13 The woman said, “The snake messed with my mind and I ate.”
וַתֹּ֙אמֶר֙ הָֽאִשָּׁ֔ה הַנָּחָ֥שׁ הִשִּׁיאַ֖נִי וָאֹכֵֽל׃
The earthling replied to YHWH with simple language. We know that what he told God was true, because we saw what happened in v. 6, and what he said in v. 12 matches what we saw. Is the woman also telling the truth?
Before we can answer that question, we must first determine what she’s saying. She most certainly is not repeating what we saw happening between her and the snake in vv. 1–5. Instead, she is describing their interaction, using the word הִשִּׁיאַ֖נִי hishiani ‘he [——]ed me’. There are two basic ways to translate this word found in standard translations:
He tricked or duped me (e.g., NJPS, NRSV, E.A. Speiser in the Anchor Bible)
He enticed or beguiled me (OJPS, KJV, Robert Alter, Everett Fox)
The verb is not a common one; look closely. It is not נשׂא ‘lift, carry’ (with a śin) but נשׁא with a shin. It’s found no more than a dozen times in the Bible, and perhaps less, depending on how you analyze things. The two possible etymologies for it are:
נשׁה ‘forget’
Joseph names his first-born Manasseh “because God has made me forget [נַשַּׁ֤נִי nashani] all my toil and my paternal home” (Gen 41:51).
שׁוא ‘deception, emptiness’
One of the Ten Commandments instructs, “Do not take the name of YHWH your God falsely [לַשָּׁ֑וְא la-shav]” (Exod 20:7; Deut 5:11).
Pseudo-Jonathan translates the word both ways (as the Aramaic translations sometimes do):
The serpent caused me to forget by his wisdom [אשייני בחוכמתיה] and led me astray by his wickedness [ואטעייני ברשיעותיה] and I ate.
Of the dozen occurrences of this verb, 5 involve the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE, where the Assyrian commander — speaking Hebrew! — warns the people not to let King Hezekiah do this verb to them. It’s not clear whether the Assyrians think he is “enticing” them or “duping” them into resisting. The other occurrences, in Jeremiah and Obadiah, are not much more helpful; one of the Jeremiah references adopts the language from the Assyrian siege to the Babylonian threat a century later.
It may be that this is a verb with a larger meaning than either “trick” or “entice” separately. The different English choices we’ve seen imply (1) that someone is trying to get you to do something, and (2) that there is a certain amount of deception involved in the attempt. Either or both would seem to make sense of the Hebrew verb. I’ve chosen a phrase, rather than a single verb, that expresses the general meaning without pointing to either of the two more specific meanings.
How does the woman’s saying that the snake “messed with her mind” apply to our story?
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