7 So they sewed fig leaves to make themselves loincloths.
וַֽיִּתְפְּרוּ֙ עֲלֵ֣ה תְאֵנָ֔ה וַיַּעֲשׂ֥וּ לָהֶ֖ם חֲגֹרֹֽת׃
A word about “so” and “to” before we talk about the three (count ‘em!) words that appear here for the first time in the Bible.
The King James Version translates, “and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Don’t worry, we’ll get to the “aprons” shortly. Right now, I intend to talk about the English word and. Way back when, at the beginning of this Substack, I talked about the Biblical Hebrew story-telling verb form, the converted imperfect. (See Lesson 11 of my Hebrew course for the Teaching Company for more details.)
These “converted” or “consecutive” verb forms are marked with ו (vav), the all-purpose Hebrew conjunction that is often, but not always, translated as and. A translation like the KJV will (almost?) always translate that vav, because … it’s in the Bible. Since English verbs are not automatically linked that way, a translation that is trying to sound more modern will often ignore the and. The grammatical terminology, if I have it right, is that English is asyndetic, but Biblical Hebrew is syndetic. The Bible will even occasionally have a vav that’s simply impossible to translate into English
What English does instead is to simply state the next sentence, or connect it with the previous sentence with words like since or so or when or although or something of that sort. In English, it’s natural to convey the relationships between clauses and sentences. Our biblical verse is simply stating four consecutive facts:
וַתִּפָּקַ֙חְנָה֙ “and [their eyes] opened”
וַיֵּ֣דְע֔וּ “and they knew”
וַֽיִּתְפְּרוּ֙ “and they sewed”
וַיַּעֲשׂ֥וּ “and they made”
I’ve said before that simply translating doesn’t permit the translators to explain their choices. Nonetheless, all translation is an implicit commentary. In this case, I am stopping to explain that I’ve taken those four verbs stating facts and explicitly made “they sewed” a consequence of what they now knew, presenting “they made” as the purpose for which they sewed the leaves. I’m most certainly not going to go through this sort of explanation every time I make a choice of this kind, but I think it’s important to explain this every now and again. If you are an “and … and … and …” kind of Bible reader, consider yourself warned.
וַֽיִּתְפְּרוּ֙ and they sewed
Next time you hear someone mention “the oldest profession,” feel free to ask them innocently, “You mean tailoring?” There is, as Eccl 3:7 tells us, “a time to rend and a time to sew,” and a good time to sew is when you realize you are wandering around in the buff. With the act of sewing, as with the act of eating in the first place, we find the humans analyzing the situation and acting in order to achieve a goal.
The verb t-p-r ‘sew’ occurs only two other places — just four times anywhere in the entire Bible. That’s a good reminder that the words used in the Bible are a (perhaps small) subset of the words actually used in Hebrew in biblical times. Many everyday objects and actions just didn’t happen to be mentioned in a biblical story. There is a verb “to comb” [שׂרק], and we’ve discovered many ancient combs, but the noun “comb” doesn’t appear in the Bible even though combs were certainly in common use.
Wondering where they got sewing equipment? Don’t let Abraham ibn Ezra know:
Some loudmouths wonder where in this story we find a needle. Idiots! They were perfectly capable of using twigs to do this sewing.
And presumably an equivalent of thread could have been made from various plants on the scene. The Bible is not interested in that aspect of things. The point of the story is that they realized they were naked and solved the problem.
עֲלֵ֣ה תְאֵנָ֔ה “fig leaves”
The word עֲלֵה alé looks like it should be construct singular, but I’m not translating “a leaf of a fig” here. Instead, I’m following the lead of every scribe and translator throughout the ages. We all understand that they sewed “fig leaves,” plural. See Deut 14:7 for a case where a similar plural form is spelled once with ה at the end and once with the standard י that we teach in Biblical Hebrew class. What we don’t teach often enough in that class is that the biblical writers did not learn how to read or write from our textbooks, and what we call “rules” are really just our best guess about what’s going on.
Now some commentators weigh in on those fig leaves:
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.