Hark! (Gen 3:8)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁸ They heard YHWH God walking around in the garden

 וַֽיִּשְׁמְע֞וּ אֶת־ק֨וֹל יְ׳הוָ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים מִתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ בַּגָּ֖ן

The humans have eaten fruit from the Tree of Sorting, but YHWH God does not know that (!) yet. In the story Genesis is telling, these are the last moments of humanity’s childhood. As always, we’ll approach what’s happening by looking carefully at what the Hebrew words are telling us.

Believe it or not, this is the first time anyone has heard anything anywhere in the Bible, after two chapters (and 10 instances) of seeing. Precisely what they heard is not as clear as I’ve made it sound; as you remember, that possibility exists whenever you’re reading a translation. In this case, I’ve made at least two assumptions, and I’ve even left out one of the Hebrew words.

The word I’ve left out of my translation is קול qol, another word we’re seeing for the first time. The verb that precedes it, שׁמע sh-m-ʿ ‘hear’, is frequently paired with ראה r-ʾ-h ‘see’, which we’ve already seen 10 times, starting with the fourth verse in the entire Bible. [Those two marks that resemble single quotes are the shorthand way to mark two letters we don’t have in our alphabet: a “close quote” ʾ for ʾaleph and an “open quote” ʿ for ʿayin.] Both verbs, like their English counterparts, are used for more than just literally hearing and seeing.

More on that shortly; now let’s talk about what our friends have heard. It is a qol, of course, and I did not even give a quick, one-word definition of it because it too is a more complicated word than it seems. The basic meaning of the word is “a sound.” When it is a sound made by a person, קול can mean “a voice,” as in “Let me hear your voice” (Song 2:14). קול is also used to say “A sound!” in more or less the same way English used to use the word “Hark!”

And there is one more meaning of this word: “thunder.” For an example, let’s look at Exod 19:16, at Mount Sinai on the day the Israelites are to receive what we now call the Ten Commandments:

On the third day, when it was morning, there were thunderclaps [קֹלֹ֨ת] and lightning flashes [בְרָקִ֜ים] and a dense cloud on the mountain.

The קול that is thunder is very much associated with YHWH; see Psalm 29, where it is a theme of the poem. Exod 20:18 (v. 15 in some Bibles) tells us that at Sinai the Israelites could actually see the thunder (רֹאִ֨ים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹ֜ת), a phenomenon that Deuteronomy jumped on like white on rice.

There is nothing in our story except the presence of YHWH to suggest that the qol they heard was thunder, though (as we’ll see) the humans were certainly startled by it. But is it the “voice” of God, who may not be human but is certainly a “person” in the Bible? Or is it the “sound” of God? By leaving קול out of my translation, I can preserve that ambiguity better than if I were to add it. Still, what are we supposed to imagine they heard? God’s size-18s stomping on the ground? YHWH humming to himself, or checking the progress of his tomatoes?