What Difference Can a Literal Translation Make–Part 3

Last updated on: December 20, 2024 at 8:37 am by Ben Witherington

What Difference Can a Literal Translation Make–Part 3 2024-12-20T08:37:03-05:00 Ben Witherington

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Gen. 3 begins with a bang by telling us that the serpent is most cunning of all the beasts of the field. Here Alter points out that the proper translation of what the snake said to the woman is as follows: “Though God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden…” and in the Hebrew it is an incomplete sentence cut off by the woman interrupting, and indeed it is a false statement by the snake. The woman retorts “From the fruit of the garden’s trees we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God has said ‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it lest you die”. Alter suggests that Eve may be setting herself up for a fall, for instance she might touch the fruit, feel no ill effects and then eat which is the sin with moral consequences.

And the serpent replied “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”. This may involve a merism— i.e. you will have the full gamut of moral knowledge . Then we are told “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 the fruit and ate and she also gave to her man and he ate. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked and they sewed fig leaves and made for themselves loin cloths.”

The disaster has happened, and one has to ask why did the man simply eat? After all, according to Gen. 2.16-17 it was only the man who was given the command ‘thou shalt not eat…’ because according to the story the woman had not yet be created, and this in turn means that the man had told the woman what God said, and someone embellished it, namely the woman according to Gen. 3. But if the command was given to the man, then he was in charge of making sure neither he nor his woman disobeyed the one and only commandment given them. He could have also simply refused to eat the fruit handed to him by Eve, but he simply accepts it and does what the woman does, eating…. I would suggest that the reason in subsequent Biblical literature it is Adam who is blamed for the Fall (see Rom. 5.12-21) is because it was his responsibility to make sure God’s command was obeyed, and he failed. Furthermore, the reason the verb ‘deceived’ comes up in 2 Cor. 11.3 and in 1 Tim. 2.8-15 when applied to Eve is probably because she is viewed as not properly instructed by Adam in the first place, and therefore subject to deception by the snake. Of course one possible moral to this story is beware of talking snakes! Nothing in this story suggests the snake is Satan himself, to the contrary the snake is simply said to be one of the beasts of the field, but presumably he is being used by the Evil One to deceive Eve.

Then the truth and consequences part of the story happens— man and woman hear the sound of “the Lord God walking about in the garden in the evening breeze” and human pair hid amongst the trees in the garden. And the Lord God asks “where are you”, and the man says “I heard your sound in the garden and I was afraid for I was naked and I hid”. And God said “Who told you you were naked? From the tree I commanded you not to eat have you eaten?” And the human said “the woman whom you gave by me, she gave me from the tree and I ate.” And the Lord God said to the woman “What is this you have done?” And the woman said “The serpent beguiled me and I ate”. And the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this: “Cursed be you of all the cattle and all the beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. Enmity will it set between you and the woman, between your seed and hers. He will boot your head and you will bite his heel.”

To the woman he said “I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children, And your longing shall be for your man and he shall rule over you.”

And 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. Thorn and thistle shall it sprout for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread until you return to the soil for from there you were taken, for dust you are and to dust shall you return.” As Alter notes, this last contrasts with the lush previous description of the garden and its fruit, and probably hints at the banishment of man and woman from the garden which is about to happen.

It is at this juncture, finally that the human names his woman Eve for she was the mother of all that lives. The Hebrew word play here is between hayah meaning to live, and hawah meaning Eve. Alter notes that her name sounds suspiciously like the Aramaic word for serpent.

So it was that the human and Eve (he’s not yet called Adam as a name) are banished from the garden lest they eat of the tree of life and live forever, and “he set up east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the flame of whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life”.

Notice that the curse amounts to labor pains both in the case of the woman and in the case of the man, she labors through pain to produce offspring and he labors through pain to produce produce from the soil. Neither are cursed directly by God. The serpent however is cursed directly, and later he provides one image for Satan himself (see e.g. Rom. 16.20; Rev. 12.9; 20.2; cf. 2 Cor. 11.3).

One question not answered in Gen. 1-3 is where does supernatural evil come from, if God created everything good and is all good himself. This led to stories in Milton’s Paradise Lost and elsewhere, based in part on Job 1-2– about ha satan, the adversary or prosecuting attorney in the heavenly council, and in part based on Gen. 6 when the ‘sons of God come down and mate with the daughters of human beings’ with the former seen as fallen angels. But the basic answer would seem to be that God created both angels and human beings as creatures with the power of contrary choice, and so both some angels and humans sinned and introduced evil into the world. In other words, it is not because the creation itself was inherently flawed, but because of the moral choices of the higher orders of beings, angels and humans. As Pogo once said– ‘I have seen the enemy, the enemy is me’.

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December 17, 2024

What Difference Can a Literal Translation Make--Part 2

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December 19, 2024 What Difference Can a Literal Translation Make--Part 4

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