E-TZ-B-W-N – ‘travail, toil, labor’

The word עצב employed twice in this verse merits a particular attention. It springs from the two contracted roots עץ–צב. The first עץ, should be known to us. It is the same one which forms the name of that mysterious substance whose usage was forbidden to intellectual man. It is not difficult to recognize in it, sentient, corporeal substance, and in general, the emblem of that which is physical, in opposition to that which is spiritual. The second צב contains the idea of that which is raised as hindrance, swells with wrath, arrests, prevents a thing, opposes with effort, etc.

Moses employs first the word עצבון, after having added the tensive syllable ון, wishing to indicate the general obstacles which shall be opposed henceforth to the unfoldment of the will of intellectual man, and which shall multiply its conceptions, forcing them to become divided and subdivided ad infinitum. He then makes use of the simple word עצב to depict the pain, the torment, the agony which shall accompany its least creations. This hierographic writer would have it understood, that the volitive faculty shall no more cause intellectual conceptions to pass from power into action, without intermediary; but that it shall experience, on the contrary, deviations without number and obstacles of all sorts, whose resistance it shall be able to overcome, only by dint of labour and of time.

It is not necessary to say how the Hellenists have interpreted this verse. It is well known in what manner the ideas of Moses were materialized, and how the volitive faculty having been transformed into a corporeal woman, the physical hindrances opposed to the exercise of the will, have been no more than the pain which accompany childbirth. But one cannot accuse the Hellenists entirely of this charge. It was an inevitable consequence of the corruption of the Hebraic tongue, of its total losss and of the wretched inclination of the Jews to bend everything to their gross ideas. Moreover the vulgar translation seems to offer at first some appearance of reason. Only a moment of reflection, nevertheless, is necessary to discover the error…

In the first place, it is not true that Moses made the Being of beings say, that he will multifply the sorrows and the conceptions as the Hellenists translate it λυπας και ζεναμοις ; but that he will multiply the number of the obstacles and the conceptions, as Saint Jerome has not been prevented from seeing, “aerumnas et conceptus.” …

Now I ask in the second place how the Being of beings could have said to the corporeal woman that he would multiply the number of her conceptions or her pregnancies, as one understands it, since it would in such a manner shorten her life? Would he not rather have said that he would diminish the number, by rendering them more and more painful and laborious? But the Hellenists only abandoned it to follow the Samaritan version, because they saw plainly that it exposed the spiritual meaning, as indeed it does. For, while it is in accordance with reason and experience, to think that the volitive conceptions increase in proportion to the obstacles which are opposed to their realization and which force them to be divided, it is absurd and contradictory to affirm it of the pregnancies of physical woman, which are necessarily diminished with the pains, maladies and sufferings which accompany and follow them. (The Hebraic Tongue Restored, Fabré d’Olivet, p. 111-113)