Two Naked People (Gen 2:25)

Into and Out of the Garden

²⁵ The two of them were … וַיִּֽהְי֤וּ שְׁנֵיהֶם֙

Before we get to the clickbait — that’s right, I said these people are NAKED — let’s take a moment to look at where we are in the story.

In Christian Bibles, this is the last verse of Genesis 2. I’ve been using the chapter and verse numbers right along, to make our discussion easy to follow, so this might be a good time for a reminder: the chapter divisions are Christian, and not Jewish.

As I pointed out many months ago, each of the seven days of creation in Version 1 is a paragraph on its own in a Jewish Bible or a Torah scroll, but then the story continues without a break all the way through 3:20. There are shorter breaks before and after 3:16, which we’ll discuss when we get to that verse. You can learn about how the Hebrew indicates these divisions in my column “Paragraphs and Semi-Paragraphs.”

For present purposes, what I want to emphasize is that this verse is not a conclusion of any kind, not even a pause. We are reading a continuous story, the one that I’ve called “Into and Out of the Garden.” The NJPS translation presents this verse as the beginning of a new section, a decision that is equally unjustified by the Hebrew. Warning! Just as we all naturally think the English versions we read are the Bible, instead of the translations they actually are, even the formatting in your English Bible may well be an editorial decision.

One reason the NJPS presents this verse as the beginning of a new paragraph, I would guess, is that they have also chosen to present all but the first two (Hebrew) words of v. 23 as poetry rather than prose. Thinking literarily, the poetic qualities of that verse are clear. The Masoretic (traditional Hebrew) text just does not use special formatting to distinguish poetry from prose as we like to do today, outside of Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, and Judges 5.

Then v. 24 says על-כן ‘therefore’, which clearly points backward in explanation of what it is about to say. So it is reasonable to think of v. 25 as resuming the story. Because the mood is so different from the excitement of v. 23, it makes sense to start a new English paragraph here. I just want to emphasize that, although v. 25 is the last verse of Genesis 2, it is not the end of anything. We are resuming a story that is already in progress. So let’s return to our two nudists.

… nude, עֲרוּמִּ֔ים

Did I mention that these people were naked? With very few exceptions, most of us knew the story before we read the words, so it’s quite hard to put ourselves into the minds of ancient people hearing or reading this story or some version of it. On a first encounter, did they think of these people as being undressed?

The King of Tyre, in Ezekiel 28, was covered with bling, so we must presume he was wearing some clothes too, and not just “The King of Tyre’s New Clothes.” Our young couple are different. They are not wearing anything.