The Tree was Good (Gen 3:6)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁶ The woman saw that the tree was good for eating, it was תַֽאֲוָה to the eyes, and the tree was attractive לְהַשְׂכִּ֔יל.

וַתֵּ֣רֶא הָֽאִשָּׁ֡ה כִּ֣י טוֹב֩ הָעֵ֨ץ לְמַאֲכָ֜ל וְכִ֧י תַֽאֲוָה־ה֣וּא לָעֵינַ֗יִם וְנֶחְמָ֤ד הָעֵץ֙ לְהַשְׂכִּ֔יל

There’s an awful lot going on in v. 6 even before this woman picks the fruit. I’m hoping she and her man will have something to eat by Sunday brunch; let’s see how it goes. As you see, I’m waiting until next time to translate two of these words I won’t have space to discuss at length in this post.

The first four words of the verse are not a complete sentence, but if they were, we would translate them as follows:

The woman saw that it was good.

Sound familiar? Nahum Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary, observes:

There is an undertone of irony in the formulation that she “saw that it was good,” for it echoes God’s recurring judgment about His creation in chapter 1.

He goes on to say that “good has become debased in the woman’s mind.” Count me among those who disagree. Just because the fruit of this tree tastes good (as it apparently does), is that necessarily a debasement of the Genesis 1 creation? We never really discussed what “good” meant in that story; I don’t think there was supposed to be anything philosophical or metaphysical about it. God created the material world and thought it was good — in fact, “it was really good” (1:31).

This “formulation” suggests that the woman agrees. In fact, it suggests that she is already “like elohim,” replicating an earlier divine action just as the man did in naming the animals. Jack Sasson explains:

[T]he narrator reveals [the woman’s perceptions] to parallel God’s own characterization of the flora in the garden … [This] makes it impossible to deny that, even before she had taken one bite from any fruit, the woman’s capacity to reason was fairly sophisticated, potentially even a match for God’s.¹

That is, in plain English, she already knows ‘good’. And something else is going on as well. The replication of the famous phrase from Version 1 is like the repetition of a musical phrase in a different context, a trick of the composer’s art. In context, what “the woman saw” is something much more complex — and more interesting. She saw …

• that the tree was good for eating

• that it was תַֽאֲוָה to the eyes

• the tree was attractive לְהַשְׂכִּ֔יל

The very first of these phrases is yet another repetition, this time from Gen 2:9, part of Version 2, when YHWH God first caused every tree that was “good for eating [ט֣וֹב לְמַאֲכָ֑ל]” to grow. This exactly matches the first thing the woman saw: טוֹב֩ הָעֵ֨ץ לְמַאֲכָ֜ל. She and God are seeing the world the same way. No wonder it looks good! The only thing not good that we have seen so far was the fact that she did not yet exist, which of course has now been remedied.

When we look at 2:9 as a whole, though, we begin to see that perhaps we need to slow down, look around, and think again:

YHWH God caused to sprout from the ground every tree attractive² for seeing or good for eating, and the tree of life was also in the garden and so was the Tree of Sorting.

The second matching phrase is not merely repeating a pretty melody. Instead, there is a slight dissonance here, one that does not necessarily sound tov at all. When we originally read that verse, we assumed (correctly, I believe) that it was telling us about two different categories of trees, those that produced food and others that were ornamental. Now I am wondering whether something additional may have been going on in 2:9.

As I’ll explain at greater length one day in my long-threatened book on biblical poetry, rhythm and parallel phrasing play a large role when the goal is to convey ideas in a literary way and not just journalistically. The pattern of 2:9 might hint that we should think of the two special trees each belonging to one of the categories: