To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bear children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
⛓ Read Genesis 3 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion2
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
The sentence on the woman, 'in pain you shall bring forth children,' and the rule of the husband over her, underlies both 'saved through her childbearing' and the call to subjection. Paul reads the curse of painful childbearing as the very sphere of the woman's salvation. The verse is central to verse 15.
High confidenceThe command that wives 'be in subjection, as the law also says' (14:34) is widely understood to invoke Genesis 3:16, 'your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you,' the only Torah text grounding wifely subordination. Since Paul cites no chapter, this is the most plausible referent of 'the law,' and it coheres with his appeal to Genesis order elsewhere; volume rests on the allusion to the rule-over-her clause.
Medium confidenceEcho3
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
"Wives, be in subjection to your husbands" may invoke the post-fall ordering of the woman to her husband. Low/contested; the household-code form is shared with Hellenistic moral philosophy, so direct dependence on Gen 3:16 is uncertain.
Low confidence'Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you' offers the OT backdrop for the wifely-subjection and husband-as-head household instruction. Low volume and conceptual; contested because Ephesians grounds order in Christ rather than the curse.
Low confidenceThe instruction that wives be 'in subjection to their own husbands' (v.5) may faintly echo the post-fall ordering of marriage. Contested, since the household-code material is more directly Hellenistic-Jewish ethical convention than a Genesis citation.
Low confidence