What Did “God” Say? (Gen 3:1)

Into and Out of the Garden

¹ “Besides, God said you could not eat from any tree in the Garden.”

 אַ֚ף כִּֽי־אָמַ֣ר אֱלֹהִ֔ים לֹ֣א תֹֽאכְל֔וּ מִכֹּ֖ל עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן׃

As we saw last time, with the saying that “a man leaves his father and his mother, sticks with his woman, and they become one flesh,” the narrator interrupted the action of the story. We did not realize it immediately, but the effect was like that moment when the theater goes dark at the end of a scene. When the lights go back up, at the beginning of Genesis 3, two different characters are on stage, the woman and “the” snake. Because the first thing we hear is the word אף af ‘even, also, besides’, David Kimhi (a commentator from 12^th-13^th c. Provence) pointed out that there must have been a whole conversation, “of which this is just the end.”

We also noted that:

• There is no indication in the Hebrew that the snake is asking a question. That is an interpretation, most likely adopted from the Aramaic translation.

• This snake is not Satan, but our author may be hinting at some relationship with the sea-serpents of 1:21.

There are two more points we have to look at in the language and the translation that will lead us to some larger considerations.

God אֱלֹהִ֔ים

Did you notice? Throughout Version 2, God has been called by his personal name, the Tetragrammaton: YHWH God. The snake refers to him but doesn’t use that name even though the verse has used it just before he speaks, to introduce him.

The 12^th-c. commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, Spanish but flourishing as a commentator only after he left Muslim Spain to wander through Christian Europe, considered himself an ultra-rationalist. He explains what the snake says this way:

The serpent did not say “the LORD God,” as the Holy One is called elsewhere in this story, because he did not know that name.¹

The narrator of our text — perhaps Ibn Ezra assumes it to be Moses — knew God’s name, but the snake did not. They hadn’t been introduced.

Ibn Ezra was well aware of the philosophical questions posed by the snake’s speaking. Nonetheless, he combined his reliance on reason with a profound religious belief and took the Torah’s assertion that this snake spoke for an observed fact.

Kimhi, who was born around the time Ibn Ezra died, responds (I’m quoting both men from my Commentators’ Bible translation):

Ibn Ezra thinks the serpent actually spoke like a human being, but one must ask how the story of creation could fail to single out such a creature, as man was singled out? And when the snake’s punishment is recorded, why is it not also cursed with the loss of its intelligence? We must conclude that the snake indeed spoke, but miraculously, in order for God to be able to test the woman.

Note that Ibn Ezra’s explanation requires him to assume that the serpent says “God” and not “Lord God” because he did not know the Tetragrammaton; our “miracle” explanation would simply mean that God would not place that exalted name in the serpent’s mouth, nor would the woman use it in conversation with an animal.

The snake does use the Tetragrammaton in the Aramaic translations of Onkelos and Pseudo-Jonathan, but not in the Syriac or Greek or Latin versions, so it is reasonable to assume that this is not a case where it has mistakenly dropped out of the Hebrew text. Notice that, as Radak points out, in v. 3 the woman also uses simply “God” in her reply to the snake.

If we assume, as I have been doing throughout our discussion, that Genesis is not journalism but a work of narrative art, that does not relieve us of the obligation to explain why this snake isn’t using God’s personal name. Ibn Ezra’s explanation is certainly plausible but lends itself easily to comedy, as his deadpan assertions often do. The woman certainly knows and uses the Tetragrammaton when she names her first child, as we’ll see a chapter from now, but it’s not clear whether or how she might have learned it already at this point in our story.

To me it seems most reasonable to adapt Kimhi’s explanation, and say that the creator of our story “would not place that exalted name in the serpent’s mouth,” nor would he let the woman use it “in conversation with an animal” — or at least not with this apparently nefarious snake.

any tree כֹּ֖ל עֵ֥ץ

The question here is whether the snake is saying:

• God said you could not eat from any tree in the Garden.

• God said you could not eat from every tree in the Garden.

We (the studio audience) know from 2:16–17 that the original earthling was told, “You may totally eat from any tree in the garden except from the Tree of Sorting, from which you must not eat. Once you eat from it you are totally going to die.”

Here’s the Hebrew of what YHWH God said:

מִכֹּ֥ל עֵֽץ־הַגָּ֖ן אָכֹ֥ל תֹּאכֵֽל

And here’s the Hebrew of what the snake says:

לֹ֣א תֹֽאכְל֔וּ מִכֹּ֖ל עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן

The any / every phrase is the same in both statements; it’s the negative לֹ֣א lo ‘not’ that throws things into question. The Jouön-Muraoka reference grammar of Biblical Hebrew [§ 160k] explains:

Opposite and conflicting notions are less sharply distinguished than in some other languages … The phrases combining the negative לא and כֹּל every are ambiguous: the meaning can be not every or none. Thus in Gn 3.1 the context requires: you may not eat from every tree rather than from any tree.

Whether that’s what the context really requires, however, is not obvious to me. It depends on something we don’t really understand: why this conversation is taking place to begin with. Next time, we’ll start to look into that question.

1. Remember that most translations replace the Tetragrammaton with LORD in capitals.]