The Return (Gen 3:19)
Into and Out of the Garden
19 Until your return to the earth עַ֤ד שֽׁוּבְךָ֙ אֶל־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה
Wait, what? I’m not going anywhere!
It looks like you are, though. And perhaps this was inevitable, given that you are אדם adam and the earth (not the planet, but the dirt) is אדמה adama. Still, it comes as a bit of a shock.
From our later perspective — that is, from every human perspective outside the mythological realm in which this story takes place — “returning to the earth” means dying. The man will be disassembled and put back in the box, to be returned to the manufacturer for a newer model.
Cassuto observes that this is the explanation for an earlier phrase in our story, one that had us puzzled when we encountered it: כֹּ֖ל יְמֵ֥י חַיֶּֽיךָ kol y’mei ḥayyekha ‘all your life long’, a phrase spoken both to the man and to the snake. If you are told that something applies for the length of your life, it means that, long or short, your life will come to an end.
It’s interesting to notice how alike the man and the snake are. Let’s compare those two statements:
“dust shall you eat, all your life long” (v. 15)
“you shall eat it in grief all your life long” (v. 17)
The phrase may apply more broadly, but in its specific context “all your life long” refers in both cases to what they will eat. I called the post at the link above “Like Man, Like Snake,” and now we realize that they have even more in common than we thought.
“Return” here is שׁוב, a verb that occurs more than a thousand times in the Bible. This is its first appearance, and we will see it again before we move on to v. 20. Most translations say something like “until you return”; by contrast, I wrote “until your return.” That’s partly because I like to defamiliar the text so we can think about it more clearly, partly because one of the aims of this blog is to help people who are learning Biblical Hebrew. Those who aren’t interested yet in learning the language can skip to below the block quote.
Translations that say “until you return” instead of “until your return” are from my point of view perfectly correct, even much better for any purpose other than learning the language. That’s because this idiom, strange as it sounds to an English speaker, is utterly natural in Biblical Hebrew. Here’s the contrast:
English uses a verb with tense, a finite verb that pins down who’s doing the verb when.
Hebrew uses an infinitive, a verbal noun that just describes the action. Who’s doing it when must be added by other elements of the sentence. Here, it’s the preposition עד ad ‘until’ and the suffix ־ך -kha ‘your’ that give us the when and the who, respectively. (For more on infinitives, see Lesson 24 of my Hebrew course; watch the first lesson for free here.)
We encountered this syntax back in March (!) when we looked at Gen 2:4. That’s another place you can go for some discussion of it.
Cassuto makes a nice point about the resonances between this verse and 2:7.
We are getting close to the end of this section, and the harmony of the story requires that some sort of echo should be heard here from the story’s beginning.
We are not merely getting “close to the end of this section.” This verse is the last line of the poetic interlude before the story resumes, and the poetic quotient is getting higher. A look at the rest of this verse will show you what I mean.
עַ֤ד שֽׁוּבְךָ֙ אֶל־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה until your return to the earth
כִּ֥י מִמֶּ֖נָּה לֻקָּ֑חְתָּ for from it you were taken
כִּֽי־עָפָ֣ר אַ֔תָּה for dust you are
וְאֶל־עָפָ֖ר תָּשֽׁוּב׃ and to dust you shall return
I’ve numbered the four last phrases of our verse to point out some of what’s going on here poetically, marking the crucial words in bold. Different colors would be a plus if only Substack had them.
Lines 3 and 4 are parallel, with the following structure:
particle — afar ‘dust’ — address to ‘you’
ki ‘for’ — dust — atah ‘you [are]’ in line 3
v’el ‘and to’ — dust — tashuv ‘you shall return’ in line 4
They are what we might call a “couplet.”
Lines 1 and 4 are chiastic (more on that shortly), tying all four lines together as what we might call a “quatrain.”
The key words are these:
shuv ‘return’ — adama ‘earth’ in line 1
afar ‘dust’ — tashuv ‘you shall return’ in line 4
I somehow resisted the temptation to discuss chiasm when we looked at the hinge between Versions 1 and 2 of the creation story. It’s precisely chiasm that makes this verse a hinge — like the facing pages of a book. The difference is that, without a physical hinge like a book’s gutter and spine, a text demonstrates chiasm by reversing the order of the matching words. Instead of being parallel …
A — B — C
A — B — C
… they run in opposite order:
A — B — C
C — B — A
The name chiasm comes from the Greek letter chi (χ). If you draw a line connecting the matching ends of the verse (A and C in this example), you get an X. It isn’t tremendously intellectual to call something X-istic, so we replace X with a Greek letter that looks the same and makes us sound very erudite: χ-istic = chiastic. Read more here.
It’s a literary technique that has the effect of tying up your text in a little bundle, something akin to the inclusio (“envelope structure”) that scholars often find in the Bible. Like the aria that begins and ends Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” it tells us that the piece is about to end — because we have returned home.
The return home for adam — for us — is to adama, the earth he was originally made of, before YHWH “blew into his nostrils [אַפָּ֖יו appav, the same word where his sweat will be at the beginning of our verse] the breath of life” (2:7).
I’ll have more to say about this in v. 22, where it seems our story resumes. First, however, there are two verses in prose that give us information yet somehow without furthering the plot of the story. We’ll begin to look at them next time — after one more quick look at v. 19.