Sunday before last in worship, we read from Genesis 3:8, a passage that says in the NRSV English translation: “They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”
I did a double take, reread the passage, then reached for my iPad I had used to teach Sunday school and went straight to my Hebrew-English interlinear testament. Sorry, I wasn’t listening to the sermon yet; I was on a mission from God.
How could Genesis 3 describe “the woman” — the Hebrew word is from אִשְׁתּ֗וֹ — as “his wife” when there is no indication in the first two chapters of Genesis that the “man” and the “woman” have had any kind of wedding ceremony or that “marriage” as we know it today was a thing? Are they automatically married because God made them as partners? Were we not invited to the wedding?
Mark Wingfield
This Hebrew word translated in every major English translation of the Bible as “wife” actually means “woman” or “female” and sometimes “wife.” Applying the word “wife” is an editor’s choice, although a common one. Yes, I am aware the construct of the Hebrew word in question often is translated “wife” or “his wife.”
Yet we must ask of whoever first wrote down these words — and no, they were not dictated by God verbatim — what later context they brought to bear.
What makes someone “man and wife” anyway? According to our modern understanding, that designation requires an official action, whether a legal contract with the state or a religious blessing from the church. The modern church frowns on common-law spouses and couples “living together in sin.”
How, then, can “the woman” of Genesis 3:8 be referred to as “his wife”? This “woman” doesn’t get a name until 12 verses later in Genesis. Seems to me that’s taking much later standards of family relations and reading them back into an ancient text.
In the earlier creation story in chapter 2, we are told God makes the woman out of a rib of the man — a story different from chapter 1’s creation account — and then we are given this interpretation: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
Amid a creative narrative, we are given an editorial comment, an interpretation.
“It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that this interpretation was added later as a way of explaining how marriage fits in to a context where there was no such thing as marriage.”
It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that this interpretation was added later as a way of explaining how marriage fits in to a context where there was no such thing as marriage. Again, reading back into an ancient oral tradition as it gets written down. The Genesis story began as oral tradition.
My beef with “his wife” in this verse is not the most difficult thing about this passage. There’s a lot of scholarly discussion about what it means for “the sound of the Lord God” to be heard walking. We’ll save that for another day.
There are related problems in Genesis 2, particularly with the Hebrew word adam, which later gets transliterated as the proper name Adam. Every time we see either “man” or “Adam” in Genesis 2 and 3, it’s the same word. So there’s a choice made in translation throughout.
For example, the NIV uses “Adam” in 2:20, but the NRSV doesn’t use “Adam” ever. This is significant because the word adam (which is translated as “man” or “human” or “person”) comes from adamah (meaning the ground). Phyllis Trible explained that since the person was made from the ground, the person is an “earthling” in Genesis 2.
When does the earthling become one sex instead of a non-gendered earthling person? When the switch is made to “Adam” or even in using the translation “man,” translators begin to impose gendered hierarchy.
This highlights the conflict between the two creation accounts in Genesis, told for different purposes. In one, the second person is made from adam’s rib, but in the other both beings — ish and isah — are created at the same time.
One of my biblical scholar friends explained of this quandary: “Something happened between Genesis 2:23 and 3:8 when the isah started to belong to the ish.”
All this illustrates just a few of a multitude of problems with interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative proscriptions of “family values.” (Remember: We don’t know where Cain and Abel found wives either.)
Genesis 3 plays a key role in the Southern Baptist Convention’s sordid history of seeing “the woman” as less than “the man.” A 1984 SBC resolution on women shockingly declared women must be submissive to men “because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.”
This is one of the places where so-called “complementarians” today get their view that God embedded a hierarchy in creation that must be followed: Children submit to parents; wives submit to husbands; husbands submit to God. Oh, yeah, and people with dark skin submit to people with white skin. Go ahead and try to find that verse in the Bible.
“Complementarianism is a house of cards that reads the Bible backward and imposes later cultural understandings on ancient people.”
Complementarianism is a house of cards that reads the Bible backward and imposes later cultural understandings on ancient people. That’s true of Genesis as well as the Pauline epistles.
For millennia, human Bible interpreters have been men who see the world through their lens of power and hierarchy. This has fed views of patriarchy and hierarchy. Especially for complementarians, it is necessary for the rest of their theology for the man to be the center of the story and woman to be submissive to the man.
Those with a gender agenda keep telling us the Bible is “absolutely clear” on things it is not absolutely clear about.
In his sermon last Sunday, our pastor urged us to renovate our minds to have a bigger understanding of Scripture and God’s work in the world. We so easily get trapped in what has been handed down as gospel truth that fits our wishes but isn’t even borne out in the precise words of Scripture.
This is an important reminder as we continue to hear complementarians — like those running the SBC today — declare that the Bible expressly implies a created order that allows men to do some important things women are not allowed to do.
When you hear those pronouncements, think of Genesis 3:8.
And feel free to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “You keep saying that word. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.