Sorrow in Childbirth is often counted as a punishment for Adam’s wife for disobeying the commandment not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But the punishment was death. That was promised ahead of time and fully came upon the woman, Adam and all his descendants.
Was it a curse like God put on the serpent and on the earth? God did not call it a curse, apparently because it was not a curse. Surely God had a good reason for this. I had thought for some time that other things might have made more sense—like maybe making the woman allergic to that specific fruit or something like that.
I looked everywhere I could think of to find the reason God to assigned sorrow in childbirth. I looked in commentaries in libraries and bookstores. I looked in religious encyclopedias. This was long before there was internet. But there were Bibles with explanatory notes, so I looked through every one of those I could find. I saw no satisfactory answer until one morning God showed me the answer in my Bible reading. And God’s answer, which I have written in the theology slides Sorrow in Childbirth, is far above anything I could have imagined.