use of the word "members" to mean in fact the whole body.
458 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis will, but that it had been the devil operating from it and by it and in it, and he had already been assigned to eternal fire for the sin of his own disloyalty and pride. So now then, what is said to the serpent and really of course being addressed to the one who had operated through the serpent is undoubtedly figurative. These words, you see, are giving a description of that tempter which fits what he was going to be like for the human race in the future, the human race that began to be propagated precisely when this sentence was passed on the devil as if on the serpent. So these words are to be treated in the way figurative language is explained, and I discussed them as best I could in those two volumes on Genesis which I published against the Manichees;52 and ifon another occasion I can do it again more thoroughly and suitably, I am sure God will be at hand to help me carry out the task. Now however, l am intending to do something else, and l must not be distracted from it at anybody's insistence.
The punishment of the woman
37, 50. And to the woman he said: Multiplying l will multiply your griefs and your groaning; in griefs shall you bringforth children, and your turning round shall be towards your man, and he shall lord it overyou (Gn 3: 1 6). These words too, addressed to the woman, can be much more aptly understood in a figurative and prophetic sense. Nonetheless, the woman had not yet given birth, and the pains and groans of childbirth come from the body of this death (Rom 7:24), the death that was conceived by that transgression of the commandment, in members" which even then were just animal or "ensouled," but if the man had not sinned were certainly not going to die, and were going to live in some more favorable condition, until they earned after a life well lived the reward of being changed for the better, as l have suggested above in several places. So this punishment can be taken in the proper literal sense—though we will have to see how the last part, andyour turning round shall be towardsyourman, and he will lord it overyou, can in fact be taken in the proper sense. lt is not fitting, after all, to suppose that even before sin the woman was made otherwise than to have the man lording it over her and to be herself turning towards him in service.
But we can rightly take it that the service indicated here is one of social status rather than of affection; so this kind of service, by which human beings later on began to be the slaves of other human beings, turns out to have arisen from the punishment of sin. The apostle indeed says, Serving one another through love (Gal 5:13); but he would never have dreamed of saying, "Lord it over one
52. See above, Book V111, 1,5, note 8. 53. The background of his thought here is all the time Romans 7, which accounts for this rather odd use of the word "members" to mean in fact the whole body.