The Cycles of the Curses

The curses of Genesis involve not merely suffering, but also a set of complete cycles of struggle, suffering, and death--the practical analogues of this blog's "roused, readied, reaped."  The elements of Creation are roused to their states of opposition, and the drama plays out in the readyings and the reapings.

The snake, already the enemy of mankind, is pictured as facing an unending, cruel struggle of its progeny against that of the man.  This aspect of "The Fall" does not create a struggle, but rather exacerbates an existing one--as is the case with all the other struggles--revealing the convenient and contrived nature of the conventional fixation on "The Fall."

The woman is told that child-bearing will be an excruciating experience, and dark elements of destructive lust and disordered relationships are presaged as far as male-female intimate relationships are concerned.  Again, this is really nothing new; the relationship of Adam to Eve was never what it ought to have been.

Indeed, as we have seen, the relationship of Adam to Eve ought never to have existed at all (though God's possibilities of creating potentially an infinitude of beings after Adam need never have been problematic.)  Eve is presented in the text as a creature brought into being because Adam's disposition toward God was not what it ought to have been.  Indeed, what we as individuals must strive for is exactly that which was presented as a possibility for Adam from the first: an open relationship to God, requiring nothing and no one else.

This realization about Adam and Eve is in distinction to the conventional commentators' notion that marital difficulties arise from the institution being cursed from The Fall.  Having an interest in controlling individuals by enhancing their entanglements with others, the denominations typically insist that marriage was God's plan--rather than the bittersweet, curse-laden outworking of man's inadequacies.

And then there is humanity's relationship to Creation depicted as the soil, now cursed because of us.  Adam's charge to tend to the garden is now enlarged into a dire, almost physically-intimate struggle with the ground from which he arose.  As is the case with all the other curses, the possibility exists for us to view our now-blighted relationship with the earth as one of our having a responsibility to care for something that was provided for our good, or as one of our having a responsibility to care for something that we have wronged.  Almost invariably, we as a species choose the incorrect approach--the first approach--the "we have to take care of what God provided for us" approach.

And so we plunder and despoil the Earth because we believe we must at present, and we are really not disposed to do anything but plunder and despoil it in the near future, because supposedly we must provide for our needs while we prepare for some comfortably distant future in which our innovations will let us settle our debts to Mother Nature.  Good luck to us.

All of the Genesis curses bear upon a more fundamental question about how we approach life and how we approach God.  Our preferred approach--perhaps best exemplified by "toxic masculinity"--is to pursue a tender and intimate relationship with a God that we have sequestered to Heaven, while we behave as entitled brutes toward the Creation into which God poured his goodness--all in the name of doing our duty to him.

The importance of properly viewing the Genesis curses cannot be overstated.