Instead of moving on with Gen 3:21 today, I want to take advantage of this week’s free post to talk about a bigger subject: Where are we in our story?
The story I’m talking about is the one I’ve been calling “Into and Out of the Garden” or, for brief reference, Version 2 of creation. What’s happened so far in Genesis 3 is this:
The woman whom YHWH built in Genesis 2 has a conversation (which began off-camera) with a snake.
She decides to eat some fruit they’d been told not to eat, and she gives some to the man from whose body she had sprung. (By the way, did that remind anyone else of the birth of Aphrodite?)
YHWH God shows up and the humans realize they have been caught with their pants down.
YHWH interrogates first the man and then the woman.
YHWH pronounces sentence on the snake, the woman, and the man.
The man gives the woman a name.
You see the problem. Cassuto fleshes it out:
It’s quite strange that this verse does not appear until now. Some commentators think it is out of place; others try to explain why it was put here, but their reasoning is unconvincing.
(I should point out, by the way, that Cassuto’s commentary is available in English, but due to my move to Jerusalem I don’t have access at the moment to my English copy. I’m translating from the Hebrew, now available online as part of the extremely rich collection of sources at Hillel Novetsky’s alhatorah.org.)
Giving the woman a name doesn’t seem like the first thing you would do after hearing what we readers have just read.
Let’s restart our chart and continue on with the rest of the chapter.
The woman has a conversation with a snake.
She decides to eat some fruit and gives some to the man.
YHWH God shows up.
He interrogates first the man and then the woman.
He pronounces sentence on the snake, the woman, and the man.
The man gives the woman a name.
YHWH clothes the humans.
YHWH decides the man (who has been told in v. 19 that he will “return to dust”) must be prevented from living forever.
He expels the man from the garden.
You see the “ungrammaticalities” here. (Every once in a while I like to remind myself that I have a PhD.) V. 20 begins with a consecutive verb, so we presume it is the next thing that happened after sentence was pronounced:
YHWH to the man: “Earthling! You are going to die!”
The man to the woman: “I’m going to call you Eve.”
YHWH to both: “Get dressed, you two.”
It has more than a touch of absurdity.
Removing vv. 20–21 from our text makes the text read more smoothly on a superficial level, but points to another complication. The man is told in v. 19 that he will return to dust; in vv. 22–23, YHWH has to take steps to achieve that result.
These bumps in the road can be resolved. Cassuto, who says that the explanations he’s seen for why vv. 20–21 are here did not convince him, came up with one of his own. I’m of a different opinion.
Ancient Israel knew not just one, not just two, but many, many stories explaining how the world — and human life on it — came into being. We’ve glanced at one of them that comes to us from Ezekiel 28 and seen allusions to others that we know from elsewhere in the Bible (Isaiah, Psalms, Job) and from the ancient Near East more broadly. We have at least one case of a copy of the story of Gilgamesh found within the territory that was ancient Israel, at Megiddo, and the Canaanite myths we know from Ugarit have many reflections in the Bible.
We’ll see when we get to Gen 5:1 that Genesis describes itself as containing earlier sources. Once you dissect a joke it’s no longer funny, and I certainly don’t want to kill the Torah by cutting it to bits. But I’m convinced that some of the difficulties in the text are most easily resolved by assuming that the biblical authors were working with a certain amount of pre-existing material.
I’ve generally taken the position that the author who composed the beginning of Genesis, by uniting Version 1 and Version 2, had literary skill. I don’t really know how to untangle the literary nature of Genesis 1–3 from that of each of the earlier versions. But I do feel comfortable in trying to explain what vv. 20–21 are doing here by seeking a literary answer to the question. So I’m going to explain it by reverting to the model I learned from the book of Job, which I’ve previously discussed here and here.
At the second of those links, I explained why I think the text is not telling us that God said these things directly to the characters involved. Instead, vv. 14–19 have avoided consecutive verbs, subtly moving us away from the scene of our story in the garden and “up” to the realm in Sky where God (that’s elohim, the hero of Version 1) calls the shots.
With v. 20, there is a scene shift, and we are back in the garden. The man and woman (may) think they have successfully passed the buck to the snake; they (probably) don’t know what YHWH has decreed for them in vv. 16–19; they (certainly) have to cope with their new mental reality after eating the fruit.
When we resume our close reading of the text, next time, YHWH God is no doubt already considering what further measures are called for. He is not angry; in fact, he will clothe the two naked people. But he is done talking with them — 3:13 is the last exchange between him and either of them — and he will definitely not take them into his confidence. Soon enough, they will be on their own.