Genesis - Chapter 03 - Line 00072

Contemplative Summary

To the woman he said, “Greatly I will increase your pain and your conception. In pain you shall bear children. And toward your man is your desire, and he shall rule over you.”

The voice now turns to the one who receives and gives life. The Hebrew harbah arbeh — “greatly I will multiply” — repeats itself as an echoing pulse, doubling intensity. The same word that once blessed with fruitfulness now stretches into sorrow. Etzev, “pain” or “toil,” binds together conception and birth, creation and ache — a single continuum of becoming. From this point, life will be born through contraction, joy braided with suffering, expansion through rupture.

The final cadence shifts from body to bond: ve’el ishekh teshukatekh — “your desire shall be toward your man.” The word teshukah, a yearning of gravity, carries both tenderness and dependence; the following clause, vehu yimshol-bakh — “and he shall rule over you” — names the imbalance that shadows longing. Together, they mark the fracture between attraction and power, communion and control.

To contemplate this line is to stand where love meets consequence — where the rhythm of life is both gift and weight. Pain here is not punishment but passage, the resonance of creation continuing through limitation. Desire and rule remain twin mirrors of separation, yet within them still moves the ancient pulse of union — the yearning to return to balance, to bear life without bondage, to love without fear.