Reverse the Curse: Genesis, Defamiliarization, and the Song of Songs

This paper assesses the relationship between the so-called “curses” on the Woman in Gen 3:16 in terms of themes (garden, tree, creation, marriage, procreation, and so on) and concludes that the late poetic text of the Song aims at a deliberate corrective to the negative view of gender relations in Genesis. The use of mashal, “to rule over” in Gen 3 is reassessed from the perspective of its use of the native genre designation of mashal in Wisdom Literature. There, it refers to similarities between two compared items. The direct reversal of God’s speech to the humans in Gen 3, where the woman will be ruled over by her man but still desire him, appears in the Song in the speeches of the Beloved: there she states categorically that the man is her beloved and belongs to her, while she belongs to him. The tactic of defamiliarization (a Russian literary concept) is used to juxtapose radically different views and destabilizes the notion of only one meaning for the words under consideration. In effect, reading two opposing themes together forges a new, more inclusive understanding of both. This paper concludes with a dramatic new rendering of the Song, “The Song I Sing Complete” with speech and motifs reassigned to the woman’s voice, foregrounding her remarks within the genre of love poetry, drawing on tropes found in lyrical poetry and the myth of Israel’s neighbors in Mesopotamia and Egypt.