Hiding (Gen 3:10)

Into and Out of the Garden

¹⁰ So I hid. וָאֵחָבֵֽא׃

At the end of our last post, we saw a subtle literary allusion playing out below the surface of v. 10. The human — that is, the man, since our female friend has gone missing from the story and will stay missing until it is time to point fingers — the man was afraid. He did not say so, but presumably he was afraid of YHWH, and fear of YHWH has a very specific meaning in a story, like ours, about gaining knowledge.

Now we have one last word in v. 10 that seems quite easy to translate. The question is whether the grammatical variation I’m about to point out has a similarly deep literary purpose, whether it is stylistic, or whether it is (gasp!) simply random. To explore what’s going on, I must explain something about the binyanim — not “buildings,” as the word means nowadays outside of grammatical discussions, but verbal patterns or frameworks.

Some of you are following this Substack not merely to learn more about Genesis as I discover it for myself, but also to work on your Biblical Hebrew. So I like to take advantage of the text to explain something about the grammar, vocabulary, or syntax of the Hebrew words in our verse. Last time, we saw a word out of normal sentence order, an anomaly that many translators have ignored, which we tried to learn from. This time, too, I expect to learn something about the meaning of our verse by working carefully on the Hebrew. Here we go.

English likes prefixes: convert, revert, divert, pervert — all of them different verbs, from our English-language perspective, created by taking a base -vert ‘turn’ and adding a prefix that “turns” the verb in one direction or another. Hebrew does not have this kind of prefix; instead, it shifts the meaning of a root by conjugating it in a different binyan. Here’s what I wrote about this in Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course (watch the first lesson for free here).

The Hebrew word binyan ( בִּניְָן, plural binyanim) refers to an aspect of the Hebrew verbal system unlike anything we have in English. A binyan is a pattern (also sometimes called a stem or conjugation) that changes the meaning of a verbal root. For example, the root ראה can mean “to see” in the Qal, “to appear” in the Niphal, “to show” in the Hiphil, and “to look at each other” in the Hitpa’el. All of them have something to do with your eyesight, but simply changing the pattern into which the three root letters are placed has the effect of changing our English translation to a completely different verb. In the Hebrew system, all of these words are clearly related.

So what, and who cares? Well, we ought to, because here at the end of v. 10, the human being is “hiding” in the Niphal binyan, after v. 8 told us that he and his woman “hid themselves” in the Hitpael binyan. In Modern Hebrew these two patterns are hardly related, but in Biblical Hebrew they are extremely similar. “To hide” and “to hide oneself,” if you think about it, would look exactly the same if you watched them on the security video. We’ve seen that the author of these chapters is writing at an extremely high level, so we must ask, What (if any) is the difference between these two verbs?

Randall Garr explains:

Although both verbs are derived from transitive החביא ‘hide’, the individual depictions are not quite the same. The first presents the writer’s viewpoint; the second presents that of the man. The first scenario, expressed in the hithpael, describes a deliberate action that the subject nouns direct to themselves. The man and the woman respond to the sound with a self-conscious and intentional act of evasion. The second, expressed as a niphal, is likewise an evasion—but of personal responsibility. The man only confesses to a simple act of concealment as a knee-jerk response to danger. Had the man used the hithpael, he would have admitted guilt. Instead, he deflects and offers a no-fault excuse as if it were a completely natural reaction. Each representation of concealment here is semantically and exegetically significant. [“Niphal & Hitpael,” JNES 80 (2021) 345]

What Garr is trying to show is that a Hitpael verb can be reflexive, that is, the subjects of a Hitpael can do the action to themselves. In Modern Hebrew, one shaves or showers in the Hitpael. He thinks that Niphal, at least in Biblical Hebrew, is “middle” rather than reflexive. I have translated that way — “hid themselves,” reflexive, for the Hitpael, and simply “hid,” which sounds like it should take a direct object but doesn’t, for the Niphal.

But … how exactly does the difference between those two verbs demonstrate an assertion or evasion of guilt? That’s not clear to me at all. Gary Rendsburg, who likes to point out that the biblical writers enjoy variety for its own sake, might suggest that this is simply another case of variation for esthetic reasons. I have a different explanation.

There are two reasonably common roots that mean “hide,” חבא and סתר. We’ll discuss the second of these when we encounter it in Gen 4:14, but I can tell you now that in the few cases we have of people talking about themselves hiding, they use the Niphal binyan to say so. Ours is the only example with חבא, but there are half a dozen of them with סתר.

So I think what we’re seeing here is not an excuse — don’t worry, he will come up with one soon — but simply a case where our writer is letting his character speak more colloquially than he himself, as narrator of the story, wants to speak. Once again, I must emphasize that this is not a story about sin, a word that we will not see for another ten chapters. There is conflict, for sure — that is what makes a story.

As we’ll see next time — quoting my late teacher Marvin Fox — “God is no dummy.” YHWH will figure out rather quickly what has happened. The fact that the two humans have eaten from the Tree of Sorting puts the ball squarely in God’s court. Fortunately for our friends, and unlike what will happen later in the Torah, this time God does not shoot first and ask questions afterwards. When we continue with v. 11, we’ll see YHWH asking the questions first, and then deciding how to proceed.