Genesis 3

Notes

1. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "more subtil than any beast of the field" (KJV) / "more subtle than any other wild creature" (RSV)

   Rulings 24, 2, 44

   עָרוּם answers עֲרוּמִּים "nude" in the verse before (2:25): the same consonants, and the hinge between the two chapters. Proverbs fixes its sense. The עָרוּם is the one who sees trouble coming and hides (Prov 22:3; 27:12), keeps back what he knows (12:23), watches his steps (14:15) and is crowned with knowing (14:18), against the simple one; Job uses the word of the crafty (Job 5:12; 15:5). It is neither praise nor blame, and "shrewd" is the English word that is also neither. The Proverbs field already has עָרְמָה "shrewdness" (44; Prov 8:5, 12), so the adjective and noun share one English root. "Subtle" has lost its old sense of cunning. The rhyme "nude… shrewd" carries the pun under ruling 24 (Gen 2, and the second word for nakedness, עֵירֹם, takes "naked" at v. 7. The comparative מִכֹּל is printed "more… than every living thing of the field"; the same מִכֹּל returns in v. 14, where it is not only comparative.

2. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (KJV) / "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" (RSV)

   Rulings 1, 40

   The serpent's first words, אַף כִּי, have no verb of asking and no interrogative ה. Elsewhere the pair means "how much more" or "how much less" (1 Sam 14:30; 21:6; Prov 11:31; 15:11), as if the serpent took up a conversation already under way. The LXX (Τί ὅτι εἶπεν ὁ θεός, "Why is it that God said…?") and the Vulgate (cur praecepit vobis Deus) make it a question about the reason. "Is it even so, that…?" carries both words, אַף "even" and כִּי "that," and frames as a question what the Hebrew leaves to the voice; "is it" is supplied. The prohibition the serpent quotes, לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן, can mean "not from every tree" (some are forbidden) or "from no tree" (all are). "Not… from every tree" keeps both, as the KJV does; the RSV's "any" settles it as a total ban, which the woman then corrects. The negation is the Hebrew's and stays where it stands. Like the woman, the serpent says only "Elohim" (Gen 2.

3. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 74

   The woman's account of the command differs from 2:16–17 in three ways. She does not name the tree but places it, "the tree that is in the middle of the garden," where 2:9 put the tree of life. She adds "and you shall not touch it." And "dying you shall die" becomes פֶּן תְּמֻתוּן, "lest you die." Genesis Rabbah 19:3 and Avot de-Rabbi Natan (A 1) read the added words as a fence built higher than what it guards: the serpent pushed her against the tree and said, "As you did not die from touching, you will not die from eating." פֶּן "lest" is a negative of purpose and is carried as one.

4. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 6, 10

   The serpent quotes "dying you shall die" (2:17) with the negation put first: לֹא מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן. The figure is kept (6). A negation before an infinitive absolute denies the whole statement, as at Amos 9:8 and Ps 49:8. "Not dying shall you die" keeps both the echo of 2:17 and the KJV's sense of a certainty denied ("Ye shall not surely die"). The WPRB has the KJV's order.

5. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "as gods" (KJV) / "like God" (RSV)

   Rulings 38, 1, 46

   כֵּאלֹהִים has no verb or adjective of its own. The plural participle that follows, יֹדְעֵי, may agree with "you" (the two of them) or with elohim. No singular agreement fixes the word, so ruling 38 prints it in lowercase as a crux. The versions divide on exactly this. The LXX ὡς θεοί and the Vulgate sicut dii read a plural, "gods," and the KJV follows them. Targum Onkelos has כְּרַבְרְבִין, "like great ones." The RSV and NJPS read "like God," taking the word as the Elohim of the verse's first half, who "knows." The English keeps the word the serpent used twice in one breath, the singular "Elohim knows" and the open "like elohim," and leaves the reader to weigh them. Adonai Elohim answers the promise in v. 22 with a plural of his own, "like one of us." "Knowing good and bad" is the participle; the tree's name (2:9, 17) used the noun דַּעַת, and one English word, "knowing," carries both, so the promise is heard as the tree's name (10). Ps 8:6, "you made him a little less than elohim," is the other place where the human is measured against the word; the LXX there has ἀγγέλους, "messengers."

6. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "pleasant to the eyes" (KJV) / "a delight to the eyes" (RSV)

   Rulings 2, 57

   תַּאֲוָה is the craving of appetite: the people in the wilderness "craved a craving" for meat (Num 11:4, הִתְאַוּוּ תַּאֲוָה) and buried the dead of it at Kibroth-hattaavah, "the graves of the craving" (Num 11:34; Ps 78:29–30). It is also the heart's wish granted (Ps 21:3; Prov 10:24). "Pleasant" and "delight" make it a quality of the tree; the Hebrew makes it the woman's want, felt through the eyes. "Desirable" is held for חָמַד in the next clause (as at 2:9, "desirable to the sight"), so two words for wanting stand side by side, as in the Hebrew. Prov 13:12 joins the two to this garden: "a craving that comes is a tree of life."

7. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "to make one wise" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 1, 3, 10, 44

   לְהַשְׂכִּיל is the hiphil infinitive of שָׂכַל. Used absolutely, the hiphil is to have insight, to act wisely, to succeed (Ps 2:10; Prov 10:5; Dan 9:22; 1 Sam 18:14). With an object or אֶל it is to attend to, consider (Ps 41:2; Neh 8:13). The versions read sight here: the LXX ὡραῖόν ἐστιν τοῦ κατανοῆσαι, "lovely to look at closely," the Vulgate aspectu delectabile, and Targum Onkelos לְאִסְתַּכָּלָא בֵּיהּ, "to gaze at." On that reading the clause finishes the eyes' craving. The KJV and RSV take the verb as causative, "to make one wise," which the serpent's promise in v. 5 invites. Here the verb has no object and no אֶל, so the collocation gives the absolute sense (3): "for having insight." The English leaves open whose the insight is, the tree's to give or the woman's to gain. The infinitive is kept as a verbal -ing (10). "Wise" is left for חָכָם and the wisdom field (44).

8. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 24, 2

   עֵירֹם, the second Hebrew word for nakedness, appears only now that the two "know" it (here and vv. 10–11); before, they were עֲרוּמִּים, "nude" (2:25). The English changes its word where the Hebrew does (Gen 2. עֵירֹם is the nakedness of the deprived and the shamed (Deut 28:48, "in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness"; Ezek 16:7, 22, 39, "naked and bare"). Their eyes are opened, as the serpent said (v. 5), and what they know is this.

9. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "aprons" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 2, 39

   חֲגוֹרָה is what is girded on (חָגַר "gird"): the belt Jonathan gives David with his sword and bow (1 Sam 18:4), the belt Joab would have paid for Absalom's death (2 Sam 18:11), the blood "on his belt that was on his loins" (1 Kgs 2:5), and everyone "who could gird on a belt" (2 Kgs 3:21). It is a band at the waist, and the concrete word is kept (39). The Geneva Bible (1560) printed "breeches" here and was nicknamed for it. עֲלֵה תְאֵנָה is a collective singular, "leaf of fig," printed as the English plural.

10. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 2

    קוֹל is "voice," its home gloss, held so that the chapter's chain of hearing stays visible. They hear the voice of Adonai Elohim here; the man says "your voice I heard" (v. 10); and he is judged for having "heard the voice of" his woman (v. 17). The word is also any sound: of marching (2 Sam 5:24), of footsteps (1 Kgs 14:6), of thunder (Exod 9:23, 28; Ps 29:3–9, "the voice of Adonai is over the waters"). "Walking about" may describe the voice or Adonai Elohim, and the English leaves it open, as the Hebrew does. The same form of the verb is Adonai's walking about in the camp (Deut 23:15) and among his people (Lev 26:12; 2 Sam 7:6).

11. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "in the cool of the day" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 31, 1

    רוּחַ takes its weather gloss, "wind" (31), since no person and not Elohim possesses it. לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם is read in two ways. Most read a daily wind, the breeze that rises toward evening: the LXX τὸ δειλινόν, "toward evening"; the Vulgate ad auram post meridiem; Rashi, "in the direction of the sun," the west, toward evening; and Song 2:17; 4:6, "until the day breathes." Others take יוֹם as the cognate of Akkadian ūmu "storm," and the phrase as "in the wind of the storm," a coming like that of Ps 29 or of Job 38:1 "from the storm" (J. J. Niehaus, 1994). "At the wind of the day" keeps the words and both readings. "Cool" is the KJV's inference.

12. Decision↩ Back to the text

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

    Rulings 2, 11

    Ruling 11, verse by verse. Once the woman exists (2:22), הָאָדָם is "the man" wherever she appears in the same verse or the next: here (v. 8, "his woman"), v. 12 (he names her as "the woman whom you gave"), v. 20 (he names her Eve), and v. 24, where the next verse (4:1) is "the man knew Eve his woman." Where she is in neither, it is "the human": v. 9, where Adonai Elohim calls to him alone and v. 10 is his answer alone, and v. 22, "the human has become like one of us." The Hebrew does not change; the English rule does. The anarthrous לְאָדָם of vv. 17 and 21 has its own note.

13. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "hid themselves" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 2, 44

    חָבָא in the niphal and hithpael is to go into hiding and stay there, usually from someone stronger: the five kings in the cave at Makkedah (Josh 10:16–17), the Hebrews in caves and thickets (1 Sam 13:6) and holes (14:11), the young men who withdraw when Job passes (Job 29:8). "Took cover" keeps the retreat. "Hide" is left for סָתַר, the verb of hiding the face (Deut 31:17–18; Isa 8:17; Ps 13:2), which Cain uses at 4:14, "from your face I shall be hidden." The verbs of hiding (סָתַר, חָבָא, כָּחַד, צָפַן, טָמַן) are to be fixed as a set (44). The WPRB has "hid."

14. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 37

    בְּתוֹךְ עֵץ הַגָּן, "in the middle of the tree of the garden." עֵץ is a collective here, "the trees" (KJV, RSV), and the WPRB says so. The singular is kept because the words are those of v. 3, "the tree that is in the middle of the garden," and of 2:9, "the tree of life in the middle of the garden," and the reader may hear them.

15. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 74

    אַיֶּכָּה, "where are you?," is written with the consonants of אֵיכָה, "how!," the word that opens Lamentations (1:1) and the dirge. Genesis Rabbah 19:9 reads it so: as the human was brought into the garden and sent out of it, so Israel was brought into its land and sent into exile, and over both Elohim laments, "Eikhah." It is the first question Adonai Elohim asks in the Bible.

16. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field" (KJV) / "cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 6

    The מִן of מִכָּל is comparative in v. 1 ("more shrewd than every living thing"), and the KJV and RSV read it so here: cursed more than all. It may also be partitive, cursed out of all of them, the one singled out, or separative, cursed away from them. The separative is how the same formula reads when Cain is cursed: אָרוּר אַתָּה מִן־הָאֲדָמָה, "cursed are you from the ground" (4:11), and he is driven from it. "From" holds the second and third readings and lets 4:11 echo; the plain comparative of v. 1 is printed as a comparative. The serpent is the first creature cursed, as the creatures of the water were the first blessed (1:22). בְּהֵמָה is a collective, "the beast," as in 1:24–26.

17. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 26

    חַיִּים is a plural of abstraction, "life" (26; Gen 2: "all the days of your life," for the serpent here and for the human in v. 17.

18. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (KJV) / "he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 8, 40, 41, 46

    שׁוּף occurs here twice and otherwise only at Job 9:17 ("he crushes me with a tempest") and Ps 139:11, where its sense is disputed. One verb serves both blows, so one English verb does too. The Vulgate's two verbs (conteret "shall crush," insidiaberis "shall lie in wait for") resolve a play the Hebrew keeps; the LXX has τηρήσει… τηρήσεις, "shall watch… shall watch," as if from שָׁאַף, "pant after, snap at." No stranger sense of שׁוּף itself is attested, so the expected verb is printed with the evidence (40). The construction is a double object, יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ, "he shall bruise you, the head," and the English adds "on the." הוּא is masculine because זֶרַע "seed" is, and the seed here is persons, so rulings 8 and 41 give "he." The KJV's "it" reads the seed as the woman's descendants as a whole. "He" is equally the pronoun of that collective, as the Hebrew's is, and does not decide for a single descendant; that decision is the history of the verse (46). The LXX already writes αὐτός, masculine, after the neuter σπέρμα. From Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 100) and Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3.23.7; 5.21.1) the Christian reading took the woman's seed as Christ and the serpent as the devil (Rev 12:9; Rom 16:20, "the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet"), and the verse was later called the protevangelium, the "first gospel." The Vulgate's ipsa, "she," made the woman herself the victor, and Latin tradition saw Mary in her. The Palestinian targums (Neofiti, Pseudo-Jonathan) read the woman's children keeping the Torah and striking the serpent's head, with a healing for the heel "in the days of King Messiah." "Seed" is the home gloss (2): the noun of 1:11–12 and of the promise to Abraham's seed (22:18), which Paul reads as a singular (Gal 3:16).

19. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children" (KJV) / "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children" (RSV)

    Rulings 37, 1, 6, 46

    This verse has two nouns of one root, עצב. עִצָּבוֹן occurs three times in the Bible: the woman's here, the man's in v. 17 ("in pain you shall eat it"), and at 5:29, where Lamech names Noah for comfort "from our deed and from the pain of our hands, from the ground that Adonai cursed." The RSV prints "pain" for her and "toil" for him, and so hides that both are given the same word. The chain wins (37), and one gloss holds through the unit. "Pain" is chosen as the root's own sense: the verb is to hurt or grieve (45:5; 1 Sam 20:3), and at 6:6 it is Adonai's own, "and he was pained to his heart." Carol Meyers (Discovering Eve, 1988) reads the woman's עִצָּבוֹן as "toil," the farm work of a highland household, so that both she and the man are sentenced to labor. That reading is carried here by the other noun. עֶצֶב in "in labor you shall bear sons" is toil in Proverbs (14:23, "in all labor there is profit"; 5:10) and in Ps 127:2 ("the bread of labors"), and its twin עֹצֶב is the pain of a birth (1 Chr 4:9). English "labor" holds both, the work and the delivery. The RSV joins וְהֵרֹנֵךְ, "and your pregnancy," to the first noun as one idea, "your pain in childbearing"; the "and" is kept, and the reader may join them or not. "Making many I will make many" is the figure of 2:16–17, the infinitive absolute with its verb (6). In 1847 the verse was cited against chloroform in childbirth, and James Young Simpson answered from 2:21, the trance Adonai Elohim made fall on the human (46).

20. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "children" (KJV, RSV)

    Ruling 2

    בָּנִים is the plural of בֵּן "son," its home gloss; the masculine plural is also the word for children of both sexes, and every version reads it so here. The gloss is held because Genesis is built on the word: Eve's sons (4:1, 25), then "and he produced sons and daughters" (5:4–30), where the two are named apart. The WPRB has "children."

21. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (KJV) / "your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you" (RSV)

    Rulings 2, 37, 46

    תְּשׁוּקָה occurs three times. Here; at 4:7, where sin crouches at the door, "and toward you its longing, and you shall rule over it," the same two clauses said to Cain; and Song 7:11, "I am my beloved's, and upon me his longing," where the man longs for the woman and no one rules. One gloss is held across the three so the reader can lay them side by side (37); "desire" is held for חָמַד (2:9; 3:6). The LXX has ἀποστροφή, "turning," here and at 4:7, as if reading תְּשׁוּבָה, "return": her turning will be to her man. The clause has no verb and none is supplied, so the English, like the Hebrew, does not say whether it describes, predicts or commands. "Rule" is מָשַׁל, the word of the light-givers' rule over day and night (1:16–18). Whether the verse ordains the rule of husbands or describes a consequence of what has been done is the crux of its later use. 1 Cor 14:34 ("as the law also says") and 1 Tim 2:11–14 stand behind the first reading; Phyllis Trible (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 1978) argued the second.

22. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "unto Adam" (KJV) / "to Adam" (RSV)

    Rulings 86, 72, 11, 2

    וּלְאָדָם here and לְאָדָם at v. 21 are pointed without the article, where the chapter otherwise has הָאָדָם. The OSHB morphology reads v. 17 as the personal name (H121) and v. 21 as the common noun; the LXX (τῷ Αδαμ, both verses) and the Vulgate (Adae, Adam) print the name in both. Read with the article, לָאָדָם, the noun is "the human," and the difference is one vowel. "Adam" enters at 5:3, its first unambiguous personal use (72, 86; see the note at 5:3); before it the anarthrous word is the common noun, and ruling 11 makes it "man," since the woman is in the verse ("your woman"), exactly as at v. 21 ("for man and for his woman"). The source tag stays H121. Either verse may be heard as a name, as this one person, or as humankind; the Hebrew decides no more than that.

23. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 2, 37

    שָׁמַע לְקוֹל, "hear the voice of," is the idiom for heeding (16:2, Abram "heard the voice of Sarai"; Exod 18:24; 1 Sam 15:24). The words are kept so that the chapter's three hearings stay one chain: they heard the voice of Adonai Elohim and took cover (v. 8); "your voice I heard… and I feared" (v. 10); and now "you heard the voice of your woman." The sentence on the man begins with what he heard, before what he ate. "You shall eat it" keeps the Hebrew's direct object (תֹּאכֲלֶנָּה): the ground itself is what he will eat, in its produce.

24. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 37

    קוֹץ וְדַרְדַּר, "thorn and thistle," come together again only at Hos 10:8, growing on the altars of Beth-aven. The verbs and nouns come back from Gen 2. "Make spring up" was Adonai Elohim's verb for the trees (2:9); now the ground makes thorns spring up. "The plant of the field" was what had not yet sprung up, for want of a human to serve the ground (2:5).

25. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 39, 37

    אַפַּיִם is the dual of אַף "nose," the "nostrils" (39) of 2:7, into which Adonai Elohim blew the breath of life; now the sweat runs from them. The KJV and RSV have "face," the sense of the dual in bowing (19:1; 42:6). The verse closes the story of אָדָם and אֲדָמָה begun at 2:7 (Gen 2: "until you return to the ground, for from it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return." Ps 104:29 ("you gather their spirit, they expire, and to their dust they return") and Eccl 3:20; 12:7 take it up. לֶחֶם "bread" is the concrete word for food in general (39), as at Ps 104:14–15.

26. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "Eve" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 18, 17, 23

    The narrator explains the name חַוָּה, Ḥawwah: "for she was the mother of all living" (כָּל־חָי). The name sounds like חַי "living," and in Aramaic and Phoenician the root of living is written with w (חוה), though the name is not quite a form of it. The familiar form "Eve" is printed (18). The pun is not, because no English name keeps both meanings (17), and adding a word (23) would turn a name into a gloss. The LXX translates the name here, Ζωή, "Life," and transliterates it at 4:1, Εὕαν. Genesis Rabbah (20:11; 22:2) also hears Aramaic חִוְיָא, "serpent," in it. "She was the mother" looks ahead: she has no child until 4:1. The man names the woman as he named the animals (2:19–20), with the same verb and noun, "call… name," which he did not use at 2:23, where she "shall be called Woman."

27. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "coats" (KJV) / "garments" (RSV)

    Rulings 2, 37

    כְּתֹנֶת is a tunic, the long shirt worn next to the body: Joseph's (37:3, 23, 31–33), Tamar's (2 Sam 13:18–19), and the priests' (Exod 28:4, 39–40). The verb and the noun together are the ordination of Aaron's sons: "and he clothed them with tunics" (Lev 8:13, וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם כֻּתֳּנֹת; Exod 29:8; 40:14), where Moses does what Adonai Elohim does here. "Coats" is an outer garment, and "garments" names none in particular.

28. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 74

    Genesis Rabbah 20:12 reports that the Torah scroll of Rabbi Meir read כָּתְנוֹת אוֹר, "tunics of light," for כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר, "tunics of skin." The two words differ only in their first letter, א for ע, gutturals that speech did not always keep apart. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan makes them "garments of honor" from the skin the serpent cast off. Christian readers took the skins as mortality, the body's coat after the fall; Methodius (On the Resurrection) argued against Origen's form of that reading. The Masoretic "skin" is printed.

29. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "Behold" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 2, 88, 95

    הֵן is the short form of הִנֵּה, one deictic in two spellings, and shares its gloss "look" (1:29, 31) as a declared pair (88, 95). הֵן can also be "if" (Jer 3:1; perhaps Exod 4:1), as its Aramaic cognate always is (Dan 3:15, 17); that use is a split by construction when it is reached. Cain uses it at 4:14, "Look, you have driven me out."

30. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "is become as one of us" (KJV) / "has become like one of us" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 40, 46

    The first person plural is Adonai Elohim's own here, as in "let us make human" (1:26) and "let us go down" (11:7), and it answers the serpent's "you will be like elohim" (v. 5). מִמֶּנּוּ is "of us" or "of him," one form, and the second has been read. Targum Onkelos makes the human "unique in the world by himself, knowing good and bad." The Mekhilta (Beshallah 6) records Rabbi Pappias reading "like one of the ministering angels," and Rabbi Akiva rebuking him: the human was set between two ways and chose. Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 62) argued from this verse and 1:26 that the plural is spoken to another person, not to angels, and the Christian tradition read the Trinity in it. Most modern readers hear the council of the skies (1 Kgs 22:19–22; Job 1:6; Isa 6:8, "who will go for us?"). "Of us" is printed; "of himself" is a second parse of the form, not a stranger sense of the words (40). הָיָה is "has become" here, the change of state it carries in 2:7 ("became a living soul"). "To know good and bad" is the infinitive (10).

31. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 37

    שָׁלַח joins the two verses: "lest he send his hand" (qal) and "Adonai Elohim sent him away" (piel, v. 23). The sentence of v. 22 breaks off at "to the age—" without a main clause. The speaker does not finish, the narrator answers with the act, and the dash keeps the break. The human is sent away "to serve the ground from which he was taken." That is the "serve" of 2:5 and 2:15, where he was settled in the garden "to serve it and to keep it." Now the serving is outside, and the keeping passes to the cherubim (v. 24).

32. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "placed" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 2, 3, 96

    וַיַּשְׁכֵּן is the hiphil of שָׁכַן "tent" (96), the verb of the sanctuary: "and let them make me a sanctuary, and I will tent among them" (Exod 25:8), and of its noun, מִשְׁכָּן, the tabernacle; John 1:14 has its Greek, ἐσκήνωσεν. With the same hiphil Israel "made the tent of meeting tent" at Shiloh (Josh 18:1). The cherubim are the sanctuary's figures: over the ark (Exod 25:18–22), woven into the curtains and the veil (26:1, 31), carved on the temple's walls and doors (1 Kgs 6:23–35). The garden is kept on its east as the tabernacle was entered from the east (Exod 27:13–16; Num 3:38). מִקֶּדֶם is spatial, "on the east of," as Gen 2 expected, and Cain goes to live "east of Eden" (4:16). "Placed" loses the dwelling.

33. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 5

    כְּרֻבִים is printed "cherubim," the Hebrew plural English already has (5). The cherub of Eden returns in Ezekiel's lament over the king of Tyre: "in Eden, the garden of Elohim… you were a cherub, anointed, covering" (Ezek 28:13–16). Ezekiel's living creatures are cherubim (Ezek 10:15, 20). The word is usually traced to Akkadian kāribu, a figure of intercession at temple gates. The winged child of later art is another thing.

34. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "a flaming sword which turned every way" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 2, 6, 20, 29

    לַהַט is a noun, "blaze," and the sword stands after it in a construct: "the blaze of the sword," the sword's own fire, not a sword that flames. The noun occurs only here. The verb לָהַט is to set ablaze (Ps 104:4, "his ministers a blazing fire"; Joel 2:3, where before the locusts "the land is like the garden of Eden" and behind them "a flame blazes"). Its neighbor לַהַב is both "flame" and "blade" (Judg 13:20; 3:22). "Flame" is held for Aramaic אֶשָּׁא (29, 33). הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת is the hithpael participle of הָפַךְ "turn," reflexive and repeated, "turning itself about": the barley loaf "tumbling" into the camp of Midian (Judg 7:13), the clouds "turning round" by his steering (Job 37:12). the stems are split (20).