Time to Relax (Gen 3:8)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁸ when it was time to relax. לְר֣וּחַ הַיּ֑וֹם

In Tuesday’s post, our fruit-eating friends had just heard a noise. We were told, and we were left to assume that the humans also understood, that this was YHWH God walking around his garden. There are two more words in this first half of v. 8, which have always been interpreted as telling us when this happened. You will not be surprised, by this point in our journey, to learn that this phrase is much harder to understand than it seems.

R. Johanan b. Hanina to the rescue! (By the way, Johanan — or as we would more likely transliterate it today, Yochanan — is the Hebrew name from which we get English “John” and all its variants in other languages.) On 38b of Tractate Sanhedrin in the Babylonian Talmud (here in the Soncino translation) he gives us a complete rundown of the schedule of Day Six of creation:

The day consisted of twelve hours.

• In the first hour, his [Adam's] dust was gathered;

• in the second, it was kneaded into a shapeless mass.

• In the third, his limbs were shaped;

• in the fourth, a soul was infused into him;

• in the fifth, he arose and stood on his feet;

• in the sixth, he gave [the animals] their names;

• in the seventh, Eve became his mate;

• in the eighth, they ascended to bed as two and descended as four;

• in the ninth, he was commanded not to eat of the tree,

• in the tenth, he sinned;

• in the eleventh, he was tried, and

• in the twelfth he was expelled [from Eden] and departed.

For it is written, Man abideth not in honour. [Ps 49:13]

The “first hour” in rabbinic terms starts at 6 AM. They heard the noise after “sinning” (by which R. Yochanan means eating from the tree) and before being “tried” (perhaps a reference to vv. 9–13). The “eleventh” hour would begin at 4 PM, so R. Yochanan seems to be suggesting that v. 8 takes place just before that. Let’s call it quarter to four.

The question remains, how does R. Yochanan know that l’ruaḥ ha-yom indicates 3:45 PM? That phrase breaks down this way:

• l’- ‘to, for’

• ruaḥ ‘wind, spirit’

• ha- ‘the’

• yom ‘day’

KJV translates, “in the cool of the day,” but Speiser (in the Anchor Bible) observes:

The Heb. preposition lᵉ- may be used of time (cf. 8:11), but not temperature; hence the memorable “in the cool of the day” lacks linguistic support. The time involved is toward sundown, when fresh breezes bring welcome relief from the heat.

The 20^th-c. Italian-Israeli scholar Umberto Cassuto offers this word of caution:

Numerous attempts have been made to explain this expression, which is found nowhere else in the Bible. The rabbinic expositions … do not reflect the actual sense of the verse.

The traditional commentators assume that a unique phrase demands a unique explanation: