Theological Kaleidoscope: The Ever-Changing Genesis 3.16

From 

"Intelligent Submission & Other Ways of Feminine Wisdom"

How many times can a verse be changed in Bible translations before anyone notices that something fishy is going on? Is it possible to do it, say, nine times over the course of sixteen centuries? Yes, it actually is. Genesis 3.16 has been changed numerous times over the centuries. With every major change in theology, this one verse has been changed in both wording and meaning. But why this particular verse of all the verses in the Bible? Because it is the only verse in the Bible that talks about the man's rule.

The first change was made by Jerome in the beginning of the fifth century in his newly created Latin translation. Instead of providing a literal translation, he decided to express the meaning of the verse as the patristic church understood it. In the Vulgate, Genesis 3.16 tells us that the woman was placed under the man's authority for Jerome thought the verse said God caused the woman to turn to the man as a punishment for her sin. For about a thousand years, the Latin translation was the only one available. When the reformers decided to rid themselves of the obsolete language in favor of languages actually spoken by the people, the meaning of the verse was changed again. The German reformer, Luther, changed Jerome's paraphrase with a small addition of his own: he added the word “will” to the text making the woman's will subject to the man as a punishment for her sin; Calvin agreed with Luther for he thought the verse said the woman would desire only that which the husband wished, as her punishment was servile subjection.[i] The creators of the Geneva Bible decided that it was the woman's desire that was subject to the man while Luther's English contemporary Myles Coverdale chose the word “lust,” making the woman literally lust after the man. The King James Version scholars must have felt uneasy about using such a crude word for they chose the more polished word “desire,” setting precedence for four centuries of translations. A deviation from the norm - and the Septuagint itself - is found in the nineteenth-century English translation of the Greek Septuagint in which the woman's submission is said to be to her husband. The latest change, made at the end of the twentieth century, is found in the footnotes of The New Living Translation: the desire is now understood to be the woman's desire to control the man.

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[i] John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, Volume I, Part