Up Next (Gen 3:22)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²² Now, then. וְעַתָּ֣ה

We spent all of Sunday’s free post discussing the single letter פ that marked 3:22 as the beginning of a new section, one that will run to the end of Genesis 4. Congratulations, paid subscribers! Today we are discussing four letters (count ‘em, 4), a 300% increase. If that is not worth your money, I don’t know what is.

Once again we’re encountering a word we have not seen before. As we’ll see shortly, it’s more significant than may at first appear. ʿatta (with an ע) means “now.” It’s related to עֵת ʿet ‘time’, as in Ecclesiastes 3 (set to music by Pete Seeger and made famous by the Byrds), where there is a “time” for every purpose under heaven. Modern Hebrew has עִתּוֹן ittōn‘ newspaper’ — that is, “the Times.”

We are in v. 22b by now, but Speiser in his Anchor Bible commentary translates what YHWH says, including most of v. 22a, this way:

 “Now that the man has become like one of us in discerning good from bad, what if he should put out his hand and taste also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever!

He comments:

“Now that. Heb. hēn … wᵉʿattā introduce the protasis and the apodosis, so that the two clauses cannot be interpreted as independent.

Okay! The words protasis (prah-tuh-sis) and apodosis (uh-pah-duh-sis) are normally used to refer to the if-clause and then-clause of a sentence like “If you lived here, [then] you would be home by now.” Speiser is using the words in a somewhat broader way with the sense “since they have become like us, therefore another unwelcome situation may occur.”

Back on the level of individual words, he is either translating ʿatta as “what if” or he has somehow promoted וְעַתָּ֣ה ‘and now’ to the beginning of YHWH’s speech, quietly omitting the conjunction. But that little ו (vav) is crucial, as it so often is in understanding the Hebrew of the Bible.

The word עַתָּה occurs 433 times. Gen 22:12 offers an example:

• ‏כִּ֣י ׀ עַתָּ֣ה יָדַ֗עְתִּי כִּֽי־יְרֵ֤א אֱלֹהִים֙

• For now I know that you are a God-fearing man.

But וְעַתָּה is a completely different animal. Bill Schneidewind of UCLA (who was two years ahead of me when I was in grad school at Brandeis) wrote an article on this word, calling it “A Transition Particle in Ancient Hebrew.” He makes these two points: