Multiple Choice (Gen 3:17)

Into and Out of the Garden

Since this is a free Sunday post — and since perhaps there are some new readers referred here from my Torah Talk column, whether on Substack or on the Times of Israel — I’m going to spend a bit of time today on a broader discussion before we resume our careful close reading of Gen 3:17, slightly further down.

Many religious people view what has happened in Genesis 3 as a crime followed by a punishment, but as I’ve said many times those words never occur in the story. Perhaps I should have said: in this version of the story. As those who have been around for a while recall, this garden comes on screen again in Ezekiel 28, where its inhabitant is the king of Tyre. God (via the prophet) tells him (in the NJPS translation):

¹³       You were in Eden, the garden of God …

¹⁵       You were blameless in your ways,

         From the day you were created

         Until wrongdoing was found in you.

¹⁶       By your far-flung commerce

         You were filled with lawlessness

     And you sinned.

Our story — beginning with an encounter between snake and woman whose beginning is not told to us — is more complicated than one of sin and punishment. It’s clear that other versions of the creation story existed; some of them are alluded to in the Bible itself. I’m trying to read this version of the story so carefully because I’m convinced that it’s being told carefully, using all the tools of great literature to convey its message.

A literary reading of this kind does not mean that I’m trying to avoid discussing how the text of the Bible that we have today developed from earlier sources, nor how its text may have changed while human beings were copying it from scroll to scroll and transmitting it from generation to generation. We’ll see one example of such a change by the end of today’s post. In Bible graduate school this phenomenon is a full semester: Text Criticism of the Bible (“criticism” in the sense of crticial analysis, not of criticizing).

All of these ways of looking at the text are necessary if we want — as I most certainly do — to figure out as best we can what the original writers were trying to achieve. Today, that’s going to leave us room to discuss just a single Hebrew word.

¹⁷ on your account בַּֽעֲבוּרֶ֔ךָ

The last word of the short phrase that begins the second half of this verse is more complicated than it looks. Two Biblical Hebrew dictionaries even disagree on whether the ב is a word to itself or whether the combination בעבור should be considered a word. I’ll leave that to the lexicographers; everyone agrees that the Hebrew ba’avur means that the ground is cursed “on account of” the man.

Almost everyone, that is. The King James Bible says “for thy sake,” which presumably means the same thing. It’s possible (I suppose) that there’s still a question of whether the ground is cursed …

• because of what the man did, or

• toward the man in his future endeavors.

There’s an interesting technique in biblical poetry that may apply here. It’s called “Janus parallelism,” named by Cyrus Gordon when he described this feature in the Song of Songs. Song 2:12 has three parts, not the usual two of biblical poetry, and the middle phrase uses the word זמיר zamir. The first phrase in the line describes the blooming of flowers, so we read zamir in the second phrase as a gardening word, “pruning.” But the third phrase describes birdsong, so it’s natural to recalibrate and take zamir musically as “singing.”

Which of those two is correct? Well, it’s poetry, so “Greenstein’s law” applies. Ed Greenstein, who formulated it this way at a conference honoring his teacher H. L. Ginsberg, didn’t want it to be called “Greenstein’s Law,” but I had to have some shorthand way to refer to it in my teaching. Greenstein’s Law says, “If a word can mean A or it can mean B, it means both until proven otherwise.” Since both those meanings work beautifully in the poem, we assume the poet meant them both. Janus, of course, was the Roman god of doors, the god who could look both ways simultaneously (and who gave us January). You read zamir one way looking backward and a different way looking forward.

Here too the implication when we first read ba’avurkha is that this is the result of the man’s action in listening to the woman and eating what YHWH had told him not to eat. When we read on, it’s the consequences that follow. So both those meanings might well be in play. Can Janus parallelism really occur in prose as well as poetry? Having myself written a paper on “Janus Parallelism in Job 1:20,” in the prose introduction to the book of Job, I have to say yes.

Believe it or not, we still have two more meanings of this little word ba’avurkha to discuss. The first we’ll look at comes from the 13^th-c. French Bible scholar Hezekiah ben Manoah (Hizkuni), who comments as follows:

Cursed be the ground because of you. Not “because of you” but “with regard to your produce”; that is how the Hebrew word is used in Josh. 5:11, “they ate of the produce [עֲב֥וּר] of the country.”

That’s a rare usage, occurring only there and in the very next verse, but that doesn’t rule it out. In any case, that meaning would add more of the same to what we already understand, so I suppose it’s not impossible our author meant that as well.

But did he mean “the ground is cursed in your work”? That’s the implication of the Septuagint, which translates בעבורך with the Greek words ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις σου. (That’s ergois, as in ergonomic, the Greek word for work.) Textual scholars point out that this is not translating בעבורך (from עבר ‘cross, go through’) but עבודך (from עבד ‘work’). It’s an easy mistake to make in reading or in writing Hebrew; compare Num 1:14 and 2:14 and then tell me whether Eliasaph was the son of Deuel or of Reuel.

There’s a similar confusion in Exod 21:29, with the goring ox whose owner must “guard” it (יִשְׁמְרֶ֔נּוּ, in the Hebrew text) or “destroy” it (ἀφανίσῃ αὐτόν, = יַשְׁמִידֶנּוּ, in the Greek text). In the Talmud (Baba Kamma 45b) Rabbi Eliezer says, “There’s no way to ‘guard’ it except to slaughter it” — suggesting that he knew, and perhaps accepted, both readings. Might the same be true here?