Genesis 2

Notes

1. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 74

   The Masoretic text has Elohim finishing his work "on the seventh day," which can be read as work done on the seventh day itself. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the LXX (ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἕκτῃ) and the Peshitta read "on the sixth day," which removes the difficulty and is for that reason likely the secondary reading. Rashi, after Genesis Rabbah 10:9, answers within the Masoretic text: what the world still lacked after six days was rest; the sabbath came, rest came, and the work was finished. The Masoretic reading is printed. The verses carry their own sound: שְׁבִיעִי "seventh" and וַיִּשְׁבֹּת "sabbathed" begin alike, and the seventh day is named three times in vv. 2–3. They also speak the language of the tabernacle's completion: the work "finished" (Exod 39:32; 40:33, וַיְכַל מֹשֶׁה אֶת־הַמְּלָאכָה), then seen, found made, and blessed (Exod 39:43).

2. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "which God created and made" (KJV) / "which he had done in creation" (RSV)

   Rulings 10, 20

   The Hebrew is אֲשֶׁר בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת, a finite verb followed by an infinitive with לְ: "which Elohim created to make." The KJV coordinates the two verbs; the RSV turns the infinitive into a noun ("in creation"), which ruling 10 forbids. The infinitive is kept as a to-infinitive, and its sense is left open: a hendiadys for the one act, or a purpose, the creating done so that making might follow it. Genesis Rabbah 11:6 takes the second way: what was created in the six days still needs making, the grain grinding and the human mending, and that work is left to the human. עָשָׂה takes its "make" side here (20), the creation being the thing made; in v. 2 "his work… done" takes the "do" side, the sabbath law's own construction (Exod 20:9, "you shall do all your work").

3. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 79, 10

   The ה of בְּהִבָּרְאָם is written small in the Masoretic tradition, and two readings hang on it. The Talmud divides the word as בְּה׳ בְּרָאָם, "with ה he created them": this world was created with the letter ה (b. Menahot 29b). Genesis Rabbah 12:9 reads the same consonants as an anagram of אַבְרָהָם: the skies and the land were created for Abraham's sake. The small letter is translated as an ordinary letter (79). The infinitive, "in their being created," becomes a finite clause (10).

4. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 9, 49

   The first Tetragrammaton in the Bible, joined to Elohim as יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים. The pair stands twenty times in 2:4–3:24 (eleven in this chapter, nine in the next) and is uncommon outside it (Exod 9:30; Ps 84:12), so the seam between the two accounts falls inside this verse: its first half still speaks of the skies and the land being "created," its second of what Adonai Elohim "made." In ch. 3 the serpent and the woman say only "Elohim" (3:1–5). The name is set as small-caps ADONAI under ruling 49; the WPRB has "the LORD God."

5. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth" (KJV) / "In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth" (RSV)

   Rulings 1, 10

   The second account opens in the same shape as the first (Gen 1: a temporal phrase built on an infinitive construct (בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת, "on the day of making," as בְּרֵאשִׁית בְּרֹא is "at the beginning of creating"); then circumstantial clauses with the subject first (v. 5 "now no shrub…," v. 6 "and an upwelling…," as 1:2 "now the land was…"); and the main verb only in v. 7, וַיִּיצֶר, as in 1:3 וַיֹּאמֶר. The English keeps the two openings visibly parallel: "When Elohim began creating… now the land was… and Elohim said" and "On the day Adonai Elohim made… now no shrub… and Adonai Elohim shaped." The KJV ends a sentence at v. 4 and hides the match; the RSV keeps the long sentence here but reads 1:1 the other way. The infinitive becomes a finite clause (10); בְּיוֹם keeps "on the day," so that "on the day you eat" (2:17) answers it. The order of 4a is reversed, "skies and land" to "land and skies": the second account starts from the ground. In v. 5 each טֶרֶם, "not yet," is carried as "no… yet"; the negation is the Hebrew's, neither added nor dropped.

6. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "mist" (KJV, RSV)

   Ruling 25

   אֵד occurs only here and at Job 36:27, where the drops are refined "into his אֵד" as rain. The versions divide: the LXX has πηγή "spring," the Vulgate fons, Targum Onkelos a cloud (עֲנָנָא), from which the English "mist" comes. Within Genesis the thing goes up "from the land" and gives drink to the whole face of the ground, which suits water from below better than vapor; the usual cognate is Akkadian edû, the flood or high water of the rivers, ultimately a Sumerian word. "Upwelling" keeps the rising and the water and does not name a source. The yiqtol יַעֲלֶה is iterative, "would go up": a dry land watered from beneath before any rain.

7. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 79

   וַיִּיצֶר is written with two yods here, where the shaping of the animals in v. 19 has one (וַיִּצֶר). b. Berakhot 61a reads the two yods as two יְצָרִים, the good and the bad inclination, given to the human alone; Genesis Rabbah 14 reads two formations, one for this world and one for the world to come. The spelling is translated as the ordinary verb (79): the human and the animals are "shaped" alike.

8. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 17, 23, 24

   The human (אָדָם) is shaped from the ground (אֲדָמָה) and will return to it (3:19); the pun runs from 2:5 ("human there was none to serve the ground") through 3:17–23. English has no pun that keeps both home glosses, so ruling 17 does not put it in the text. Ruling 23 allows an added word and ruling 24 lets marked sound outrank a chain, and translators have used them: Alter, "the human, humus from the soil"; Trible, "earth creature" from "earth." Each spends a settled gloss: "humus" for אֲדָמָה would break "ground," a chain through 3:17, 23 and 4:2–14, and Alter's "humus" displaces עָפָר "dust," the word of 3:19. The pun is left to this note. Latin had it without trying (homo and humus are of one root); the English tradition lost it when the name "Adam" entered the text.

9. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 26

   חַיִּים is a plural of abstraction, rendered by the English singular "life" (26); "breath of lives" would mislead. The same plural stands in "the tree of life" (v. 9; 3:22, 24), where the article of הַחַיִּים is left unprinted, as English does with abstracts.

10. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 2

    נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה is the phrase used of the creatures of the water and the land in 1:20, 21, 24, 30, and it returns for the animals in 2:19. The home gloss "soul" is held so that the reader sees the human become what the animals already are; what is the human's own in this verse is the breath blown in by Adonai Elohim. Paul quotes the verse from the LXX, ἐγένετο… εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν (1 Cor 15:45), and builds his "soulish" body on it (70).

11. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 18

    Names are printed in their familiar English forms (18); the Hebrew forms and their meanings are in the names table. עֵדֶן as a common noun is "delight" (2 Sam 1:24; Ps 36:9, "the stream of your delights," נַחַל עֲדָנֶיךָ), and the ancient versions sometimes translate the name: the Vulgate's paradisum voluptatis (2:8, "a garden of pleasure"), the LXX's ὁ παράδεισος τῆς τρυφῆς (3:23–24). Akkadian edinu, "steppe," from Sumerian eden, is the likely source of the name; the Hebrew ear heard "delight."

    See the table

12. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "eastward" (KJV) / "in the east" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 3, 37, 46

    Crux. קֶדֶם is "front," and so both the east (the quarter one faces at sunrise) and, in time, what is before, "of old" (Deut 33:15; Ps 74:12; Mic 5:1). The LXX has κατὰ ἀνατολάς, "toward the east." Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion took the time sense, and Jerome followed them (Hebrew Questions on Genesis, on 2:8; Vulgate a principio), as does Targum Onkelos, מִלְּקַדְמִין "from the beginning." On that reading the garden was made before the world: b. Pesahim 54a counts the garden of Eden among the seven things created before it, from this word. English has no word for both senses. The spatial sense is printed: every prose use of מִקֶּדֶם in Genesis is spatial (3:24; 11:2; 12:8), the unit closes with the cherubim stationed מִקֶּדֶם לְגַן־עֵדֶן, "on the east of the garden of Eden" (3:24), and Cain goes out to live "east of Eden" (4:16), so the chain within the unit (37) and the collocation (3) agree; and the wayyiqtol sequence puts the planting after the shaping of v. 7. The doctrine the time sense carries is named here, not printed (46).

13. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 10, 46

    דַּעַת is a verbal noun that takes its objects directly (Deut 1:39, children "who do not know good and bad"; Isa 7:15–16), so "knowing good and bad" keeps it a verb (10); the article on הַדַּעַת is left unprinted. What the knowing is stays open in the English, as in the Hebrew. Moral discernment: Deut 1:39; 1 Kgs 3:9, "to discern between good and bad." Everything, by merism: 2 Sam 14:17, 20, the king who is "like the messenger of Elohim, to hear the good and the bad… to know all that is in the land." The knowledge of the grown and of sex: 2 Sam 19:36, Barzillai at eighty who can no longer "know between good and bad"; the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa 1:10–11), a man may not approach a woman until he is twenty, "when he knows good and bad." The reading is decisive for the Christian doctrine of the fall and its Jewish counterparts, and the English settles none of them. "Bad," not "evil," is the core gloss of רַע.

14. Reading↩ Back to the text

    From here to v. 14 the narrator steps out of the story into the reader's world: a participle (יֹצֵא, "goes out"), then yiqtol and weqatal ("separates… becomes"), then verbless clauses ("it is the one going around"). The geography is given in the present, of rivers the reader can still find, the Euphrates by name; the story resumes with the wayyiqtol of v. 15.

15. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "onyx" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 40, 25

    שֹׁהַם is a precious stone of the high priest's shoulder-pieces and breastpiece (Exod 25:7; 28:9, 20; 35:27; 39:6, 13) and among the stones of the king of Tyre "in Eden, the garden of Elohim" (Ezek 28:13). It is unidentified, and the versions guess: the LXX here λίθος ὁ πράσινος, "leek-green stone," and σμάραγδος at Exod 28:9; the Vulgate lapis onychinus; Targum Onkelos בּוּרְלָא, "beryl"; NJPS "lapis lazuli." No stranger sense is attested, only rival identifications, so the expected reading is printed with the evidence (40).

16. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "put" (KJV, RSV)

    Ruling 2

    וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ is the hiphil of נוּחַ "rest" with the doubled nun, the form for setting a thing down to stay, especially before Adonai: the jar of manna (Exod 16:33–34), Aaron's staff (Num 17:22 [Eng 17:7]), the basket of first fruits (Deut 26:4, 10). It is a different verb from שׂוּם "put" in v. 8, and the reverse concordance keeps them apart. "Settled" carries both the laying down and the rest of the root. Genesis Rabbah 16:5 hears the rest, because Exod 20:11 retells 2:2–3 with this root: וַיָּנַח, "and he rested on the seventh day."

17. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "to dress it and to keep it" (KJV) / "to till it and keep it" (RSV)

    Rulings 34, 37, 41

    עָבַד and שָׁמַר together are the Levites' charge at the tent of meeting, "to serve… and to keep" (Num 3:7–8; 8:26; 18:3–7), and each alone is a verb of worship (Exod 3:12, "you shall serve Elohim on this mountain") and of commandment (Deut 5:12, "keep the sabbath day"). With the ground the collocation is tilling (2:5; 3:23); the chain within the unit wins (37), and ruling 34 keeps the verb "serve" with every object. Both suffixes are feminine (-הּ), but גַּן "garden" is masculine: they agree with אֲדָמָה "ground," or the infinitives are abstract. Sifre Deuteronomy 41 reads them as worship and the commandments, not gardening. English "it" holds the referent open (41).

18. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 6, 10

    The infinitive absolute with its finite verb is kept as the Hebrew builds it (6; Gen 1: "eating you may eat," "dying you shall die." The serpent quotes the second back with the negative placed first, לֹא מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן, "not dying shall you die" (3:4). "On the day you eat" (an infinitive with its subject, made a finite clause, 10) answers "on the day Adonai Elohim made" (v. 4). The human dies at 930 (5:5); the interpreters have taken the day as a thousand years (Jubilees 4:29–30; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 81, both with Ps 90:4) or the dying as beginning that day.

19. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "an help meet for him" (KJV) / "a helper fit for him" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 2

    עֵזֶר is used most often of Elohim (Exod 18:4; Deut 33:7, 26, 29; Ps 33:20; 121:1–2; 146:5), so the word carries no rank below the one helped; "help" is its home gloss, as at Ps 121:1, "from where will my help come?" כְּנֶגְדּוֹ is כְּ "as" with נֶגֶד "opposite, in front of" (Exod 19:2, Israel camped "opposite the mountain"; Ps 16:8, "I have set Adonai before me always"): a counterpart who faces him. b. Yevamot 63a hears the other side of the word: "if he is worthy, she is a help to him; if not, she is against him." "Opposite" keeps both, the partner face to face and the opponent, and so holds the crux open (1). The KJV's "meet" is the adjective "fitting"; "helpmeet" is a later misreading of it. LXX βοηθὸν κατ᾽ αὐτόν (v. 18), ὅμοιος αὐτῷ (v. 20); Vulgate adiutorium similem sui.

20. Reading↩ Back to the text

    The clause נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה הוּא שְׁמוֹ is awkward: "living soul" stands without a verb between "whatever the human would call it" and "that was its name." It is printed as an apposition between dashes, so the animal named is a "living soul" as the human is (v. 7). Many modern editors take the two words as an explanatory gloss; the LXX (ψυχὴν ζῶσαν) and the Vulgate (animae viventis) translate them. The human names the animals as Elohim named day, night and skies (1:5–10), with the same idiom, "call to."

21. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "for Adam" (KJV) / "for the man" (RSV)

    Rulings 72, 11

    וּלְאָדָם is pointed without the article, where every other אָדָם in the chapter after 2:5 has it (הָאָדָם). The vocalization may be reading a personal name, and the LXX (τῷ Αδαμ, already from 2:16) and the Vulgate (Adam) take the name; a repointing, וְלָאָדָם, gives "for the human" (RSV). Under ruling 72 the name enters only at its first unambiguous personal use, fixed in Gen 5; here the anarthrous noun is printed as the kind, "for human," as at 2:5 ("human there was none") and 1:26 ("let us make human"). The subject of "he did not find" is unexpressed: the human, or Adonai Elohim. The English "he" leaves it so; the KJV has "there was not found."

22. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "rib" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 2, 46

    צֵלָע is a side everywhere else in the Bible: of the ark of the covenant (Exod 25:12, 14), of the tabernacle (Exod 26:20, 26–27), of the altar (Exod 27:7), of a hill (2 Sam 16:13), and the side-chambers of the temple (1 Kgs 6:5, 8). Only here has tradition read "rib," and its words can mean either (LXX πλευρά, Vulgate costa). Genesis Rabbah 8:1 reads it as "side" outright: the first human was made double and divided. The LXX's πλευρά is the word for the pierced side of Christ (John 19:34), and the patristic figure built on the pair, Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam and the church from the side of the sleeping Christ (Augustine, Tractates on John 9.10), stands with "side" as well. The home gloss is printed: "one of his sides," and in v. 22 "the side."

23. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "the man" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 2, 11

    Ruling 11: אָדָם is "man" when a woman who is distinct from it, and already exists in the story, appears in the same verse or the next. She is built in this verse, so "the man" here and in v. 25 ("the man and his woman"). Not in v. 21, where she does not yet exist, nor in v. 23, where אִישׁ "Man" is in the verse and keeps the word (11). The Hebrew is הָאָדָם throughout; the change is the English rule's, not the source's.

24. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 17, 81

    The pun is in the text (17): אִשָּׁה "Woman" because taken from אִישׁ "Man," and English has a pair that keeps both home glosses (Old English wīfmann, a female mann, "person"). The two Hebrew words are not from one root (אִשָּׁה is from ʾnṯ, as Aramaic אִנְתְּתָא), so the pun is the speaker's and not the dictionary's, as in English. Symmachus coined ἀνδρίς for it, the Vulgate virago from vir, Luther Männin. The first words of the human are framed by a threefold זֹאת, "this one." The verse is often set as verse (BHS), but the Leningrad Codex runs it as prose, and it is printed as prose (81).

25. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 4

    The narrator comments on the scene, the yiqtol and weqatal habitual ("forsakes… clings… become"); עַל־כֵּן, "thus," is the formula of an origin explained (10:9; 26:33; 32:33). Matt 19:4–5 and Mark 10:6–8 put the words in the Creator's mouth, and 1 Cor 6:16 and Eph 5:31 quote them; the NT follows its own Greek, from the LXX's "and the two shall become one flesh" (οἱ δύο), which the Masoretic text does not have (4). Ruth 2:11 is the one other place where someone forsakes "your father and your mother," and Ruth is the one who "clings" (1:14).

26. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "naked" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 24, 2

    עֲרוּמִּים, from עָרוֹם, is followed at once by the serpent, עָרוּם "shrewd" (3:1): the same consonants, the second account's sharpest pun, and the hinge between the chapters. English has no word for both, but it has a rhyme, "nude… shrewd," and ruling 24 lets sound the source marks outrank the literal gloss. No gloss is displaced to do it: "naked" is wanted for עֵירֹם, the other Hebrew word, which comes in 3:7, 10–11 once the two know it, so the reverse concordance needs a second English word here in any case. The two words for nakedness then stay apart in English as in Hebrew, and the change from "nude" to "naked" falls where the story turns. "Shrewd" is the Proverbs field's word for עָרְמָה (44; Prov 8:5, 12), the expected home gloss for עָרוּם at 3:1, which that chapter fixes.