Taken (Gen 3:19)

Into and Out of the Garden

¹⁹ for from it you were taken כִּ֥י מִמֶּ֖נָּה לֻקָּ֑חְתָּ

Over the series of posts covering Gen 3:14–19, one of the things we’ve noticed is the repeated use of words that link the condemnations of the three characters: snake, woman, man. I’ll undoubtedly forget a few in the list that follows, and I won’t try to provide links to the posts discussing them, but here are some of the connections, obvious and otherwise:

• ארור arur ‘cursed’ and eating dirt “your life long” link the snake and the man.

• Eternal enmity links the snake and the woman.

• עצבון itzavon ‘grief’ and “more” of it than before link the woman and the man.

Now we must discuss one more linkage that takes us away from the condemnations and moves us up a level to the larger story of Version 2 of creation. It’s found in the quatrain at the end of v. 19, which I suggested was written as a kind of coda to the three poetic addresses that followed YHWH’s interrogation of the woman and the man.

Line 3 of that quatrain is at the top of this post, and the key word I’m looking at is לֻקָּ֑חְתָּ luqqáḥta ‘you were taken’. V. 23 will reiterate that the adam was taken from adama, the second and third times we’ve seen this unusual Qal Passive form in our story. The first (go there for more on the grammar) was in 2:23, where the earthling identifies his newly created partner as an אשה isha ‘woman’ because she was taken from an איש ish ‘man’.

Last time, unexpectedly, we learned in our quatrain that the adam (an alternative name in Version 2 for the ish) would eventually return to the adama from which he was taken. Implicitly — as with the implicit “more”-ness of dardar and harbah arbeh — the woman too will “return” to a grave in the earth just as the man will.

It would be bathetic (with a b) to imagine a literal rewinding of the story — first, the woman is reversed back into a joist, which is then restored to the man before he himself returns to earth. Nonetheless, the word luqqáḥta is here to remind us that God is perfectly capable of unmaking this omelet. I said God (the hero of Version 1) and not YHWH God (the divine character in Version 2) because, as we’ll see eventually, creation as a whole will literally be reversed in the time of Noah.

What’s interesting is that picturing the Flood as a reversal of creation is a motif in the priestly version of that story. The more limited and literary reversal implied here in Version 2 is in the biblical voice of J. (One quite small example is that God “calls” things to name them in Version 1, while in Version 2 the adam “calls” things by a “name.”) It’s interesting to speculate whether the literary connections between Versions 1 and 2 that we’ve seen were seized upon by the composer of the overall text or inserted to help forge the link between them.

Now, on with our story.

²⁰ The earthling named his woman Ḥavvah. וַיִּקְרָ֧א הָֽאָדָ֛ם שֵׁ֥ם אִשְׁתּ֖וֹ חַוָּ֑ה

I don’t usually use a dot to differentiate ח from ה when ח occurs in a name. I’m doing it this time because we’ll be talking about what this name might mean.

Oh — have I mentioned that there are lots of links in vv. 14–19 between man, woman, and snake? Just saying, because here is another one: חוה is “Eve” (as we call her in English) and it is also an Aramaic word for “snake.” Check the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon — your tax dollars at work — if you do not believe me. The first example they quote there, from one of the Sefire inscriptions, says this:

• wbʿmh [yʾkl p]m ḥwh wpm ʿqrb

• may the mouth of the serpent and the mouth of the scorpion devour among his people

If you have an Aramaic translation of the Bible handy (as I know some of you do), have a look at Gen 3:1, where our friend the snake first appears. He is נחשׁ in the original Hebrew, but חִיויָא (a variant of חוה) in the Targum.

A bigger question is: Why? If you’ve been following me right through this series, you are probably willing to agree that our author is capable of making this play on words simply for his own writerly pleasure. Still, in a text this significant, we’d like to think something important is being said here. Reuven Kimelman (whom I studied with and TA’d for at Brandeis) has this to say, in an article called “The Seduction of Eve and the Exegetical Politics of Gender”: