About Those Trees … (Gen 2:16)

Into and Out of the Garden

¹⁶ YHWH God commanded the earthling: וַיְצַו֙ יְ׳הוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים עַל־הָֽאָדָ֖ם לֵאמֹ֑ר

As when God thought יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר back in Gen 1:3, I’m not going to get into the discussion about what language YHWH used to communicate to the earthling. The story’s in Hebrew, and so that’s the language the earthling “obviously” understood. What’s clearly important for understanding the story is what happened:

• God formed the earthling

• God brought him to life

• God put him in the garden

• God gave him a command

The verb here is צוה tz-v-h, and this is the root that gives us the word מצוה mitzvah, regularly used (especially in Deuteronomy) for the rules that God gives the Israelites. (A “bar mitzvah” originally referred not to the celebration but to the boy who had reached the age at which he was obligated to observe the commandments.)

In rabbinic tradition there are 613 mitzvot or commandments that Jews must observe — but this earthling is not a Jew. There are also seven “Noahide” commandments that Jewish tradition asserts non-Jews are required to follow — but the covenant with Noah has not been made yet. So what YHWH is commanding the earthling is obviously not one of those either. This is personal, a matter of “God says ‘Jump’ and you ask ‘How high?’”

It's significant nevertheless, I think, that the first thing the earthling is told in this story is an instruction about what not to do. “Torah” does not mean “law” (as it has often been translated), but the Torah most certainly is a book in which a narrative describes and includes long sections that are what we today would call “laws.” It’s a story, but it is the kind of story that explains why we are commanded to do or not do certain things.

As we’ll see when we get to Genesis 4, this is not a story about “original sin.” But it is a story about how we humans got kicked out of Shangri-La and lost the chance at eternal life. Recounting that the first thing YHWH did was to “command” the earthling is unquestionably symbolic of the theme of the Torah and in some ways of the entire Bible.

Now the word that I didn’t translate. I wrote about the word לֵאמֹ֑ר lemor when we first saw it, in 1:22. I said there that I’d been taught by Mayer Gruber that it means “comma, quotation marks,” which is why I didn’t, and don’t usually, translate it at all.

I should have added an alternative view, from Galia Hatav, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Florida who specializes in Biblical Hebrew. She writes that לֵאמֹ֑ר does not exclude the possibility of giving an exact quotation, but it does suggest “that the speaker is not committing herself/himself to giving it” (The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface of the Biblical Hebrew Verb Forms, 161 f.).

Now for the relevance of these two perspectives for Gen 2:16. When God told the animals he had created, לֵאמֹ֑ר, “Reproduce, proliferate, and fill the water in the Seas,” I explained that he was not speaking to them or commanding them, but that Genesis was telling us more about God’s thought process. (Note that when God “says” the same thing to the earthlings there is no לֵאמֹ֑ר in the verse.)

Here in v. 16 we are seeing לֵאמֹ֑ר for only the second time in the Bible. Because it is introduced not with the verb אמר amar ‘say, think’ but with צוה ‘command’ — and because we are now in the down-to-earth version of creation rather than the cosmic one — it seems reasonable that we should understand לֵאמֹ֑ר to be indicating direct speech here. For the first time, God is speaking with one of his creatures.

We are not going to be presented with actual dialogue until Genesis 3, with two interlocutors whom we have not yet met. Nonetheless, God and the earthling are clearly interacting just a few verses from now, when God makes animals and brings each one over to the earthling “to see what he would call it” (v. 19). So we can imagine that the command we are about to hear would have been captured on Xanadu’s closed-circuit camera as actual spoken words.

You may totally eat from any tree in the garden מִכֹּ֥ל עֵֽץ־הַגָּ֖ן אָכֹ֥ל תֹּאכֵֽל׃

There are three things to discuss in this short phrase, even though the vocabulary is not difficult:

• Is כל ‘all’ used to mean “any” or “every”?

• What does the repetition of the verb אכל akhal ‘eat’ mean?

• How should the imperfect form of the verb be translated?

I’ll explain “imperfect” in a moment; there’s some grammar here that English does not have. First let me remind you that you can find longer, video discussions of all the Hebrew language points in this column in my Biblical Hebrew course for the Teaching Company.

The form תֹּאכֵֽל tokhal in Modern Hebrew would be called a future tense verb. In Biblical Hebrew it is imperfect (details in Lesson 11 of my course), which gives it a somewhat wider range of meaning. It might mean

• you will eat

• you may eat

• you can eat

• you should eat

• you would eat

• you do eat

That’s where אָכֹ֥ל akhol comes in. This is a form of the infinitive, but not “to eat” as in English. Biblical Hebrew uses a form called the infinitive construct for that, but this is the infinitive absolute. (Details in Lesson 24 of the course.) When this form is followed by the same verb in the imperfect, it indicates emphasis. The question is always what kind of emphasis to give it.

It seems to me that the two possible emphatic readings of this verb are:

• You must eat from every tree (which seems odd).

• You may eat from any tree (which I’ve chosen and which seems more reasonable).

Thanks to Edward M. Cook for the brilliant suggestion that this emphatic infinitive absolute can be colloquially translated using the slang English usage of “totally.” The fact that God has not finished speaking, and is about to qualify this statement, strengthen my feeling that this is permission and not an order to eat from “all” the trees. It’s expansive permission, but not “total” permission, which is what makes “totally” and the infinitive absolute form here colloquial. Genesis 1 is scientific, but Genesis 2 is chatty.

Biblical literalists, take note! These words spoken by God in Gen 2:16 cannot be taken literally, since they are immediately contradicted by what God says in the continuation of this speech. That is the real “command,” which we’ll see in v. 17.