12 The earthling said וַיֹּ֖אמֶר הָֽאָדָ֑ם
In anticipation of his turning into Adam, what many translations call “the man” is not האיש ha-ish, the obvious word to contrast with and complement האשה ha-isha ‘the woman’, but ha-adam. This usage must be the result of the separation between man and woman that was affected by their eating from the tree. They are no longer a matched set.
The woman you gave me — she gave me something from the tree, so I ate.
הָֽאִשָּׁה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר נָתַ֣תָּה עִמָּדִ֔י הִ֛וא נָֽתְנָה־לִּ֥י מִן־הָעֵ֖ץ וָאֹכֵֽל׃
There are two major ways to translate this verse:
Precisely, and awkwardly
Idiomatically, and imprecisely
To approach that discussion, let me point out that once again we have the object before the subject/verb, and this time it is obvious why. The earthling is in a hurry to pass the buck. It is all the woman’s fault.
Or, rather, not all her fault. What is she doing there in the first place? YHWH built her and “brought her [וַיְבִאֶ֖הָ va-y’vi’éha] to the earthling” (2:22). But here, in 3:12, YHWH is told that he “gave” the woman, and (as the Hebrew literally says) “with me.”
In Modern Hebrew, נתן n-t-n is much closer to English “give” than it is in Biblical Hebrew, where it is perfectly reasonable to say נתן when you put something somewhere — like, for example, lights in the sky. That is exactly how I translated 1:17, to say that God “put” those lights in the sky, even though the Hebrew there is וַיִּתֵּ֥ן va-yitten, literally “and He gave.”
So a more idiomatic translation would have the earthling saying, as the NJPS does, “The woman You put at my side—she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” The King James, trying its best to be ultra-faithful to the Hebrew text (so much so that many KJV editions have the practice of italicizing words that must be added to make a literal translation into correct English) writes:
And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
You can’t quite say “gave with me,” so KJV polishes the English a bit to make it work.
Robert Alter writes:
The woman whom you gave by me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.
This preserves the difference between Hebrew עמדי immadi, literally “with me,” and לי li, literally “to me.” I have pushed slightly in the other direction, making both of them simply “gave me,” to highlight the emphasis that the earthling himself seems to be putting here. After all, the woman did give him something to eat; see v. 6, where he is “with” her just as she is “with” him here. Though God certainly could have “given” the woman to the man, he did not (see again 2:22). The man is passing the buck, first to her and then through her to YHWH.
However. We have not seen any indication that either of them thought they were doing something wrong. The woman, at least, gave things some thought before they ate, and I take at face value the earthling’s assertion that they were hiding because they were embarrassed about being naked — not about having done something wrong. (The author, on the other hand, is hinting at the conflict between God and the humans.)
Only this repetition of “You gave … she gave” seems to expose a consciousness of having done something YHWH is not going to like. That and, of course, the mere fact that he is giving an excuse. Jack Sasson has argued that the correct answer to God’s question is “No, I ate from a different tree, not the one you told me not to eat from.” I have been ignoring this and will continue to do so, for two reasons: (1) it’s obvious that they ate from the “knowledge” tree, not the Tree of Life; and (2) I don’t know how to deal with the apparent confusion between the two trees that Sasson points to.
Why did the earthling eat this fruit? The simple answer is that the matching helper YHWH made for him gave him some. So it’s quite reasonable for him to push the responsibility off on her and on God. On the other hand …
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