1Now the serpent was most cunning of all the beasts of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, 2“Though God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden—” And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the garden’s trees we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden 3God has said, 4‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, lest you die.’” And the serpent said to the woman, 5“You shall not be doomed to die. For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will become as gods knowing good and evil.” 6And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man with her, and he ate. 7And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.
8And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden in the evening breeze, and the human and his woman hid from the LORD God in the midst of the trees of the garden. 9And the LORD God called to the human and said to him, “Where are you?” 10And he said, “I heard Your sound in the garden and I was afraid, for I was naked, and I hid.” 11And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? From the tree I commanded you not to eat have you eaten?” 12And the human said, “The woman whom you gave by me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” 13And the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me and I ate.” 14And the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
Cursed be you
of all cattle and all beasts of the field.
On your belly shall you go
and dust shall you eat all the days of your life.
15Enmity will I set between you and the woman,
between your seed and hers.
and you will boot him with the heel.”
16To the woman He said,
“I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs,
in pain shall you bear children.
And for your man shall be your longing,
and he shall rule over you.”
17And to the human He said, “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree that I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat from it,’
Cursed be the soil for your sake,
with pangs shall you eat from it all the days of your life.
18Thorn and thistle shall it sprout for you
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread
till you return to the soil,
for from there were you taken,
for dust you are
and to dust shall you return.”
20And the human called his woman’s name Eve, for she was the mother of all that lives. 21And the LORD God made skin coats for the human and his woman, and He clothed them. 22And the LORD God said, “Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever.” 23And the LORD God sent him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been taken. 24And He drove out the human and set up east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life.
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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1. cunning. In the kind of pun in which the ancient Hebrew writers delighted, ʿarum, “cunning,” plays against ʿarumim, “naked,” of the previous verse.
2. 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, 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.
6. lust to the eyes. There is a long tradition of rendering the first term here, taʾawah, according to English idiom and local biblical context, as “delight” or something similar. But taʾawah 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. Taʾawah is semantically bracketed with the next term attached to the tree, “lovely,” neḥmad, 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.” Although the usual sense of lehaskil in the hiphʿil conjugation does involve the exercise of wisdom, Funkenstein’s suggestion leans on the meaning of the same root in the hitpaʿel conjugation in postbiblical Hebrew and Aramaic, “to look.” And in fact, the Aramaic Targums of both Onkelos and Yonatan ben Uziel render this as leʾistakala beih, “to look at.” At least one other biblical occurrence is almost certainly in the sense of “look,” the beginning of Psalm 41: “Happy 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.
12. 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.
15. 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.
bite . . . boot. The Hebrew uses what appear to be homonyms, the first verb probably referring to the hissing sound of the snake just before it bites, the second, identical in form, meaning “to trample.”
17. to the human. The Masoretic Text vocalizes leʾadam 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 ʿitsavon 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. 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.
20. 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 it to the trials of language, compromises it, complicates it, renders it potentially mobile.” In the Hebrew here, the phonetic similarity is between ḥawah, “Eve,” and the verbal root ḥayah, “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?
23. 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. The cherubim, a common feature of ancient Near Eastern mythology, are not to be confused with the round-cheeked darlings of Renaissance iconography. The root of the term means either “hybrid” or, by an inversion of consonants, “mount,” “steed,” and they are the winged beasts, probably of fearsome 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.