“Cursed is the Soil” (Gen 3:17)

Into and Out of the Garden

¹⁷ Cursed is the soil אֲרוּרָ֤ה הָֽאֲדָמָה֙

As we’ve discussed in the last few posts, the “your” of this phrase may be spoken at the man rather than directly to him. Now we’ll begin to look at what YHWH has in store for him.

The first thing we notice is a surprising contrast with v. 14. In that verse, the snake is arur because of what he did. Here, because of what the man did, it is the adama that is cursed.

Okay, all right, I get it — he is the adam, so there is some sort of connection between them. He is made out of adama, after all. Yet, as we’ll see shortly, it does not seem to be his body that is cursed by this pronouncement, but the rest of the soil, the ground from which he will attempt to grow his food.

Nahum Sarna comments:

Once again, the punishment is related to the offense. The sin of eating forbidden food results in complicating the production of goods. The man himself is not cursed, only the soil. The matter from which he sprang turns against him. His pristine harmony with nature is disturbed by his transgression.

And once again I must disagree. With regard to the snake’s eating dust, Sarna writes, “The transgression involved eating, and so does the punishment.” It is actually quite unclear what transgression (if any) the snake committed; the one thing that’s clear is that he did not eat anything.

If we think about our story so far, we in fact have not seen the humans eat anything either, except from the tree they were instructed to avoid. The two versions of the creation story differ as to what they are allowed to eat: