Don’t Touch That Tree! (Gen 3:3)

Into and Out of the Garden

³ “But from the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden — God said, ‘You must not eat of it … וּמִפְּרִ֣י הָעֵץ֮ אֲשֶׁ֣ר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן֒ אָמַ֣ר אֱלֹהִ֗ים לֹ֤א תֹֽאכְלוּ֙ מִמֶּ֔נּוּ

The pronoun in מִמֶּ֔נּוּ that matches etz is singular, so we understand that this is not a collective noun, “the trees” that are b’tokh ha-gan, as we took these singulars so often in the first two chapters of Genesis. It also seems obvious that the woman could not know that this tree is only in the garden but not outside them, as I understood b’tokh ha-gan to mean originally, and as the continuation of the story seems to demonstrate. So she must mean that they are forbidden to eat from or even to touch “the” tree in the middle of the garden.

As we saw last time, it’s not obvious that the tree that was b’tokh ha-gan was the tree the man was told not to eat from, nor that the tree he was told to eat from was b’tokh ha-gan. I suggested there that the confusion was deliberate, something I’ll have more to say about when we get to v. 6.

One more point that’s worth making before we go any further is to remind ourselves that we are listening in on the end of a conversation whose beginning we did not hear. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a comparable story in the ancient Near Eastern material that we’ve recovered, nothing to suggest what some Israelites might have thought about how this conversation started and what the snake was trying to achieve (and why).

This is exactly the kind of thing that prompted the development of midrash. I don’t italicize the word because it’s in the English dictionaries now. A short definition of it that I learned from a friend (and others seem to have coined it too) is that midrash is “rabbinic fanfic.” For a longer discussion, follow this link to a talk I gave on the subject at Spertus College of Judaica some years ago. Rashi’s assertion that the snake was hitting on the woman is taken from a collection of rabbinic midrashim called Genesis Rabbah, where there are many more such stories.

The problem is that these stories, and the midrashim in general, were invented to solve problems in the text (“eisegesis,” reading something into the text), not to resolve them convincingly in the way the original writer “must” or even “might” have meant (“exegesis,” reading something out of the text). That’s another reason I think of this serpent as just a character actor hired to move the plot along.

… and you must not touch it, in case you die.’” וְלֹ֥א תִגְּע֖וּ בּ֑וֹ פֶּן־תְּמֻתֽוּן^[1]׃

I’m translating פן here (“lest” in most English versions) as “in case” for my usual reasons: to defamiliarize it so we can think about it.

The NRSV, the one outlier I’ve found, translates “or you shall die.” There’s no note on this translation, so I’m relying on my ear for English to guess that by “or you shall die” instead of “or you will die” they are taking this as a threat. I think that’s a pretty good guess, since their title for Genesis 3 is “The First Sin and Its Punishment.” Spoiler: the word sin doesn’t occur anywhere in this story.

When we first saw the command about not eating from the Tree of Sorting, I pointed out that we were justified in thinking of it as a command because it has the same syntax as “thou shalt not” in the Ten Commandments. Otherwise, this might have been a friendly warning. The man and woman in our story, however, have not read the Bible, and might indeed have taken this as a warning — especially the woman, who we assume did not hear these words directly from YHWH. “You will die,” like my “in case you die,” could indeed be a warning rather than a threat.

The other thing she says here that we don’t understand as well as we wish we did is of course “you must not touch it.” So we are forced to speculate:

• Did the man tell her this?

• Did YHWH tell the man this when we were not looking?

• Did YHWH speak to both of them (when we were not looking) to add this?

• Is the woman inventing it so the snake will buzz off?

• Is she simply exaggerating?

There are certain things that “everyone” knows about the Bible. (I’m using that word à la Yogi Berra: “No one goes there any more, it’s too crowded.”) “Everyone” knows that the woman is adding something that God did not command, and the midrash explains that this was her downfall: The snake pushed her against the tree, she touched it, she didn’t die, and the rest is history — or at least mythology.

It’s true that Deut 4:2 and 13:1 both emphasize that one must not add anything to the divine command (or take anything away from it either). The midrash points instead to Prov 30:5, which says “Do not add to [God’s] words” without mentioning “taking away.” Paradoxically, there is another rabbinic tradition that specifically calls for “adding” something to God’s words. It’s called “building a fence around the Torah.”

The classic locations for such “fence-building” are in the Mishnah. M. Avot 1:1 begins this tractate of “the fathers [of the synagogue]” by attributing the locution to “the men of the Great Assembly,” the first of these rabbinic “fathers.” M. Ber 1:1, traditionally the beginning of the Mishnah, offers the classic example: Wherever the deadline to do something is dawn, the Sages declared it was midnight “in order to keep people from transgressing” (כְּדֵי לְהַרְחִיק אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעֲבֵרָה).

The midrash claims that building this “fence” worked just the opposite way. That’s a good reminder that rabbinic ideas are not scientific. They deploy whatever idea fits what they, or a particular individual rabbi, may want to express in a certain context.

Why was this midrash invented? Because otherwise what the woman says about being forbidden to touch the tree plays no role in what follows. I suggest that, like the conversation between snake and woman that we join already in progress, it is meant to open up our imaginations, precisely to fill in the gaps that the original story leaves open for us.

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^[1] That ן at the end of תמותון? Ignore it; imperfect verbs that end with a vowel sound sometimes add it.