Genesis 2:21-3:1

Commentary:

I wanted to add a quick note to our previous discussion on the meaning of death in the Garden. The stories in the Tanakh originally existed in oral form, being passed down from generation to generation by storytellers. Over time, they were written down by various groups, forming similar but unique versions of the stories. Most scholars believe the Tanakh as we know it today was edited together around the time of the exile (the time of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, etc.) by skilled scribes who combined the parallel streams into one cohesive text. There are some who have suggested those later editors added in narrative easter eggs, especially in Genesis, that would connect the exile generation with their ancestors in these stories. It’s a less popular view, but I do think there’s enough to it that makes it worth paying attention to. So, in that view, the Creation story is a form of commentary on the later exile. The prophets spoke of exile from the land as a form of death. (Think of Ezekiel with the dry bones and Jeremiah with the book of Lamentations.) And surely enough, the consequence of Adam and Eve’s failure is not physical death but exile from their land. Even Cain, when he leaves the presence of Yahweh in Genesis 4:14 equates his exile with death. This could help to explain why death didn’t appear to happen to Adam and Eve after eating from the tree; death might have been a euphemism for exile from their land, not the physical cessation of life as we often think of it.

In my studies over the last week, I noticed a pattern in the first two chapters of Genesis where humans and animals are created the same ways. We like to emphasize the differences between humans and animals in our circles in reaction to the fallout from the Scopes Monkey Trial. And I do believe there is a difference between humans and animals. In Genesis, it’s the image of God. But the text presents us as being created the same ways. In Chapter 1, both humans and animals are spoken into existence. In Chapter 2, both are formed from the adamah, from the ground. I missed that in Genesis 2:19 previously. It’s the same language used in verse 7 for how God formed the human from the ground. I think the takeaway is that the same care God takes in creating humans is the same care He takes in creating animals. We should therefore respect and nurture animal life as well as human. When animal life threatens human life, we choose the human life since animals are part of what we are to rule and subdue. But whenever possible, we should respect all life forms as valuable.

2:21- This begins a pattern in the Tanakh of God’s putting key characters to sleep at pivotal moments in their stories. While they are in that dream-state, God often does something for them or reveals new information to them that they would not otherwise be able to do or know by themselves. Some of the occurrences even lead to dreams that place the humans back in the Garden or a Garden-like place.

The text literally reads that God “took one from his side.” Nowhere else in Scripture does this word imply ribs. It’s a construction term referring to the side of something. In fact, it’s almost always used for the side of a sacred building like the temple. The word is also frequently used in Noah’s building of the ark. Thus, the woman was not created from the man’s rib bone but from a half of him. God split the adam, the human, into two halves and, taking one of those halves, made a new person, reforming them both. This is why the human declared the woman to be not only “bone of my bones” but also “flesh of my flesh.” So, for those of you who were told that men have one fewer rib than women, I’m sorry. Not only is that biologically untrue, it’s also based on an incorrect translation choice in the first place.

2:22- The construction metaphor continues with how God is said to create the woman. It literally reads, “From the side which Yahweh God had taken from the human, He built a woman.” “Though this may seem an odd term for the creation of woman, it complements the potter's term, "fashion," used for the creation of first human, and is more appropriate because the Lord is now working with hard material, not soft clay. As Nahum Sarna has observed, the Hebrew for ‘rib,’ tsela`, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary

The Hebrew word for a male is ish. And the word for female is ishah. -Ah is a Hebrew suffix that can mean “from” or “out of.” Thus, the woman is the “out of ish” one. It’s very similar to how the English terms man and wo-man work. Woman was originally wiffmann, wiff meaning female and mann meaning human—female human.

I personally believe that there is some significance to God’s splitting the human into two rather than simply creating a second person. In a culture where firstborn status mattered, the man’s being created first could lead some to infer men are superior to women or entitled to a better role/blessing from God. But by creating and blessing one human then splitting that same human in two, the rights and responsibilities given to the man are the same as those for the woman. There is no hierarchy of male and female in God’s economy.

2:23- Poetry is frequently used in the Torah to break up a narrative at an important point. It slows you down and makes you think just like poetry does for us today.

“The first human is given reported speech for the first time only when there is another human to whom to respond. The speech takes the form of verse, a naming-poem, in which each of the two lines begins with the feminine indicative pronoun, zot, "this one," which is also the last Hebrew word of the poem, cinching it in a tight envelope structure.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary

Young’s Literal Translation is the only version I’ve found to give the full nuance of the Hebrew. “And the man saith, ‘This is the proper step! bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh!’ for this it is called Woman, for from a man hath this been taken.” What is often translated as “This is now bone of my bones” is literally “This time, bone of my bones.” This is what convinced me that God’s parading the animals before the human was for the purpose of finding him a mate. After seeing all the animals were paired up and incompatible with him, the human was ready to appreciate a mate corresponding to him. He bursts out excitedly, “Finally! Someone who looks like me!”

Note that even here, the female’s name is not Eve. She is not named Eve until after they fail in the Garden. Her name until then is Ishah, literally, female human. Our main characters’ names are Human and Female Human.

2:24- While some people think verse 24 is still the human’s speech, the grammar suggests the poem ended in verse 23. It is also doubtful that the human would have had a context for a child leaving their parents since he wouldn’t have ever witnessed that yet.

I do find the emphasis on leaving unusual. That would have been contrary to the later Jewish concept of a man building onto his father’s house. Even today, the idea is somewhat countercultural. A significant portion of marriage problems happen when the couple does not have healthy boundaries with both sets of parents. It’s good to determine those lines early. Once you’re on your own as an adult, you are answerable to God alone, not your parents.

The word used for leaving is rather forceful, moreso than most English translations let on. I don’t think it means you should abandon family. That would have been unspeakable in many Ancient Near Eastern cultures. But I do think that even in an ANE piece of literature, there is the principle of needing to set out on your own and be your own person. That’s one of the hardest lessons for a person to learn—not being defined by the expectations of others.

Some have even looked at the forcefulness of the word for leave and how it’s used in other passages and suggested that verse 24 is not a happy proof text for a wedding but rather a warning from the time of the exile. Recall from earlier today that most scholars believe Genesis (along with the rest of the Tanakh) was edited together around the time of the exile. Perhaps then the editor was commenting on that strange tendency within young people to leave everything behind for love. The verse would then be saying, “This is why a man abandons his heritage and latches onto someone else.” People become attracted to each other because they were originally one being anyway. We long for that completion again, like two magnets straining to reconnect. It’s definitely not saying, “When a young man turns 18, he leaves the house and pays rent and gets married.” They didn’t do that. In fact, most of the time, young couples just moved in with his parents. But many did abandon their parents’ religion to marry foreigners. So, from that point of view, this is a philosophical apologetic about intermarrying with foreign pagan women, not a blessing on traditional marriage.

That being said, I’ve heard preachers try to make too much of this verse and how a young man needs to leave his parents and cleave to his wife. We must acknowledge that this verse is not a command; it’s just a statement of fact about what usually happens in the circle of life. The translators’ bias shows when they say “shall leave” instead of “will leave.” They’re turning a statement of fact into a vaguely suggestive command.

Amusingly enough, cleave is probably not the best English word to use now as it’s come to mean “split from” instead of “join.” The Hebrew word is related to a construction word that you’d use for two adjoining walls that meet on an edge. It fits the construction language used of Ishah so far.

Note as well that the human story in the Bible begins and ends with a wedding celebration.

2:25- Adam had just emphasized their oneness, the unity of the two, yet here they are described as two again. “But characteristically, the narrative immediately unsettles the neatness of the etiological certainty, for the first couple are two, not one flesh, and their obliviousness to their nakedness is darkened by the foreshadow of the moment about to be narrated in which their innocence will be lost.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary

The word often translated “and were not ashamed” is a single reflexive Hebrew verb. It literally reads, “They were not putting themselves to shame.” or “They were not acting shamefully.” We think of being naked and ashamed as going together, but the terms are not synonymous. They are actually antagonistic to each other in God’s idea of the world. In an appropriate setting, being naked should not bring about shame in a healthy person. But what happens with many people, Christians especially, is that they feel ashamed of their naked bodies even in completely appropriate settings. This is not how God would have it.

3:1- Several theories and traditions exist about the serpent (nachash) in the Garden. He is characteristically tricky to nail down. Nothing at all in this passage or any other part of the Tanakh (or Bible) confirms the common belief that the serpent was Satan. The Bible never even says that the devil entered into the serpent to possess him. In fact, I’d challenge you to try reading this story without reading the devil into it at all. Most Jews do not see the devil present in this story, and I’m inclined to agree with them given the lack of Bible evidence to the contrary. This is a great example of how you can take something to be obvious that is far from a given. We must hold our interpretations with an open hand and a mind open to rethinking the text separately from our preconceived biases.

While it is possible to view this creature as an animal, I believe the nachash was likely not a normal snake. Many ancient mythologies included dragon-like creatures that often signified wisdom. Good arguments can be made from the etymology of the word nachash that it was not a snake but rather a one-of-a-kind, small, dragon-like spiritual being. This eliminates the problem of a talking snake and why the woman didn’t seem concerned with its ability to dialogue with her. If the nachash was a spiritual being and the Garden was a temple, it’d only be natural to assume the presence of spiritual beings crossing between realms there.

We must also observe that there is no indication yet that the nachash is evil. That word subtil (arum) means shrewdness or craftiness. It’s not a negative thing. It’s a neutral description. In fact, throughout Proverbs, shrewdness (arum) is a desirable trait of wisdom (Proverbs 8:12). It’s also a play on the word for naked from the previous verse (also spelled arum).

In most cultures throughout human history, there has been an understanding that the firstborn is privileged in the family. But there’s a prominent theme in the Tanakh of God’s choosing literally anyone other than the oldest, often the youngest in a family. Abel is favored over Cain. Abraham and his family are chosen instead of more prominent tribes. Isaac is chosen over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his brothers, Moses instead of Aaron, David over his brothers, etc. Humans privilege certain people over others, and Yahweh takes devilish glee in overturning those power structures in order to privilege the powerless and overlooked. Most of those stories also include attempts by the older to regain dominance. Some scholars argue that this is our first instance of that trend. Spiritual beings were created before humans, yet God chose the late-comer, the human, to rule as His representatives. The human then passed over all the other created beings in favor of the woman. And here, a spiritual being in the form of an animal schemes to retake his previously privileged position by dragging humanity down below him.