22 I’m frightened that … פֶּן־
Last Sunday I spent an entire column on the letter פ — and on Thursday I congratulated my paid subscribers for getting not just one letter but four. I like to think of myself as a generous person, so for this Sunday’s free column we will add a letter to פ and start with two letters. Most likely we’ll even end up with a few more entire words before the column is done.
Can God really be frightened? That’s what this word pen seems to be telling us, as I will explain shortly.
I taught Biblical Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania for more than two decades and saw Jewish students proudly displaying the letters פן on their caps and T-shirts. They probably did not know that what they thought said “Penn” was actually a negative telic particle. I didn’t know it myself until I found that expression in Waltke and O’Connor’s Biblical Hebrew Syntax.
HALOT has a slightly more comprehensible definition, calling it a “preventitive conjunction.” In even plainer English: pen- (the Hebrew particle) refers to an outcome (telos) that you don’t want to happen: “lest.” It's a particle because (with one exception) it is always attached to the next word with that maqqef you see sticking out to the left of it, a kind of Biblical Hebrew hyphen.
GKC, the standard Biblical Hebrew reference grammar when I was in school, says it this way [§ 152w]:
פֶּן־ lest, that not, at the beginning of a clause expressing a fear or precaution. Not infrequently the idea on which פֶּן־ depends is only virtually contained in the main clause, e.g. Gen 19:19 I cannot escape to the mountain (because I am afraid) פֶּן־תִּדְבָּקַנִי הָֽרָעָה lest some evil overtake me.
The more modern Jouön-Muraoka grammar puts it somewhat more gently [168g]:
To indicate a negative wish of a speaker or speakers, פֶּן is used, which means “I (or we) do not wish the following to be, become or have become a reality.” This word may originally have meant Lat. respectu, as regards, in relation to (a dreaded thing, a thing to ward off), hence the development of the negative nuance: Gen 3.3 לא תִגְּעוּ בּוֹ פֶּן־תְּמֻתוּן you shall not touch it lest you die (lit. in relation to the fact that you would die).
Yes, we’ve seen this word before, when the woman quotes God as saying they must not eat the fruit of a certain tree “in case you die” (as I translated it there). I’m not using “in case” this time because the syntax in our verse is different from that of Gen 3:3, and in fact somewhat unusual. Almost always, before saying פֶּן־, you describe the way you are hoping to prevent the unwanted outcome: in Gen 3:3, “you shall not touch it lest (pen-) you die.”
A note to the Jouön-Muraoka paragraph adds:
In those rather rare cases where פּן, at the very beginning of a sentence, has a negative optative sense (direct ne of Latin), it appears that it stems from נִשְׁמַר פֶּן to guard oneself against something, naturally something causing fear.
Another note remarks, “The notion of apprehension is manifest.” And that is what we are presented with here in our verse: a god who is apprehensive that something he does not want to happen will happen nevertheless. That word נִשְׁמַר, understood implicitly, might literally be translated “to guard oneself against something,” but a more idiomatic translation is “to be careful.” YHWH has a problem he did not have before, and he has to be careful to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.
They will reach out … יִשְׁלַ֣ח יָד֗וֹ
What is YHWH worried about? That the humans will, literally, “send” their “hand.” Just how much postage do I need to send a hand? Of course — like “to lend a hand” — the idiom is not to be taken literally. The hand does not come off the end of your arm in either case. “Sending” your hand in Biblical Hebrew does have a range of meanings that starts with the almost literal, but it goes far beyond that. DCH elaborates:
7a. stretch out, extend hand, arm; point finger; stretch out foot
7b. lay hand upon, raise hand against someone
7c. lay hand on rock
7d. lay hand on what one desires or needs
7e. lay hand on property, i.e. steal
7f. set one’s hand to evil
7g. with ellipsis, stretch out (hand) in order to save,
In our case, the literal meaning certainly comes first. The humans will stretch out their arms and use their hands to pick the fruit. But you don’t have to “send your hand” in order to do that. In 3:6, the woman merely “took” the fruit, as YHWH speculates the humans will do after “sending their hand.”
So it’s reasonable to assume that some of the other implications of the phrase are also meant to resonate with us. Let’s say, for example …
7b. raise hand against someone
7d. lay hand on what one desires or needs
7e. lay hand on property
But not “steal,” and most certainly not “set one’s hand to evil.” No sin, let alone anything evil, has happened in our story so far. The humans have most definitely done something YHWH did not want them to do, but the concept of “sin” is not yet on the table. As for evil, we have seen the word (רע ra) only in the phrase “knowing good and evil.” As we discussed when that phrase first appeared in Gen 2:9, it doesn’t really mean in Biblical Hebrew what the English makes it sound like.
YHWH is facing a challenge. It’s not obvious from our story whether the humans ate the fruit in order to challenge him; because they wanted to be like him; or simply because they felt like eating it. The woman did give it careful consideration before she ate. The man may have eaten it in solidarity with her; because he did not want to disappoint her; or simply because the natural thing to do when someone hands you a piece of fruit is to take it and eat it.
Our story does not tell us what to think. It does tell us about what God is thinking. We’ll see more of that next time.