Food for Thought & Thought for Food (Gen 3:18)
Into and Out of the Garden
Because this is a free Sunday post, I’m going to make a few general remarks with regard to what I said last time about the first half of v. 18. We’ll go on to the rest of it shortly.
In that column, I suggested that the assonance between dardar ‘thistles’ of v. 18 and harbah arbeh ‘way more’ of v. 16 was a literary way of saying that the man’s situation, like the woman’s, will be more grievous — even though that is not stated explicitly. As I’ve said before (and, I think, more than once), I often find that thinking of a biblical text as a piece of music helps me see literary implications of the writer’s word choices.
Not every biblical text is written to the level of belles-lettres — there are passages that intend to convey historical or genealogical information, and others that prescribe behavior — but I’m convinced that some things in the Bible are written by people who in our day would be poets, storytellers, or novelists. When the psalmist writes (in the NJPS translation)
Ps 45:2 My heart is astir with gracious words;
I speak my poem to a king;
my tongue is the pen of an expert scribe.
he is not speaking about calligraphy, but about the literary quality of his writing. I have asserted, and am now asserting again, that either the author of Version 2 of the creation story or the author who combined it with Version 1 also had a “heart … astir with gracious words.”
Some readers, and not a few of my fellow biblical scholars, might raise an eyebrow at this and wonder whether I am not venturing too far into the realm of midrash. What I mean by “midrash” here is this: reading a text in a way that is creative rather than interpretative. (The buck-and-a-half words for this are that it is eisegesis, “reading into,” rather than exegesis, “reading out of.”) I’m not a writer of poetry or fiction, but a scholar who is trying to understand what the original writer of our ancient text meant by what he wrote. That means I am interested in exegesis, not in creating new ideas that the original writer did not have.
When I taught biblical poetry, I always used to tell my students the following: If your idea about a word or phrase coheres with the other meanings that arise from the text, let’s assume the author meant it until we find something that contradicts our assumption. (Call this a corollary or perhaps even an expansion of Greenstein’s Law.) If your idea goes off in a completely different direction than anything else in the text — if it doesn’t cohere — it’s probably a candidate for creativity and not an idea that the original author had.
In this case …
the idea that the man is getting more itzavon brings this statement in line with what is said to the woman;
the method is one we have seen before, in which the idea is not stated but conveyed via a literary technique.
My “career path” (such as it was) grew out of a kind of collision between Intermediate Biblical Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania and my desire to show my students how much richer their reading of the Bible would be when they did it in the original language. I do feel that I’m being disciplined about looking for literary techniques in our text, as I’ve explained. You’ll certainly employ your own judgment on these comments, as I’m sure you do on the rest of what I say in this column.
And now we continue with v. 18.
18 … and you shall eat the field plants. וְאָכַלְתָּ֖ אֶת־עֵ֥שֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶֽה׃
The “field plants” are ésev ha-sadeh, a phrase that we speculated (when we read it in 2:5) was meant “to put us in an agricultural frame of mind,” to make us think of cultivated plants. These, of course, are some of the plants that we learned on Day Six were intended as food for the earthlings (as well as the beasts and birds):
1:29 God said, “Now, I have given you all the plants seeding seed all over the earth and every tree that has in it tree-fruit sowing seed: they are yours to eat.”
Rashi, the 11th-c. Jewish scholar from Troyes whom we quoted last time, has something to say about this part of the verse as well (the translation, again, is from my Commentators’ Bible):
Your food shall be the grasses of the field. What kind of curse is this? “I give you every seed-bearing plant . . . for food” (1:29) was given him as a blessing! (“Grasses” in our verse and “plant” in 1:29 are the same Hebrew word.) It is “cursed be the ground” and “thorns and thistles” that turn this into a curse. When you plant beans or vegetables, the ground will sprout thorns and thistles and whatnot, and you will have no choice but to eat them.
“Rashi’s” English translation of the biblical verse (in bold) is not mine, but the New Jewish Publication Society version. What’s quoted leaves out their translation of the very first letter of our phrase, ו־ v’-, the all-purpose Hebrew conjunction, normally translated as and, but used much more broadly than English and — even sometimes to say “that is.”
In this case, NJPS says,
Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field …
In some ways I prefer that translation to my own. Yet I think and in our phrase is less contradictory than emphatic, saying two things, not just one:
You will eat the cultivated plants as before, but will have to deal with thistles and thorns to get them.
You will no longer be able to pick fruit off a tree and eat it, as you were promised in 2:16.
From now on — to quote Malvina Reynolds — “Them that works not, shall not eat.” More on that next time.