To See What’s Hidden (Gen 3:5)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁵ … you will see what is hidden from you. וְנִפְקְח֖וּ עֵֽינֵיכֶ֑ם

What will be the result (per our friend the snake) if the humans eat from that tree?

The KJV translates, “your eyes shall be opened.” I often like to translate Hebrew idioms literally, to defamiliarize the biblical text. This is a case where I’m translating a Hebrew phrase idiomatically for the same purpose. So I need to talk about the two idioms in this phrase.

The first, and much more common one, is the word עֵֽינֵיכֶ֑ם eineikhem ‘your eyes’. (“Your” is plural, by the way; both the woman and the snake, throughout this conversation, have been talking about the two humans acting together.) We say in English that seeing is believing, and Deuteronomy loves to assert that as well; we’ll discuss that when we get to Gen 45:12, where a Deuteronomic voice makes the same claim.

Saying “your own eyes saw” is important for Deuteronomy because in Biblical Hebrew the eyes represent what you think. You may have heard — I myself may have said — that לב lev ‘heart’ is the biblical word for the mind. That’s quite true, but the eyes most certainly are at least in second place. I’ve mentioned before that people still love to contrast “Greek” seeing with “Jewish” hearing; let me emphasize again that this idea is way off base. So “your eyes shall be opened” is about a change of mind, not a change in the position of their eyelids.

That’s all the more so because “shall be opened” is a misleading translation of וְנִפְקְח֖וּ — not, of course, a deliberate one. But the King James translators could not explain, they could only translate. If they had stopped to explain, especially at the rate I myself am going, they would probably still be bogged down somewhere in the book of Isaiah. Since the purpose of this Substack is to explain, and not merely to translate, we need to take a close look at that verb.

וְנִפְקְח֖וּ [v’nifq’ḥu] is …

• 3rd common plural: That tells us that the subject of this verb is “your eyes.”

• converted perfect: That tells us that this is a future tense, “shall.”

• Niphal: Here is where things start to get complicated. In Modern Hebrew this is how you make a passive verb, the “be” of King James. That can certainly be true in Biblical Hebrew as well, but not every Niphal verb is what we would call passive — think of נלחם nilḥam ‘to fight’. In this case, the better translation would be “your eyes will open.” It’s not a transitive verb; their eyes will not “open” a beer. Grammatically, this is what’s called a “middle,” somewhere in between passive and active.

• פקח p-q-ḥ: And here is where the complication meter jumps through the roof. This is “opened” in the KJV, but פקח is not the Hebrew verb, then or now, that means “open.” That is פתח p-t-ḥ, and we will meet that root (though not the verb) in Genesis 4. פקח is a verb that means “open,” but the only thing you can open with it is your eyes. As far as I’m aware, English does not have such a verb, nor — to my great surprise — do we have any verb that’s a synonym for “open.”