The Woman Speaks (Gen 3:2)

Into and Out of the Garden

² The woman said to the snake, “We can eat some of the fruit from the trees in the garden.” וַתֹּ֥אמֶר הָֽאִשָּׁ֖ה אֶל־הַנָּחָ֑שׁ מִפְּרִ֥י עֵֽץ־הַגָּ֖ן נֹאכֵֽל׃

I haven’t found a commentator who thinks it’s significant enough to mention, but the woman’s reply adds a word the snake does not use, one that we haven’t seen yet in Version 2: פרי p’ri ‘fruit’ — yes, as in “be fruitful.” The trees in Version 1 were indeed fruit-bearing trees (see 1:11–12 and 29), and in v. 29 there they are explicitly given to the humans as food, without restriction.

I don’t want to make too much of this — ow! ow! stop twisting my arm! — all right, I will go ahead and make too much of it. To make it short and sweet, people don’t eat trees, we eat the fruit that grows on them. We saw when the man he named the animals that he was quite capable of making distinctions. Perhaps this subtle emendation of the snake’s words is hinting to us that the woman is equally capable.

Creators like Nabokov and Mozart love to add special gifts that only the good readers or listeners will get. Regular readers know that I am always on the lookout for them, hoping to qualify as a “good” reader. That may mean that I’m sometimes over-eager to find more meaning in a word or phrase than the author intended to put there, and this may be one of those times.

Alternatively, it may be here as a way of harmonizing the garden story with Version 1, or it may simply be poetic license. Gary Rendsburg likes to say that the Bible loves variation, and perhaps this is a case of it. At least we’ve noticed.

A quick word here about the word מן min. If you need to give a one-word translation of it, that translation is “from.” But it’s often used the way we use “of” in English, which is how the KJV translates it in v. 1 when the snake says it. Both of and מן can be “partitive,” meaning “some of,” and that’s how I’ve understood the woman’s use of that word.

And now it’s time to go back to Genesis 2 for a refresher on vv. 9 and 16–17 there. There are some things coming up that conflict with the way I translated v. 9. I’m not going to change that translation, at least not just yet, since there are other crucial points in 2:9, 16–17 that seem to conflict with what we are about to read. Here are those verses again:

^2:9 YHWH God caused to sprout from the ground every tree desirable for seeing or good for eating and the tree of life was also in the garden [בְּת֣וֹךְ הַגָּ֔ן] and so was [וְ] the Tree of Sorting … ¹⁶ YHWH God commanded the earthling: You may totally eat from any tree in the garden ¹⁷ except from the Tree of Sorting, from which you must not eat. Once you eat from it you are totally going to die.

Some points that will inform our discussion for the rest of this post and some future posts as well:

• It is the tree of life that is explicitly said to be b’tokh ha-gan, which I originally translated as “also in the garden” — along with the trees that were “desirable for seeing or good for eating.”

• The Tree of Sorting is added with a simple conjunction ve- ‘and’. I interpreted this to mean that it too was “in the garden” along with the tree of life, even though b’tokh ha-gan sounds as if it applies only to the tree of life.

• I took this to mean that the two named trees were only in the garden, not outside.

I’m harping on this because we’ll find some difficulties that don’t depend on my own understanding of 2:9 as Genesis 3 continues: