17 Because you obeyed your wife כִּֽי־שָׁמַעְתָּ֮ לְק֣וֹל אִשְׁתֶּךָ֒
This can’t be the reason YHWH is so angry … or is it? The “real” reason must certainly be what follows, that he disobeyed YHWH, not that he obeyed the woman. N’est-ce pas?
Maybe it is. After all, had this verse said simply “… because you ate from the tree that I commanded you, ‘Don’t eat from it!’” we would not have batted an eyelid. Remember that a great part of the Torah and of the Israelites’ relationship with YHWH comes under the heading of obedience to his commands. And the instruction not to eat from the tree in 2:17 is introduced in 2:16 with the words “YHWH commanded the earthling.”
If we want to read this chapter as an integral part of the Torah as a whole — something I have not much insisted on — it does indeed make sense that what the earthling has done wrong here is not, or at least not merely, eating that fruit, but obeying the woman YHWH gave him rather than what YHWH himself said.
Before we proceed, this brief message from our ancestor Adam.
Although I translated l’adam in v. 17 as “about the man,” I’m contradicting what I wrote about this when I commented on “But for Adam” of Gen 2:20. See there for a longer discussion of the word adam, which can refer either to human beings in general, derived from the אדמה adama ‘earth, ground, soil’ of which we are made, or to a particular human being named Adam, who will appear at the beginning of Genesis 4. Robert Alter joins Richard Elliott Friedman, the NRSV (and me) in keeping this instance of the word generic:
to the human. The Masoretic Text vocalizes leʾadam without the definite article, which would make it mean “to Adam.” But since Eve in the parallel curse is still called “the woman,” it seems better to assume the definite article here.
A more pertinent discussion right now should probably be my translation of כִּֽי־שָׁמַעְתָּ֮ לְק֣וֹל אִשְׁתֶּךָ֒ as “because you obeyed your wife.” We first encountered the verb שׁמע sh-m-ayin ‘hear’ in v. 8, when they heard the qol of YHWH in the garden; click the link for a discussion of that word. Both there and in v. 10, where “the earthling” (ha-adam) admits having heard the qol of YHWH, qol is introduced with the particle את et, which Hebrew uses to indicate a definite direct object: not a voice or sound, but the voice or sound — when it’s the object of the verb, not the subject. (You can learn more about the grammatical aspect of this in Lessons 5 and 6 of my Hebrew course; watch the first lesson for free here.)
I still haven’t used an English word for qol in my translation, but I have translated it. That’s because there’s a difference between how it’s used in vv. 8 and 10 and how it’s used here. Instead of “hear” being followed by et — marking qol as the direct object of the verb, the thing you are hearing — it is following in our verse by ל־ l- ‘to’.
When you “listen to a voice” in Biblical Hebrew, שמע לקול, you are not just hearing it. You are “heeding” the person to whom the voice belongs, “obeying” that person. “How come you never listen to me?” is not about what your ears are doing. It’s a complaint that you never do what I say. In our verse too שָׁמַעְתָּ֮ לְק֣וֹל אִשְׁתֶּךָ֒ shamáta l’qol ishtékha means that the man “obeyed” her, which amounts to disobeying YHWH.
For the umpteenth time, I must reiterate that neither of our friends, the first man and woman, have committed a sin or done anything evil. Those words are not attached anywhere in Genesis 3 to eating from the tree. When YHWH issues these proclamations about what will happen to the characters in the future …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Bible Guy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.