Intimacy (Gen 4:1)

You Can’t Go Home Again

^4:1 Now, the man had been intimate with his wife Ḥavvah. וְהָ֣אָדָ֔ם יָדַ֖ע אֶת־חַוָּ֣ה אִשְׁתּ֑וֹ

As we saw last time, putting ha-adam first in this sentence tells us that this is something that had already happened. Now we have to talk about exactly what it was that happened.

The answer some of you may be looking for is that he “knew” her “in the biblical sense of the word.” That is what happened, of course, but somehow that English-language expression has always seemed vaguely dirty to me (or perhaps that’s just how we use it). But this is also the same verb know that we use every day. It’s the verb our old friend the snake used when he (correctly) pointed out to the woman, “God knows [יֹדֵ֣עַ yode’a] that once you eat from [that tree], you will see what is hidden from you” (Gen 3:5).

The English word that shows us what’s going on with this expression is the word intimate. We all understand the adjective, with its sense of private, emotional closeness. What not everyone remembers is that English also has a verb “to intimate” (say the last syllable like the ate of ate lunch). Here’s the OED on this verb:

To make known or communicate by any means however indirect; hence, to signify, indicate; to imply, to suggest, to hint at.

As an example, they quote Waverley by Walter Scott:

The open avowal of what the others only ventured to intimate.

There are other verbs in Biblical Hebrew to use when people are having sex. Two of them are עִנָּה inna and שָׁכַב shakhav. I can’t say that ידע is always an indication of emotional closeness; the men of Sodom demand that Lot bring out his angelic visitors “so that we may ‘know’ [וְנֵדְעָ֖ה] them” (Gen 19:5). But there’s no reason to snigger. Knowledge “in the biblical sense of the word” is a perfectly straightforward expression.

Before we go on, let me say once more that we are given Ḥavvah’s name here for the second and last time in the Bible, while her partner is called ha-adam, not yet Adam. I’m thinking of stories like that of the birth of Samson in Judges 13, where his dolt of a father is named repeatedly yet his reasonably intelligent mother goes without a name. Here it’s the reverse. “The man” has one job — to get Ḥavvah pregnant — and will immediately disappear until v. 25. Ḥavvah herself still has a line, and two babies, to deliver, as we’ll see immediately.

And she got pregnant and gave birth. וַתַּ֙הַר֙ וַתֵּ֣לֶד

Women don’t give birth that often in the Bible, but when they do they like to get pregnant first. It’s true that you don’t always see הרה h-r-h before a birth, but about half the time you do. An interesting question I’m not going to explore today is whether different biblical writers tend to say “she conceived” before “she gave birth” or not. Keep this particular one in mind, however, because (as we said) Ḥavvah is going to give birth a second time without our being told that she got pregnant a second time.