End of Story (Gen 3:21)

Into and Out of the Garden

²¹ Then YHWH God made leather tunics for the man and his woman and dressed them.

 וַיַּעַשׂ֩ יְ׳הוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים לְאָדָ֧ם וּלְאִשְׁתּ֛וֹ כָּתְנ֥וֹת ע֖וֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵֽׁם׃ פ

We’ve already discussed this verse and all the words in it. But there is one more thing left to discuss: the letter פ that occurs after it. First, some introduction.

As I mentioned earlier in this series, I used to teach a three-part adult education class called “The First Page.” (Be in touch if you’d like me to teach it for you.) As a quick recap (and for readers who were not with us back then), the first of the three parts focused on the first page of the Bible, generously defined as whatever would fit on both sides of a single photocopy.

I told the students they would see two very different accounts of creation (which I called A and B) and asked them to describe each one. But I also asked them this:

1. Where does Account A end?

2. Where does Account B begin?

3. Where does Account B end?

Those of you who have been around for the long haul remember that I called Gen 1:1-2:3 “Reading through the story of creation” and Gen 2:4 “The Hinge.” You may or may not agree precisely with that, but my students’ answers to questions 1 and 2, and most likely yours as well, fall somewhere within a couple of verses of 2:3–5. The responses to question 3 varied much more widely.

We’re talking about that now because the Masoretic text is about to give an answer to that question. Its answer is the letter פ. More details in a post on my WordPress blog; to be brief, that פ is marking the end of a paragraph — a very long paragraph:

• Each of the 7 days of Version 1 / Account A end with a פ, making each Day of creation a separate paragraph.

• There are smaller spaces, marked by a ס, isolating 3:16 (about the woman) from the verses about the snake and about the man before and after it.

• The paragraph whose beginning is marked by the פ in between 2:3 and 2:4 runs all the way through 3:21, which we’ve just reached in our detailed study.

• There will be another semi-paragraph mark (ס), like those before and after 3:16, in just a few verses, at the end of Genesis 3.

• The next major break (פ) does not come until the end of Genesis 4.

I’ve spoken many times on my Torah Talk podcast (now on hiatus, but there are still two years’ worth of episodes available) and also in last year’s Torah Talk column for Parshat Va’era about the difference between the Christian chapters and the Jewish reading of the Bible. This is one I haven’t discussed before.

The Christian chapters were invented around the year 1200 CE. I don’t claim, as some traditionalists do, that the Jewish divisions were given at Sinai, but they are certainly earlier than the chapter divisions. As you can see from this image of the famous Isaiah scroll, the current system of paragraphing was already in use at the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a millennium and a half before the Christian chapters.

Interestingly, both the New Oxford Annotated Bible and the Catholic Study Bible make 1:1–2:3 their first major section, matching the Masoretic text and running blithely past the chapter break. Strictly for my own amusement, I’m going to call it a case of exegetical enjambment. I will leave it to you to decide whether chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 of Genesis are coherent units. For now, we’re going to look at the Masoretic arrangement of the material, the Jewish “table of contents” for the opening chapters of Genesis:

• Day 1

• Day 2

• Day 3

• Day 4

• Day 5

• Day 6

• Day 7

• Version 2 of Creation [with 3:16 visually identifiable inside it]

• Gen 3:22–4:26 [with Gen 3:22–24 as a sort of introductory paragraph]

When I called this series of the blog “Into and Out of the Garden,” I was more or less thinking the Jewish way at the beginning, making the seven (not six) days of creation into an opening section with distinct units for each separate day. I did give Gen 2:4 a section on its own — three posts starting here — since it so obviously functions as a hinge between the first section and the second (“Version 1” and “Version 2”).

But now — according to the traditional punctuation — that section is over, and we are still not “out of the garden.” It’s way too late to go back and change the subtitle for every post since last March 9, but it is not too late to end that series right now, as indicated by the letter פ. That means I’ll have to think up a new name starting with Tuesday’s post. Why don’t I give that some thought right now?

The purpose of the expulsion is to prevent people from living forever. Paradoxically, the first thing reported after that — not, as we’ll see, necessarily the first thing that happened after that — is the birth of children, followed more or less immediately (in narrative terms) by a killing. “Life Its Ownself” has begun, and with a vengeance. The chapter ends with a report of another killing (which has taken place offstage) and another birth.

That combination suggested the name “Life and Death in the Aftermath.” But I don’t really want to be faced, just now, with the stark choice between those two. Our next series, then, will be called something equally appropriate but less threatening: “You Can’t Go Home Again.” (Apologies to Thomas Wolfe.) And it will start next time, 3 verses sooner than I had expected it to start. I’m still convinced that the author is shifting our perspective back and forth between a God’s-eye view and one from a human perspective (cosmic and comic, respectively, as I’ve called them). More on that next time.