
Paralysed
The word ‘trauma’ is most closely associated with high impact moments like traffic accidents. Yet trauma has another side to it, something that’s come into focus through soldiers returning from war zones characterised by the threat of suicide attacks and roadside bombs: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
PTSD was first recognised during World War I as ‘shell shock’, referring to soldiers who ceased to function under the stress of being shelled. The term remains singularly appropriate: those who are traumatised often retreat into their shells, numb to their own ill treatment, rudderless and paralysed.
And, as is now scientifically recognised, the effects of PTSD can be transmitted from one generation to another through epigenetic inheritance.
History shows that not only all women but also the feminine aspects of men (emotions and sexuality) became subject to strict cultural taboos that ultimately became embedded in the human condition and normalised into invisibility.
It’s easy to see the women in Long’s painting being traumatised by their ordeal over generations until it became a socially accepted custom that no one dared—or even wanted—to challenge.
Climate change
The Bronze and Iron Ages of the Old Testament, including Babylon—periods when metallurgy was developed to create weapons—were preceded by the Neolithic and the brief Chalcolithic (copper) Ages.
It’s hard to imagine how the egalitarian, goddess-worshipping hunter-gatherer cultures of the Neolithic period gave way to patriarchy. What was that actually like? How did women become completely downtrodden?
Did men universally one day decide to take complete control of the reins of power, resulting in the anti-feminine, anti-sex, and anti-child world of the Old Testament?
No.
Climate change from around 4000 BC in a belt from the Sahara through the Middle East to Central Asia led to desertification (fertile land turning to desert), famine, and a fight for shrinking food and water sources. This desertification is graphically described throughout the Old Testament:
“The Lord will make the sky overhead seem like a bronze roof that keeps out the rain, and the ground under your feet will become as hard as iron. Your crops will be scorched by the hot east wind or ruined by mildew. He will send dust and sandstorms instead of rain, and you will be wiped out.” (Deuteronomy 28:21-24)
Masculine over feminine
Long-term famine has a double-whammy impact on the human psyche that has been seen in recent instances of environmental stress, such as droughts in East Africa in the 1970s:
- An all-consuming obsession with food whereby strength, capacity for violence and intelligence increased survival chances.
- A breakdown in emotional cohesion that diminished, denigrated and traumatised everything feminine, emotional or sexual.
Nomadic warriors erupted out of the growing deserts of the drying equatorial belt to seize remaining food and water sources. Extreme brutality became necessary for survival. Tribes that didn’t adapt perished and vanished.
The Israelites’ conquest of Canaan gives a sense of this: “They will possess the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” (Genesis 15:19-21)
In The Fall, psychology lecturer Steve Taylor writes: “The main event in human history is a sudden, massive regression – a dramatic shift from harmony to chaos, from peace to war, from life-affirmation to gloom, or from sanity to madness.”
This was the fallout of those five words in Genesis 3:16: He will rule over you.
Patriarchy emerged as a socio-political structure to reflect, contain, and normalise the violent masculine and the traumatised feminine. The rule of masculine over feminine became accepted as God’s will for humanity.
Fulfilling the Law
Yet the rule of masculine over feminine is not and was not God-given.
There’s a saying that “history is written by the victors.” The Old Testament is history written by the losers—because climate change left no winners. The authors of the Bible were trying to rationalise their fall from grace, which they could only do by ascribing it to divine will through the prism of the masculine-dominant world they created as a result of the Fall.
That view held sway until the advent of Jesus, whose teachings are completely unlike the violent judgmentalism of the Law of Moses. John 8:3-7 is one of the best-known passages in the Bible:
“The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law of Moses brought in a woman who had been caught in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband. They made her stand in the middle of the crowd. Then they said, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught sleeping with a man who isn’t her husband. The Law of Moses teaches that a woman like this should be stoned to death!’”
Jesus confounds his questioners with the classic retort, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” In this single sentence Jesus Christ refutes the rule of the masculine over the feminine, saying ‘you sin just as much as she does.’
Yet in Matthew 5:17 Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.” (ESV)
I would interpret ‘fulfil’ as ‘transcend.’ Jesus tells us that the Law of Moses—the rule of masculine over feminine—has fulfilled its purpose, which was survival. Its time is up.
“I have not come to abolish them” signals that force cannot be overcome by force; a new path must be taken that entirely transcends the old paradigm. That includes revoking Genesis 3:16—He will rule over you—and restoring the masculine and feminine life energies to their appropriate, shame-free functions in our lives.
Image: The Babylonian Marriage Market, by Edwin Longsden Long, 1875 (Public domain)
