7 The two of them saw what had been hidden from them …
וַתִּפָּקַ֙חְנָה֙ עֵינֵ֣י שְׁנֵיהֶ֔ם
The King James translates more literally: “the eyes of them both were opened.” Regular readers will remember that פקח means “open,” but only for opening eyes, and almost never literally so; others can click here for the full discussion of why I chose this different phrasing.
The reuse of our phrase provides confirmation that the snake was right. He had assured the woman that this would happen when they ate. Remember that both the snake and the woman always spoke about the two humans using the plural, implying that they would be acting together and not individually. That’s why it says here (for the 2nd time in the Bible) “the two of them.”
That brings up a question we haven’t looked at yet. Why is it the woman who considers the situation, decides to go forward, picks some fruit, eats some, and gives some to the man? — her man, as the narrator calls him in v. 6, just as she was called his woman in 2:25.
I’m half reminded of Judges 13, the beginning of the story of Samson. A messenger of YHWH (most likely an “angel” in your Bible) appears to the wife of a man named Manoah to tell her that, though she’s been unable to have children, she will now conceive a son and must follow a strict diet because he is intended to be a nazirite “from the womb.” (See Numbers 6 to brush up on nazirites.)
We’re never told the woman’s name, but the story makes quite clear that she is smarter and more competent than her husband. Go there if you care to follow that story — and while you’re there, notice that the entire book of Judges is structured to show the situation of women worsening until by the end of the book there is complete anarchy. I’m not saying there’s a connection between that story and this one, merely that we should feel no surprise at seeing a competent woman taking the lead role in a biblical story.
… and knew … וַיֵּ֣דְע֔וּ
Chalk up another one for the snake. He had told the woman that “elohim knows … you will be like elohim, knowing” — and “knowing” is exactly what happened. It’s a brilliant piece of rhetoric that you might think came naturally to our clever friend, the shrewd one among the animals. Don’t forget that it’s the scriptwriters who give these actors their lines. I’ve made some extravagant guesses about things the writer of this story or the composer of the larger story might have done for literary reasons, but it’s hard to imagine this one was not deliberate.
Before we get to what it was that they knew, a quick reminder that this makes abundantly clear that the tree they ate from was “the tree of knowledge,” the one I have called the Tree of Sorting. If you eat some fruit and then know something, that is definitely the tree of knowledge — even though the woman and the snake have been discussing the tree that is b’tokh ha-gan (which most take to mean “in the middle of the garden”), and according to 2:9 that tree is the tree of life.
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