A Retrospective (Gen 4:1)

You Can’t Go Home Again

Today, we’re beginning Genesis 4. Before we do, since this is a free Sunday post, let me share with you a poem by Robert Frost that will help us say farewell to the Bible’s Arcadia, the Garden of Eden — or, as I’ve been calling it, Xanadu Park.

Nothing Gold Can Stay (Robert Frost)

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Eden, of course, did not really “sink to grief”; he needed a word that would rhyme with leaf. Four famous rivers — or, at the very least, two — still flow out of it. We tend to think of the garden as a paradise, but don’t forget this is where YHWH spotted something, for the first time, that was not good.

He fixed the problem, as you remember, by using a joist from the original human to create a female. Now those two crazy kids are about to tumble into the sack.

Or — more precisely — we’re about to be told that they had done so. Warning, grammar ahead!

^4:1 Now, the man had been intimate with his wife Ḥavvah. וְהָ֣אָדָ֔ם יָדַ֖ע אֶת־חַוָּ֣ה אִשְׁתּ֑וֹ

Curiously, the male partner here is still ha-adam ‘the man’ (I’ll call him that rather than the human or the earthling), while his wife is called by her name for the second (and last) time in the Bible. I’m calling her “wife” rather than “woman,” the more literal translation of isha, because (1) the man is not an ish here and (2) because she’s got a name. They are, obviously, without benefit of clergy at this point, but giving her a name means that she is playing a social role, not merely a biological one.

Now for the timing. I will let Rashi, the 11^th-century Frenchman who is the greatest of Jewish Bible commentators, still consulted by tens of thousands of people every week after 1,000 years, explain the pluperfect. NJPS translates, “Now the man knew his wife”; Rashi (in my Commentators’ Bible translation) explains why that’s wrong:

Rather, he “had known” her already before the events of ch. 3, when they sinned and were forced out of the garden. Not only had they had intercourse, but she had already gotten pregnant and given birth. Grammatically, it would require not ve-haʾadam yada (as is actually written) but the standard narrative tense, va-yéda haʾadam (compare v. 25) to indicate that they had children only after they were forced out.

Rashi is explaining the grammar — and correctly; Gen 4:1 is deliberately avoiding the grammatical form that tells you events in consecutive order. (See my post here and follow the links there for more depth.) That’s not all Rashi is doing, however. In his Bible commentary, Rashi considers his primary task to be explaining what the Hebrew words mean. Nonetheless, he is also the greatest Jewish Talmud commentator, he is thoroughly familiar with all of rabbinic literature, and as Sarah Kamin ז׳׳ל argued, he considered that literature authoritative. Here (formatted by me) is what we read on page 38b of tractate Sanhedrin in the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud:

R. Johanan b. Hanina said: The day consisted of twelve hours.

• In the first hour [starting at 6 AM], his [Adam's] dust was gathered;

• in the second, it was kneaded into a shapeless mass.

• In the third, his limbs were shaped;

• in the fourth, a soul was infused into him;

• in the fifth, he arose and stood on his feet;

• in the sixth, he gave [the animals] their names;

• in the seventh, Eve became his mate;

• in the eighth, they ascended to bed as two and descended as four;

  [two children were born]

• in the ninth, he was commanded not to eat of the tree,

• in the tenth, he sinned;

• in the eleventh, he was tried, and

• in the twelfth he was expelled [from Eden] and departed,

for it is written, “Man abideth not in honour” [Ps. XLIX, 13.].

You get it, of course. They had sex, and children, before doing anything wrong. (The Talmud says Adam sinned, but readers of this column know that Genesis does not accuse them of anything but eating from a tree God had told them not to eat from.

This is not the only Jewish timeline of Day Six, and there is a Christian timeline of the day that makes abundantly clear not only that they sinned but that they had sex only afterward. Apologies; I can’t remember where it’s found in patristic literature and can’t locate it. The Sanhedrin tradition may well be a reaction to the patristic one.

We saw that Genesis 3 is not the end of a story (notice that ס at the end of our verse) but the end of the introduction to the current story, which I’ve called “You Can’t Go Home Again.” And it seems obvious that our story is continuing outside of Xanadu Park. It could very well be that avoiding the consecutive, story-telling verb form means nothing more than that we’re not being told when this took place.

If indeed this is the beginning of something new — “Once upon a time, the man was intimate with his wife Ḥavvah” — then it may well have taken place outside the garden, in opposition to the Sanhedrin version. I still think Rashi has R. Johanan b. Hanina’s timeline in mind, though, and for two reasons:

• Rashi is a sweet man. He prefers (I believe) to see the good in people, including our earliest ancestors.

• Rashi was 56 when the First Crusade swept through Europe, killing Jews on its way to killing Muslims. He is quite happy to contradict Christian understandings of the text when he finds that called for.

Believe it or not, this whole column has been focused on the first word of Genesis 4, וְהָ֣אָדָ֔ם v’ha-adam ‘now, the man …’, the word that shows us that the following verb was not the next thing that happened in the story. Next time, at last, we’ll talk about that verb and the way I’ve translated it. See you then.