The Tell-Tale Tree (Gen 3:8)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁸ The human and his woman hid themselves from YHWH God’s face.

וַיִּתְחַבֵּ֨א הָֽאָדָ֜ם וְאִשְׁתּ֗וֹ מִפְּנֵי֙ יְ׳הוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים

Earlier in this verse, “they” (the two humans) heard YHWH in the garden. Now we see how they react to what they heard: they hide from him. Why did they hide? A closer look into the Hebrew expression will give us a hint.

You can just hide “from” someone; nonetheless, there is nothing strange about hiding “from the face” of someone. The Hebrew preposition מן min ‘from’ seems to like to add a second component. The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew offers 27 different such “from” compounds, and some of them are quite common.

Nonetheless, this is the only place where one hides “from the face” of someone with the verb חבא. With סתר, the other Hebrew root that means “hide,” it’s used four or five times. If you really want to do a verb + someone’s face, try being afraid of someone: ירא מפני. That expression is found in the Bible about three dozen times.

I don’t know any reason why the verb here is חבא or any reason why it shouldn’t be. Though סתר is more common, it is not overwhelmingly so. And to hide (with either verb) “from the face” of someone is a quite natural Hebrew idiom, not at all as strange as it sounds in English. Nonetheless, I think our author, who I’ve suggested is writing literature rather than journalism, may have used mi-p’nei to hint that they are afraid.

David Kimhi explains:

They were embarrassed both at their nakedness and at having violated God’s command.

In plain English, they are not ready to “face” YHWH just at this moment.

There’s another important point to mention here. In the conversation between the snake and the woman, both of them used plural verbs to describe the humans acting together. Only in v. 7 do the woman and man act independently, and even there, he is simply following her lead. At the beginning of v. 8 it is once again “they” who heard the sound of YHWH in the garden.

Not everyone likes to pay close attention to grammatical details, but if (as I think) the writer was paying them that kind of attention, good readers should also want to do so, and here at the end of v. 8 the grammar is serving a literary purpose. In contrast with the plural verb at the beginning of the verse, we now have a verb that is masculine and singular, followed by a compound subject: “the” adam and “his” isha. Strictly as a grammatical phenomenon, it’s admittedly quite common to have a singular verb matching just the first part of a compound subject. A few examples for those who know some Hebrew:

• אָ֣ז יָשִֽׁיר־מֹשֶׁה֩ וּבְנֵ֨י יִשְׂרָאֵ֜ל (Exod 15:1)

• וַתָּ֣שַׁר דְּבוֹרָ֔ה וּבָרָ֖ק בֶּן־אֲבִינֹ֑עַם (Jud 5:1)

It’s reasonable to ask, however, why our verse didn’t simply continue by saying “they heard … and they hid [וַיִּֽתְחַבְּאוּ].”

If you like, you might say that she took the lead before they ate and he took the lead afterward. But it seems to me that something stronger is going on here. Even though she scoped out the situation, took the fruit, ate it, and gave some to him, it was not until after he ate that “they” realized they were naked.

You remember that the woman was called isha specifically because she was “taken” from an ish, and v. 6 actually calls this adam her ish. Here, the wording seems to want to make them separate, not in action but in their inner nature. They are beings of a different kind, according to the words used for them in this phrase, and indeed the moment when “they” heard YHWH God walking around the garden is the last verb “they” do together in the Bible.

inside the garden’s tree. בְּת֖וֹךְ עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן׃

Talk about returning to the scene of the crime! I’m pushing things once more, as you see. The natural way to read etz here is as a collective noun, the same way we read it in v. 2, for example, and following the pattern that began in Genesis 1.

However! Let me remind you that YHWH created, along with the varieties of ornamental trees and fruit trees, a Tree of Life inside the garden [עֵ֤ץ הַֽחַיִּים֙ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַגָּ֔ן, 2:9]. The woman told the snake that they could not eat or touch the tree inside the garden [‏הָעֵץ֮ אֲשֶׁ֣ר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן֒, 3:3, which has now apparently switched identities to become the Tree of Sorting]. Now, they are hiding inside the garden’s tree [בְּת֖וֹךְ עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן here in 3:8]. To quote Cassuto:

Why just among the trees of the garden (עץ has, of course, a collective sense here), and not in some other place; for example, in a cave or the like? All three of these words have already appeared a number of times in our section … Such repetitions do not occur without a definite purpose. It would seem that the words are intended to hint that though the sinner was trying to forget his sin and cause others to forget it, he is unable to silence the voice of his conscience and to obliterate the traces of his misdeeds; at every step he encounters objects that remind him and others of the transgression that he has committed.

I certainly don’t agree with calling what they did a sin, and it’s not clear to me what “others” there are to be reminded about their snack or where in Xanadu there are caves. I prefer to think of this as a literary technique, holding “that tree” in “that garden” — in fact, “inside” that garden, perhaps even “in the middle” of it — up in front of us, the readers. I don’t see this as a comic story, so I’ll stifle my natural impulse to imagine that they actually have climbed up into the same tree from which they ate in order to hide.

If we take seriously the assertion that they “sewed fig leaves to make themselves loincloths” (v. 7), a fair amount of time has passed. That cannot have been simple to do. In narrative time, though, it took just six words. They have not quite been caught in flagrante delicto, but they sure think they have, and that’s how we readers see them. The one person who can’t see them is YHWH. In v. 9, our perspective shifts to his. We’ll talk about that next time.