24 … he installed … וַיַּשְׁכֵּן֩
With v. 24 we are introduced for the first time to the root שׁכן sh-k-n ‘dwell, inhabit’. When it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, the neighborhood is a שכונה sh’khuna (in Modern Hebrew) and your neighbors are sh’khenim and sh’khenot (see, for example, Exod 3:22 and 12:4).
It is not as homey a word as all that, however. This is the root that gives us the word מִשְׁכָּן mishkan ‘tabernacle’, the name for the tent into which (spoiler alert) YHWH will move at the end of the book of Exodus, in which he will accompany the Israelites until he moves into his permanent home in Jerusalem in 1 Kings 8.
He really is שֹׁכֵ֖ן מָר֑וֹם shokhen marom, of course, a “dweller on high,” as Isa 33:5 calls him. Yet he is also the שֹׁכְנִ֖י סְנֶ֑ה shokhni sneh “dweller in the bush” (Deut 33:16), a reference to the famous scene where Moses encounters him (not yet knowing his name) in Exodus 3.
In our verse it is a Hiphil verb, not “dwelling” (that would be the Qal/basic form; see Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course) but the causative “making [someone] dwell.” NJPS, like Speiser in the Anchor Bible says he “stationed” something there, but stationed is a better translation for a different root, נצב. Richard Elliott Friedman says “he had [them] reside,” which at least pays attention to the root. KJV and NRSV both say “placed,” which seems a bit too vanilla for me. So I’ve chosen to say that he “installed” them. They are there and they are not going anywhere.
There are two more translations we need to look at; first, quickly, the Greek version. Here’s the NETS English translation of it:
24 And he drove Adam out and caused him [αὐτὸν] to dwell opposite the orchard of delight, and he stationed the cheroubim and the flaming sword that turns, to guard the way of the tree of life.
Did you catch what happened? In the LXX, YHWH is not שׁכן-ing the cherubim, but Adam himself, all due to the addition of one word, αὐτὸν, = Hebrew אותו oto ‘him’. It then had to add a second verb to get the “cheroubim” in place. Ronald Hendel marks both of these words as “explicating or exegetical plus,” meaning that the translator added them to clarify and explain a text he thought was difficult. Hebrew does often make do without adding an object like “him,” leaving that for the reader to figure out, but that’s not the case here.
Now a more complicated discussion. I’m basing most of this on Raanan Eichler’s article “God Abandons the Garden of Eden and Dwells with the Cherubim.” I said that there were two more translations we needed to look at. The first was the LXX, but the second is not really just one translation; instead, it’s a set of translations into one language, Aramaic.
When I say, as scholars sometimes do, “the Targum” (the word, simply meaning “translation,” that we use specifically for the translation of the Bible into Aramaic), I’m referring to a particular Targum. In the case of the Torah, that’s Targum Onkelos. What Onkelos says here (in the English translation of Eldon Clem) is:
So He drove out Adam, and from long ago He made the Cherubim to dwell in the garden of Eden, with the blade of the sword that was turning around, to guard the way to the tree of life.
“He made … to dwell” is the obvious translation of וַיַּשְׁכֵּן֩, just as we’ve been discussing all along. But there are multiple Aramaic translations of the Torah, including those we have just in fragments, some of them from the famous Cairo Genizah. Four of these alternate translations say that “he [God] caused the glory of his Immanence to dwell” — that is, YHWH caused his kavod, his own presence, to dwell outside the garden. Eichler takes the story from there:
In place of the Torah’s word וַיַּשְׁכֵּן, “he stationed,” all four Targumim have the Aramaic words אשרי יקר שכינתיה, “he caused the glory of his Immanence to dwell.” In other words YHWH himself, or “his Immanence,” dwelled east of Eden. This shows that the vocalization of the verse’s fourth word underlying their translations was וַיִּשְׁכֹּן, a qal form meaning “he dwelled” or “he went to settle”, rather than MT’s וַיַּשְׁכֵּן, a hiph‘il form meaning “he caused to dwell” or “he stationed.” (For a similar confusion with the pointing of this verb, see Jer 7:3 and 7:7.)
The surplus reference to “God’s Immanence” does not reflect a different text, but is the way the targumim euphemistically refer to God when he is said to be dwelling somewhere, likely in order to avoid applying anthropomorphic language to the Deity.
Understanding the rest of the verse involves taking את et (the direct object marker) in its original meaning of “with.” That’s easy enough to do, since this meaning of את occurs some 800 times in the Bible (see, for example, Gen 5:22).
An obvious question is why an original Qal verb (meaning “he dwelt”) would have started being read as a Hiphil (“he caused … to dwell”). Don’t forget that the vowel signs are many centuries newer than the consonants; either way, the original written text would have said וישכן. One obvious reason to change the reading is to do what the four targumim did explicitly: to preserve God’s honor and distance God from doing a physical action.
This is a well-known phenomenon. I don’t have space for a full discussion today; those who are interested can find more here. In our text, Eichler explains, YHWH himself dwelling outside the garden makes more sense:
Indeed, it is only natural that God should abandon the garden of Eden after driving Man out. His original plan was for Man to till and tend it (לעבדה ולשמרה: Gen 2:15); once Man was absent from the garden, there would be no one to maintain it, and thus it would not be fit for habitation nor serve any constructive purpose.
The reader, therefore, expects God to relocate; our verse explains where God chooses to settle and why. Never again in the Hebrew Bible is the Garden of Eden referred to as an extant habitation of God; yet, unless the targumic reading is original, we are never told when or even that it ceased to be so.
I’m of two minds about this. I appreciate Eichler’s argument and have a lot of respect for his scholarship. And I’m not committed to the Masoretic text when I find it confusing. Still, I prefer to leave it alone when it makes sense as is. For now, I’m sticking with my translation.
See you next time, when we will meet (cue ominous music) “the griffins.”