Pain and Toil
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."
To Adam he said, "Because you have listened to your wife's voice, and ate from the tree, about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat of it,' the ground is cursed for your sake. You will eat from it with much labor all the days of your life. It will yield thorns and thistles to you; and you will eat the herb of the field. By the sweat of your face will you eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
The man called his wife Eve because she would be the mother of all the living. Yahweh God made coats of animal skins for Adam and for his wife, and clothed them. Yahweh God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand, and also take of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever-" Therefore Yahweh God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
The concluding section of this segment presents the consequence of their disobedience. It answers the questions that might often have been asked by a boy or girl of their parents: why is there pain, why is life so hard, why is everything so difficult? This is what myths do. They offer through symbolic events and entities answers to questions that in a pre-scientific age were difficult to answer. In the 21st century we can look at the hidden meanings, and reflect on the wisdom of them.
Our ancestors' disobedience explains why we have pain, especially the pain of childbirth, and toil; why the easy life of gathering from the fertile area has been denied us and we have to work hard just to stay alive.