The curses in Genesis 3 are sometimes regarded, in my experience, as having an element of arbitrariness to them. Not so, in my view.
The curses systematically deracinate all the identified benefits mentioned in Gen 1 and 2 as attending life in the very good creation. They are all inverted as death is the invert of life and rejection of love brings alienation not fellowship. However, they are not merely the detriments that flow, as adverse as they are; but are markers of the grand turning from God and its result in death: I think they are all about ‘dying you will die’ as the result of taking the fruit (rejecting God). They thus underline the ‘deathliness’ of life that seeks to be against God. To contemplate, against this, that any death might have preceded the fall (required by any scheme of interpretation that denies the timing of Genesis 1) demonstrates a hermeneutic of rejection that ironically parallels the act of Adam.
1
Gen 1: 28
God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”
VSS
Gen 3:16a
To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children;
> Being fruitful and multiplying will be attended with suffering.
2
Gen 1:26-28
Then God said, "Let Us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”
AND
Ge 2:23-24
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man."
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
VSS
Gen 3:16b
Yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
> Instead of unity, we have a contest; ‘one fleshness’ gives way to competition and rivalry.
3
Gen 2:15-17
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."
VSS
Gen 3:17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it';
> Listening to Eve instead of God, all the trees ‘free to eat’ including, presumably, the ‘tree of life’; but access to that is cut off by partaking of the tree of rejecting God. There’s one tree we can’t eat: either it is the tree of death, or the tree of life: they are mutually exclusive.
4
Gen 1:29
Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
VSS
Gen 3:17
Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
> From the garden of delights (Gen 2:9a), to the thorn ground of sweat.
5
Gen 2:15-16
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely…”
VSS
Gen 3:18-19
"Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."
> Instead of trees leading to life, sweat ends in death; with return to the dust from which we were taken; [but in Christ, we live on, as he will crush the serpent’s head: God bringing his good end from our bad beginning; working all things together for good].
