In the 2000 comedy What Women Want, Mel Gibson plays the sexist boss of an advertising firm who suddenly becomes able to hear women’s internal dialogue, allowing him to land a coveted campaign aimed at females. He soon discovers he has spent his entire career misinterpreting what women really want in life. The movie’s reflects a question many have asked (or assumed they already know the answer to). What exactly do women want?
In Genesis 3:16, the Bible uses intriguing and—in the last 50 years—thoroughly debated language about the nature and object of female desire. This dispute prompted the translators of the popular English Standard Version (ESV) Bible, a preferred translation among many conservative denominations, churches, and seminaries, to change their translation of Gen. 3:16 in 2016 and then change it back this month.
Reading the Bible with Women
But before we discuss the recent changes, let’s back up to when the ESV was first released in 2001. In general uniformity with all the other major translations—including the NIV, NASB, and KJV—the ESV originally rendered Genesis 3:16,
To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.” (ESV throughout)
Yet controversy arose in 2016 when the ESV translation team changed the second half of the verse to “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (emphasis added throughout).
To understand why the ESV made such a change 15 years after its first publication and then changed it back nearly a decade later, it is helpful to step back and understand the various issues at play in this debate.
First, let’s turn to the context of the passage. Genesis 3:16 takes place right after the Enemy tempted Adam and Eve to sin by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. God turned first toward the Serpent and cursed him, warning that someday a person would come—one born of the same biological sex the serpent had targeted with his deception—who would crush his head.
Then God turned to the man and woman and pronounced the consequences of sin for each biological sex. For the man, work would become toilsome. Adam had been tasked with the care of the land before the Fall, but now the very land he was called to steward would work against him in the process.
The woman, too, was issued a warning. Her need to help her husband and care for her future children would continue—but what began as a joint venture with the man to care for creation would become oppressive and hard. Yet the woman would remain in relationship with the man and turn toward him again and again despite the fact that childbirth would be painful and the man would potentially overrule her in the process.
In the long history of the church, Genesis 3:16 was not a particularly controversial passage, at least not at the translation level. It was a pretty straightforward, albeit depressing and fatalistic, commentary on the near-universal male-female dynamic. Pregnancy can be miserable, and childbirth downright deadly. Yet women stay engaged with the opposite sex, often resulting in their oppression and abuse. This is not untrue.
But in the mid-1970s, second-wave feminism gave rise to the modern debate on Genesis 3:16. After women finally had the right to vote as result of first-wave feminism, they fought for more: equal pay in the workforce, access to birth control and abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
It was in this context that Susan Foh published an article in the 1974–75 issue of the Westminster Theological Journal. She argued that the woman’s desire in Genesis 3:16 was against or contrary to her husband—a desire to take control from her husband and to be in opposition to him. Foh’s argument was well received among conservative evangelicals at the time. It placed the advocacy of second-wave feminism in a theological light—claiming it as evidence of women’s fundamentally sinful desire to resist male leadership and oppose men’s authority.
The question is, where did Foh derive her new interpretation of the woman’s desire? The word desire (teshuquah) in Genesis 3:16 is found in only two other places in Scripture—Genesis 4:7 (“Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it”) and Song of Solomon 7:10 (“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me”). The word is reasonably clear, and most translations, including the ESV, have rendered it as “desire.”
However, Foh reinterpreted the use of the preposition el before the word desire in the two Genesis passages. In Hebrew, el indicates what Bible scholars call terminal direction, so the word is most often translated to, into, toward, or for. Note that no other English translation has translated the word el as “contrary to”, despite the word’s frequent use in the Old Testament.
The Hebrew preposition el consistently communicates the direction something is pointed or headed. You talk to someone. You direct something toward someone. You head for the door. Sometimes, the targeted location ends inside the object of the direction. You walk into a room. These are the words consistently used to translate el throughout all English Bible translations.
Furthermore, this meaning fits the context of Genesis 3:16, as the woman’s desire is directed toward the man. He is the object of this desire, the terminal direction in which she turns, even to her own detriment.
Yet Foh argued that in the case of Genesis 3:16, el indicated that the woman’s desires were against the man—that her desire in itself was a hostile action. Foh further suggested that given the similarities in the syntax between Genesis 3:16 and Genesis 4:7, they should be interpreted with parallel meanings.
That is, she wrote, “The woman has the same sort of desire for her husband that sin has for Cain, a desire to possess or control him.” This is quite the statement!
What About Eve?
The ESV’s changes in 2016 reflected Foh’s interpretation of Gen. 3:16, translating el not just as “against” but as “contrary to.” It’s worth noting that in 2016 the ESV had also changed its sister passage, Gen. 4:7, to “its desire is contrary to you” but this year reverted back to its original translation (“its desire is for you”).
Not only did the change “contrary to” make an unprecedented leap away from standard Hebrew translation of this passage; it also seemed to miss the mark of the ESV’s own “essentially literal” translation philosophy.
By moving back this year to the straightforward translation of Gen. 3:16, which has long been accepted with consensus among leading English versions of the Bible, the ESV realigns itself with its stated goal of reproducing “the precise wording of the original text.”
As the ESV’s former general editor, J. I. Packer, often reminded the translation committee, “We respect readers when we pass along to them the job of interpretive work, not going beyond what the linguistic details require and not foreclosing the interpretive options.”
Still, we are left with the question “What do women want?” Here, the larger context of Gen. 3:16 also matters.
Before God ever announced this struggle for the woman as a result of the Fall, he first proclaimed the truth that one was coming, born of a woman, who would crush the Enemy. And though the Serpent first tempted the woman to sin, she would also ultimately be the vessel through which the Savior would be born.
As Carmen Imes has written for CT, the legacy of Eve is both sin and redemption, as generations later, Mary’s willingness to submit to God’s invitation to bear the Messiah began the process that would reverse “the effects of Eve’s grave mistake.”
The Gospels flesh out how the Good News of Jesus interrupted the fallout of sin in women’s lives in various contexts. Women are failed by others, and we women often fail ourselves. But as both sinners and those sinned against, women (along with men) will only find their greatest desires met in the love of Jesus—and, ultimately, in the submission and transformation of their desires to Christ’s.
Wendy Alsup is the author of several books, including Companions in Suffering: Comfort for Times of Loss and Loneliness and Is the Bible Good for Women: Seeking Clarity and Confidence through a Jesus-centered Understanding of Scripture.
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