Attitude Check (Gen 5:29)
The Genealogy of Adam
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29 This one will change our attitude זֶה֠ יְנַחֲמֵ֤נוּ
For the benefit of those who are not yet paid subscribers, I’m repeating the first two words of this verse, with their English translation, before we move on to discuss the rest of the verse. Consider it yet another repetitive resumption.
As we said last week, in the longest commentary anyone has yet written on the word זה zeh ‘this’, v. 29 was not originally part of The Genealogy of Adam. It has been inserted into the Lemekh paragraph of that genealogy in order to link it to the material in Genesis 2 and 3. We saw the same kind of linking at the beginning of the genealogy, when Seth’s birth was recorded for a second time.
That word zeh, pointing to someone you are naming, was the first of five separate references to the earlier material, in this case to 2:23. One might argue that this is not a deliberate reference but simply a writing habit of this particular author. The rest of the references, however, point unambiguously to Genesis 3.
The verb that gave Noah his name (or at least the verb that our author is having Lemekh, Noah’s father in the Genealogy, use to explain the name) is not one of those references. זה zeh ‘this one’ points at someone, so the name explanation must have been part of this verse before it was stitched into our chapter. It seems important to understand why this particular, slightly off-key verb was chosen, but I am at a loss to explain it.
about the grievous way we were made מִֽמַּעֲשֵׂ֙נוּ֙ וּמֵעִצְּב֣וֹן יָדֵ֔ינוּ
Lots of people seem to think Noah’s invention of alcohol is what was meant to “comfort” us, but that only occurred after the Flood, when there was no one around to comfort — certainly not the “us” that Lemekh may have been thinking about. In the story as we have it, Lemekh is expecting Noah to change our attitudes (it’s not clear in quite what way) about something very much present in the story of Genesis 3.
The glaring connection to Genesis 3 in this phrase is the word עצבון itzavon, defined in HALOT as “anxious toil, hardship.” In my translation I turned this word into grievous (in 3:16, about the woman’s future pregnancies), and in grief (in 3:17, about the man’s working the soil). Those are the only two other places in the Bible that this word appears. Think our verse is referring to them? (I do, too.)
The two other words in this phrase are less evocative of particular locations in the story. The יד yad ‘hand’ is, metaphorically at least, where the adama got Abel’s blood: from the hand of Cain (4:11). A “hand” is also what YHWH God worries the humans might stretch out to pluck fruit from the Tree of Life (3:22). We assume that when the woman “took” the fruit of the other tree she must have used her hand, but the word is not found there.
Now to מעשה ma’aseh ‘doing, making’. This is the first time we’re seeing the word, but it is a noun form of the verb עשׂה asa ‘do, make’. That’s an incredibly common verb in the Bible (2,627 times, if my dictionary counted them correctly), but in what we’ve read so far it is a verb that is characteristic only of God — primarily, but not exclusively, in Version 1 of creation. The only exceptions are in 3:13, 3:14, and 4:10, where God is accusing the woman, the snake, and then Cain of “doing” something wrong. עשה is a divine prerogative in our story so far.
As a result, I’m taking ma’asenu as an objective genitive, “the making of us,” rather than a subjective genitive describing some doing or making that we ourselves have been or will be engaged in. What about “the itzavon of our hands”? Is that objective or subjective? Let’s look — not a moment too soon — at some translations of this phrase to see how other commentators understand it:
KJV: our work and toil of our hands (similarly JPS, NRSV)
Fox: from our toil, from the pains of our hands (similarly LXX)
Friedman: from our labor and from our hands’ suffering
Alter: the pain of our hands’ work
Alter has really done no more than transfer the “hands” to ma’aseh instead of itzavon, but he makes an important point which I’ll take further:
Most translations render this as “our toil, our work,” or something equivalent. But the second term, ‘itsavon, does not mean “labor” but rather “pain,” and is the crucial word at the heart of Adam’s curse, and Eve’s. Given that allusion, the two terms in the Hebrew—which reads literally, “our work and the pain of our hands”—are surely to be construed as a hendiadys, a pair of terms for a single concept indicating “painful labor.” It should be noted that the “work of our hands” is a common biblical collocation while “pain of our hands” occurs only here, evidently under the gravitational pull of “work” with which it is paired as a compound idiom. Equally noteworthy is that the word ‘itsavon appears only three times in the Bible (other nominal forms of the root being relatively common)—first for Eve, then for Adam, and now for Noah.
“The work of our hands” is actually not a “common biblical collocation,” but Alter can be forgiven for thinking so; I thought so myself until I fired up my computer concordance. It occurs just three times, but two of them are in the last verse of Psalm 90:
Ps 90:17 May the favor of the Lord, our God, be upon us;
let the work of our hands [מַעֲשֵׂ֣ה יָ֭דֵינוּ] prosper,
O prosper the work of our hands [מַעֲשֵׂ֥ה יָ֝דֵ֗ינוּ]!
It’s a verse repeated so frequently in the Jewish liturgy that it seems like a common phrase — and, to be fair to Alter, מעשה יד־ of someone (my hands, your hands, his hands) does indeed occur another 51 times in the Bible. Our phrase is a hendiadys, and Alter’s literary eye has spotted the technique that makes it one: separating the two words of a common expression and inserting the second noun of the hendiadys in between them.
Nonetheless, this phrase still has nothing to do with our own hard work; ma’aseh is not toil, it is creative. The hendiadys is talking about the itzavon that God stuck us with by the way he made us — if not originally, then after our dismissal from Xanadu Park.
We’ll go on with the curse in this verse next time.