Tailoring Done on the Premises (Gen 3:21)

Into and Out of the Garden

²¹ Then YHWH God made leather tunics for the man and his woman and dressed them.

 וַיַּעַשׂ֩ יְ׳הוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים לְאָדָ֧ם וּלְאִשְׁתּ֛וֹ כָּתְנ֥וֹת ע֖וֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵֽׁם׃ פ

Last time, I discussed the somewhat awkward storyline we’re faced with in vv. 20–21. The point was that naming the woman and making clothes for the couple are not the obvious next steps after you have decreed such terrible things for them. My understanding of what the writer is trying to do is that we readers were shown what was going on in heaven — that is, given an insight into YHWH’s thinking — while the humans in the garden were blissfully unaware of it.

Now we turn back to our detailed, careful reading of the text, at v. 21.

You’ll remember that Biblical Hebrew narrative style, like the legendary style of the old Time magazine, follows a V-S-O pattern (“backward ran sentences until reeled the mind, verb-subject-object). So the first Hebrew word in our verse is וַיַּעַשׂ֩ va-ya’as‘and he made’.

That word occurs 3 times in Version 1 and, as you remember, at the end of Genesis 1, “God saw all that He had made, and wow! it was really good” (1:31). In Version 2, the down-to-earth version of creation, YHWH “makes” things the way people do, out of other stuff. Even when he proposes to “make” a partner for the man (2:18), he has to take a piece of the man in order to do that. It’s an interesting distinction between Version 2 and the God’s-eye view Version 1.

The commentators and translators disagree about whether we are discussing “the man” here or “Adam.” I discussed the grammar in my comment to 2:20. Here, as in v. 17, I am calling this person “the man,” not Adam. If she is still “his woman” (though she acquired a name in the verse before this one), I’m going to let him still be “the man.” We’ll talk more about ha-adam when we get to v. 22.

The last three Hebrew words of this verse require more comment. We are seeing each of them for the first time in the Bible.

First, כָּתְנ֥וֹת kōtnōt ‘tunics’. Speiser in the Anchor Bible translates it as “shirts,” which gives you an idea of what they would look like; I prefer a word that sounds like and is probably related to the Hebrew. Here’s what the OED has to say about tunic:

Originally < classical Latin tunica (see below); probably subsequently reborrowed < (i) Anglo-Norman tunike, Middle French, French tunique loose, dress-like garment that covers the shoulders and torso and extends some way down the legs, with or without sleeves, and its etymon (ii) classical Latin tunica garment worn by both sexes, either by itself or under an outer garment, such a garment worn on special occasions; probably a borrowing from a Semitic language (compare Hebrew keṯōneṯ), from a word also borrowed into ancient Greek as χιτών chiton n.

(By the way, OED, it’s kuttōneṯ, not keṯōneṯ.)