[If there is a chapter so controversial that it requires rereading, restudying and reinterpretation—this would be it!
It is interesting to read—for a change—the comments of Jewish sages featured in our valuable resource book P&H/Pentateuch and Haftarahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz; they know their Hebrew terms and the original text; they correct or give alternatives to mistranslations done by non-Jewish renderings which we’ve gotten so used to that we don’t bother to question because we don’t know any differently. Please do not neglect to read the additional article at the end of this chapter: “The Jewish View of the ‘Fall of Man'” which we completely agree with. Commentary from P&H is not enclosed in brackets.
As to the interpretations presented by the commentary on each verse, we do not always agree with; however, it helps to know about the original wording of significant mistranslated verses that are sometimes intentionally twisted to support a religious doctrine or theological position. We are quite settled in our understanding of this chapter and have written articles on it, please check out if you haven’t done so:
- Prooftext 1: Genesis 3:15 – Seed of the Woman vs. Seed of the Serpent
- Prooftext 1a – Genesis 3:15 – Who is the “woman”?
- Prooftext 1b – Genesis 3:15 – Who is the “serpent”?
- Prooftext 1c – Gen. 3:15 – Who are the “seed,” “offspring”?
- Prooftext 1d – Serpent Symbolism – Postscript
- Shedding without blood . . .Ask the Rabbi: Rabbi M. Younger [aish.com]
- A Child’s Simple Logic – right on the dot!
- The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
- The Tree of Life is the Torah -2
- The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life – Proverbs 11:30
- An Inconvenient Truth for Adam and Eve – 1
A major change in year II: Our translation of choice in this website has been changed to Everett Fox’s The Five Books of Moses. The translation differs from that of the P&H commentary but it’s easy to make the connection; one more difference, EF lays out his translation in verse form. Since he has written a commentary, whenever relevant or additional insight helps us to understand the verse, his comment is enclosed in parenthesis. To add to more insights in reading, we’re featuring also “RA’ or Robert Alter who has come up with his own translation of The Five Books of Moses. Consider this series under TORAH STUDY as though you were sharing a Sinaite’s notebook; we love to share everything we discover that would help in understanding YHWH’s TORAH.—Admin1.]
Bere’shiyth 3
THE TRIAL OF MAN’S FREEDOM 1 Now the snake was more shrewd than all the living-things of the field that YHWH, God, had made. It said tot he woman: Even though God said: You are not to eat from any of the trees in the garden . . . !the serpent. According to the Rabbinic legend, the serpent in its original state had the power of speech, and its intellectual powers exceeded those of all other animals, and it was envy of man that made it plot his downfall.
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subtle. The same Heb. root signifies both ‘naked’ and ‘subtle, clever, mischievous’. Seeming simplicity is often the most dangerous weapon of cunning. The gliding stealthy movement of the serpent is a fitting symbol of the insidious progress of temptation.
yea, hath God said. lit. ‘Is it really so, that God (Elohim) hath said’—a statement expressing surprise and incredulity with the object of creating doubt in the reasonableness of the Divine prohibition.
[EF] Even though God said: Others use “Did God really say . . .?” In the garden . . .! Such an uncompleted phrase, known as aposeopesis, leaves it to the reader to complete the speaker’s thought which in the Bible is usually an oath or a threat.
[RA] cunning. In the kind of pun in which the ancient Hebrew writers delighted, ‘arum, “cunning,” plays against ‘arumim, “naked,” of the previous verse.
2 The woman said to the snake: From the fruit of the (other) trees in the garden we may eat,the woman. Guileless and unsuspecting, she falls into the trap—even enlarges on God’s command.
[RA] as E.A. Speiser has noted, the subordinate conjunction that introduces the serpent’s first utterance does not have the sense of “truly” that most translators assign it, and is better construed as the beginning of a (false) statement that is cut off in midsentence by Eve’s objection that the ban is not on all the trees of the Garden.
3 but from the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, God has said: You are not to eat from it and you are not to touch it, lest you die.neither shall ye touch it. There is no word concerning ‘touching in the original prohibition. This exaggeration on the part of the woman, says the Midrash, was the cause of her fall.
[RA] But, as many commentators have observed, Eve enlarges the divine prohibition in another direction, adding a ban on touching to the one on eating, and so perhaps setting herself up for transgression: having touched the fruit, and seeing no ill effect, she may proceed to eat.
4 The snake said to the woman: Die, you will not die!ye shall not surely die. The serpent boldly denies the validity of God’s threat.
5 Rather, God knows that on the day that you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil.God assigned no reason for the command; the serpent suggests one; viz. when God gave His order, it was not for man’s benefit, but because God was envious of what man would become, if he ate the forbidden fruit.
opened. To new sources of knowledge, hidden from ordinary sight—a strong appeal to the curiosity of the woman.
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as God. i.e. you will become endowed with a power which is at present reserved exclusively to Himself, viz. omniscience, you will be in a position to repudiate His authority.
[EF you: Plural. like gods: Or “like God.”
good and evil. A Heb. idiom for ‘all things’ (Cheyne, Ehrlich); II Sam. X”IV,17. The same Heb. idiom occurs in a negative form in XXIV, 50 and XXI,24,29, where it means ‘nothing at all’. The ordinary explanation of the phrase ‘good and evil’ in the literal sense assumes that God would for any reason withhold from man the ability to discern between what is morally right and wrong—a view which contradicts the spirit of Scripture. Moreover, Adam would not have been made ‘in the image of God; if he did not from the first possess the faculty of distinguishing between good and evil. And if he lacked such faculty, his obedience or disobedience to any command whatsoever could have no moral significance. None of these objections holds good in regard to the temporary withholding of ordinary knowledge from Adam, pending his decision to work with or against God.
6 The woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desirable to contemplate. She took from its fruit and ate and gave also to her husband beside her, and he ate.the woman saw. Though the tempter did not tell the woman to eat the fruit, he had woven the spell. The woman looked upon the tree with a new longing—it was good to eat, a delight to the eyes, and it would give wisdom. She turns her back upon the impulses of gratitude, love and duty to God. The story mirrors human experience.
with her. Either, ‘who was with her,’ or ‘to eat with her.’ The desire for companionship in guilt is characteristic of sin.
[RA] lust to the eyes. There is a long tradition of rendering the first term here, ta’awah, according to English idiom and local biblical context, as “delight” or something similar. But ta’awah means “that which is intensely desired,” “appetite,” and sometimes specifically “lust.” Eyes have just been mentioned in the serpent’s promise that they will be wondrously opened; now they are linked to intense desire. In the event, they will be opened chiefly to see nakedness. Ta’awah is semantically bracketed with the next term attached to the tree, “lovely,” nemad, which literally means “that which is desired.”
to look at. A venerable tradition renders this verb, lehaskil, as “to make one wise.” But Amos Funkenstein has astutely observed to me that there is an internal parallelism in the verse, “lust to the eyes . . . lovely to look at.” Though the usual sense of lehaksil in the hiph’il conjugation does involve the exercise of wisdom, Funkenstein’s suggestion leans on the meaning of the same root in the hitpa’el conjugation in postbiblical Hebrew and Aramaic, “to look.” And in fact, the Aramaic Targums of both Onkelos and Yonatan ben Uziel render this as le’istakala beih, “to look at.” At least one other biblical occurrence is almost certainly in the sense of look, the beginning of Psalm 41: “Happy is he who maskil to the poor man”—surely, who looks at, has regard for, the poor man. A correlation between verbs of seeing and verbs of knowledge or understanding is common to many languages.
7 The eyes of the two of them were opened and they knew then that they were nude. They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.were opened. The knowledge attained is neither of happiness, wisdom, or power, but of consciousness of sin and its conflict with the will of God (Ryle). Next come shame, fear, and the attempt to hide.
naked. They forfeited their innocence. Rashi gives a metaphorical interpretation to the words: ‘They knew that they were naked’ — naked of all sense of gratitude and obedience to the Divine will: one precept alone had they been asked to obey, and even this proved too much for them.
fig-leaves. Because they were the largest and best suited for a loin covering.
8 Now they heard the sound of YHWH, God, (who was) walking about in the garden at the breezy-time of the day. And the human and his wife hid themselves from the face of YHWH, God, amid the trees of the garden.the voice. Or, ‘sound.’
toward the cool of the day. i.e. towards evening, when, in the Orient, a cooling breeze arises (Song of Songs II,17). It was this evening wind that carried to Adam and Eve the sound which heralded the approach of God.
hid themselves. Conscience makes cowards of them.
[EF] breezy time: Evening. face of YHWH: The “face” or presence of God is a dmonating theme in many biblical stories and in the book of Psalms. People seek God’s face or hide from it; God reveals it to them or hides it from them.]
9-21. THE SENTENCE
9 YHWH, God, called to the human and said to him: Where are you? where art thou? The Midrash explains that this question was asked out of consideration for Adam, to afford him time to recover his self-possession. ‘Where art thou? is the call which, after every sin, resounds in the ears of the man who seeks to deceive himself and others concerning his sin (Dillmann). 10 He said: I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid, because I am nude, and so I hid myself.because I was naked. The Rabbis maintain that ‘one sin leads to another sin’. Adam commits a further offence by attempting to conceal the truth by means of this excuse.
11 He said: Who told you that you are nude? From the tree about which I command you not to eat, have you eaten?hast thou eaten? An opportunity is given Adam for full confession and expression of contrition. A sin unconfessed and unrepented is a sin constantly committed.
12 The human said: The woman whom you gave to be beside me, she gave me from the tree, and so I ate.Finding his excuse useless, Adam throws the blame upon everybody but himself. First of all it is ‘the woman’; then he insolently fixes a share of the responsibility upon God—whom Thou gavest to be with me.’
[EF] gave to be: Put.
[RA] gave by me, she gave me. The repeated verb nicely catches the way the first man passes the buck, not only blaming the woman for giving him the fruit but virtually blaming God for giving him the woman. She in turn of course blames the serpent. God’s curse, framed in verse, follows the reverse order, from serpent to woman to man.
13 YHWH, God, said to the woman: What is this that you have done? The woman said: The snake enticed me, and so I ate.Instead of a question, the words may be taken as an exclamation, ‘What is this thou hast done!’
14 YHWH, God, said to the snake:
the serpent. As the tempter and instigator of the offence, sentence is passed upon it first; and as the tempter, the serpent is cursed, and not its dupes and victims.
Because you have done this, damned be you from all the animals and from all the living-things of the field; upon your belly shall you walk and dust shall you eat, all the days of your life.shalt thou go . . . shalt thou eat. Better, upon thy belly thou goest and dust thou eatest. ‘Till the 18th century it was the general belief that the serpent had been walking upright and was not reduced to crawling. This is quite un-Biblical. The meaning is, Continue to crawl on thy belly and eat dust. Henceforth it will be regarded as a curse, recalling to men thy attempt to drag them to the dust’ (B. Jacob).
All the days of thy life. As long as thy species lasts.
15 I put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed; they will bruise you on the head, you will bruise them in the heel.enmity. The sight of the serpent will create loathing in man, and fear of its deadly sting will call forth an instinctive desire to destroy it.
[EF] seed: Offspring, descendants.
bruise. Because of its position on the ground, the serpent strikes at the heel of man; while the man deals the fatal blow by crushing its head. Therefore the victory will rest with man.
[RA] Enmity. Although the serpent is by no means “satanic,” as in the lens of later Judeo-Christian traditions, the curse records a primal horror of humankind before this slithering, viscous-looking, and poisonous representative of the animal realm. It is the first moment in which a split between man and the rest of the animal kingdom is recorded. Behind it may stand, at a long distance of cultural mediation, Canaanite myths of a primordial sea serpent.
boot . . . bite. The Hebrew uses what appears to be homonyms, the first verb meaning “to trample,” the second, identical in form, probably referring to the hissing sound of the snake just before it bites.
16 To the woman he said: I will multiply, multiply your pain (from) your pregnancy, with pains shall you bear children. Toward your husband will be your lust, yet he will rule over you.greatly multiply . . . over thee. Better, Much, much will I make thy pain and thy travail; in pain wilt thou bring forth children, and thy desire is unto thy husband and he ruleth over thee. (B. Jacob). This is no sentence upon the woman. It does not contain the term ‘cursed’. Moreover, God himself pronounced the fruitfulness of man a blessing (I,28), and therewith woman’s pain and travail are inextricably bound up, being part of woman’s physical being. The words addressed to the woman are therefore parenthetical, and signifying in effect:
Thee I need not punish. A sufficiency of woe and suffering is thine because of thy physical being’ (B. Jacob).
thy desire. In spite of the pangs of travail, the longing for motherhood remains the most powerful instinct in woman.
17 To Adam he said: Because you have hearkened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying: You are not to eat from it! Damned be the soil on your account, with painstaking-labor shall you eat from it, all the days of your life.cursed is the ground. It was Adam’s duty from the beginning to till the ground (II,15): but the work would now become much more laborious. The soil would henceforth yield its produce only as the result of hard and unceasing toil.
[EF] painstaking-labor: Heb. itzavon. Man and woman bring receive equal curses (see vs. 16, “pain . . .pains”).
for thy sake. Only as long as Adam lived was the earth under a curse; see on v. 29, and VIII,21.
[RA] to the human. The Masoretic Text vocalizes le’adam without the definite article, which would make it mean “to Adam.” But since Eve in the parallel curse is still called “the woman,” it seems better to assume the definite article here.
with pangs shall you eat. The noun ‘itsavon is the same used for the woman’s birth pangs, confirming the lot of painful labor that is to be shared by man and woman.
18 Thorn and sting-shrub let it spring up for you, when you (seek to) eat the plants of the field!thou shalt eat the herb. Render, ‘whereas thou eatest the herb of the field.’ The spontaneous growth of the soil will be weeds, which are unsuitable for human consumption. Man’s food is the herb, which he can only acquire by toil.
[RA] The vista of thorn and thistle is diametrically opposed to the luscious vegetation of the garden and already intimates the verdict of banishment that will be carried out in verses 23-24.
19 By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, until you return to the soil, for from it you were taken, For you are dust, and to dust shall you return.in the sweat. ‘The necessity of labour has proved man’s greatest blessing, and has been the cause of all progress and improvement’ (Ryle).
20 The human called his wife’s name: Havva/Life-giver! For she became the mother of all the living.the mother of all living. This translation is incorrect. Render, the mother of all humankind. Otherwise, some word must be supplied after ‘living’, so as to exclude animal life (Onkelos, Saadyah). W. Robertson Smith has shown that the word in the text, which is here wrongly translated ‘living’ is the primitive Semitic word for ‘clan’; Eve was the mother of every human clan, the mother of mankind. In this sense, occurs also in I Sam. XVIII,18 (‘Who am I, and who are my kinsfolk, or my father’s family, etc.’ RV Margin).
[EF] Havva: Traditional English “Eve”.
[RA] Eve . . . all that lives. Like most of the explanations of names in Genesis, this is probably based on folk etymology or an imaginative playing with sound. The most searching explanation of these poetic etymologies in the Bible has been offered by Herbert Marks, who observes, “In a verisimilar narrative, naming establishes and fixes identity as something tautologically itself; etymology, by returning ti to the trials of language, compromises it, complicates it, renders it, potentially mobile.” In the Hebrew here, the phonetic similarity is between awah, “Eve,” and the verbal root ayah, “to live.” It has been proposed that Eve’s name conceals very different origins, for it sounds suspiciously like the Aramaic word for “serpent.” Could she have been given the name by the contagious contiguity with her wily interlocutor, or, on the contrary, might there lurk behind the name a very different evaluation of the serpent as a creature associated with the origins of life?
21 Now YHWH, God, made Adam and his wife coats of skin and clothed them.
The LORD God made. Despite their sin, God had not withdrawn His care from them. Divine punishment is at once followed by Divine pity.
garments of skin. Better suited for the rough life in front of them than the apron of leaves they were wearing.
and clothed them. This is one of the passages on which the Rabbis base the Jewish ideal of Imitatio Dei, the duty of imitating God’s ways of loving-kindness and pity. ‘The beginning and the end of the Torah is the bestowal of loving-kindness,’ they say; ‘at the beginning of the Torah, God cloths Adam; and at its end, He buries Moses.’
[EF] God . . . clothed them: Once punishment has been pronounced, God cares for the man and the woman. Both aspects of God comprise the biblical understanding of his nature, and they are not exclusive of each other.
22-24. THE EXPULSION FROM EDEN
man is become as one of us. As one of the angels; or, ‘us’ is a plural of Majesty (I,26), meaning, man is become as God—omniscient. Man having through disobedience secured the faculty of unlimited knowledge, there was real danger that his knowledge would outstrip his sense of obedience to Divine Law. In our own day, we see that deep insight into Nature’s secrets, if unrestrained by considerations of humanity, may threaten the very existence of humankind, e.g. through chemical warfare.
live for ever. Through further disobedience he could secure deathlessness. Immortality, however, that had been secured through disobedience and lived in sin, an immortal life of Intellect without Conscience, would defeat the purpose of man’s creation (Sforno). Therefore, not only for his punishment, but for his salvation, to bring him back from the sinister course on which he had entered, God sent man forth from the Garden. Man, having sunk into sin, must rise again through the spiritual purification of suffering and death (Strack).
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23 So YHWH, God, sent him away from the garden of Eden, to work the soil from which he had been taken.
[RA] the soil from which he had been taken. This reminder of the first man’s clayey creatureliness occurs as a kind of refrain in this chapter, first in the act of God’s fashioning man, then in God’s curse, and now in the banishment. It is a mere thing shaped from clay that has aspired to be like a god.
24 He drove the human out and caused to dwell, eastward of the garden of Eden, the winged sphinxes and the flashing, ever-turning sword to watch over the way to the Tree of Life.
drove out. Sin drives man from God’s presence; and when man banishes God from his world, he dwells in a wilderness instead of a Garden of Eden.
at the east. Either because man dwelt to the east of the Garden, or because the entrance was on that side.
cherubim. What these really were is a matter of uncertainty. According to Rashi, they were ‘angels of destruction’. The first man was forbidden to enter the Garden again, and the slightest attempt on his part to do so would bring down upon him instant destruction. In the Bible generally, the cherubim are symbols of God’s presence (Exod. XXV,18).
[EF] winged sphinxes: Mythical ancient creatures, also represented on the Ark of the Covenant (Ex. 25:18). “Cherubim,” the traditional English rendering, has come to denote chubby, red-cheeked baby angels in Western art, an image utterly foreign to the ancient Near East.
to keep the way. Though the entrance to Eden was guarded by the angels with the flaming sword, the gentler angel of mercy did not forsake them in their exile. Adam and Eve discovered Repentance—the Rabbis tell us—and thereby they came nearer to God outside of Eden than when in Eden.
[RA] The cherubim, a common feature of ancient Near East mythology, are not to be confused with the round-cheeked darlings of Renaissance iconography. The root of the term either means “hybrid” or, by an inversion of consonants, “mount,” “steed,” and they are the winged beasts, probably of awesome aspect, on which the sky god of the old Canaanite myths and of the poetry of Psalms goes riding through the air. The fiery sword, not mentioned elsewhere but referred to with the definite article as though it were a familiar image, is a suitable weapon to set alongside the formidable cherubim.
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JEWISH VIEW OF THE ‘FALL OF MAN’
Strange and sombre doctrines have been built on this chapter of the Garden of Eden, such as the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (e.g. ‘In Adam’s fall, we sinned all’—New England Primer. ‘The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works to faith and calling upon God’—Art. X, Free Will, of the 39 Articles). This Christian dogma of Original Sin is throughout the Middle Ages accompanied by an unbelievable vilification of Woman, as the authoress of death and all our earthly woe. Judaism rejects these doctrines. Man was mortal from the first, and death did not enter the world through the transgression of Eve. Stray Rabbinic utterances to the contrary are merely homiletic, and possess no binding authority in Judaism. There is no loss of the God-likeness of man, nor of man’s ability to do right in the eyes of God; and no such loss has been transmitted to his latest descendants. Although a few of the Rabbis occasionally lament Eve’s share in the poisoning of the human race by the Serpent, event they declare that the antidote to such poison has been found at Sinai; rightly holding that the Law of God is the bulwark against the devastations of animalism and godlessness. The Psalmist often speak of sin and guilt; but never is there a reference to this chapter or to what Christian Theology calls ‘The Fall’. One searches in vain the Prayer Book, of even the Days of Penitence, for the slightest echo of the doctrine of the Fall of man. ‘My God, the soul which Thou hast given me is pure,’ is the Jew’s daily morning prayer. ‘Even as the soul is pure when entering upon its earthly career, so can man return it pure to his Maker’ (Midrash).
Instead of the Fall of man (in the sense of humanity as a whole), Judaism preaches the Rise of man; and instead of Original Sin, it stresses Original Virtue, the beneficent hereditary influence of righteous ancestors upon their descendants.’ There is no generation without its Abraham, Moses or Samuel,’ says the Midrash; i.e. each age is capable of realizing the highest potentialities of the moral and spiritual life. Judaism clings to the idea of Progress. The Golden Age of Humanity is not in the past, but in the future (Isaiah II and XI); and all the children of men are destined to help in the establishment of that Kingdom of God on earth.
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[Straight Text/No Commentary]
ROBERT ALTER’S THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES/GENESIS