Pain in the Bible
By Prof. Axel H. Murken, Issue 04/2007
Pages 01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09
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“Unto the woman he said,
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;
in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;
... unto Adam he said,
... cursed is the ground for thy sake;
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life…
So he drove out the man ...”
(Genesis 3: 16-17, 24)
Figure 1
Michelangelo: The expulsion from paradise,
1536-1541. Fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Rome.
Fourth central panel of the arched ceiling.
“God meets people precisely
at the moment when their
self-confidence is broken by
excessive pain and life appears
to be meaningless. The people
of the Old Testament already knew about
this encounter with God in the midst of pain
and suffering and it is in their attitude towards
pain and suffering that the true greatness
of Old Testament piety resides.”
Josef Scharbert, 1955
Pain and the fear of death have been accepted by human beings down through the ages as inevitable and constant companions that are with us from birth until life’s final moment. This absolutely negative feeling, which has the power to paralyse and even totally to arrest human thought and action, has been described in myriad different forms ever since the highly developed cultures of Antiquity. The full spectrum of pain finds expression in a limitless range of ways in the tribulations of our earthly existence: the Old Testament account indicates that this must have been the bitter experience made by the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, following their expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Figure 1). Suffering with its painful manifestations is such an integral part of the human condition that ultimately it also exerts a decisive influence on human consciousness. However, the great Greek tragedian Sophocles also recognised a positive side to this shattering feeling that has such an adverse effect on human happiness: in Sophocles’ play Philoctetes the eponymous tragic hero cries out in the face of his ever-painful injury that refuses to heal: “If it were not for my wound I would long ago have become like an animal – devoid of memory and care.”
The book of Genesis, which contains the Old Testament creation account, plainly states the reason why pain has become the constant companion of the human race: the inevitable prospect of pain was the punishment imposed by Almighty God for original sin (Figure 2). According to the Genesis account, pain came into the world and entered our earthly experience because first Eve and then Adam ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge that grew in the Garden of Eden, so violating God’s commandment. In Chapter 3 of Genesis the painful punishments imposed by God are listed by Moses as the agony of childbirth, the daily drudgery of having to work in order to eat, and the loss of immortal status. These penalties, issued at a single stroke, have therefore come to encompass the chief troubles and burdens that afflict human existence. And subsequent Old Testament books – despite being written by different authors at different periods – also make it clear in various stories and accounts how much every painful sensation and emotion is ultimately dispensed at the discretion of God.
Figure 2
William Blake: The fall of man, 1808. Pencil, watercolour and quill, 46.6 x 38.4 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Reproduced from: Morton D. Paley: William Blake. Oxford, 1978. Figure 49.
