4 The snake said to the woman, “You’re totally not going to die.”
וַיֹּ֥אמֶר הַנָּחָ֖שׁ אֶל־הָֽאִשָּׁ֑ה לֹֽא־מ֖וֹת תְּמֻתֽוּן׃
He’s completely wrong, of course — but he’s also more or less right.
Before we get to that, a quick word about “totally” for those who have joined us since I first translated the infinitive absolute that way. (Follow the link in that post for a longer discussion by Edward Cook, who thought of it first.) “In”finitives are called that because they are not finite; they don’t pin down the who or when of the verb. A form like t’mutun of our verse does do that: “y’all [that’s the who] will [that’s the when] die.”
When this special infinitive form is added, that tells us to emphasize the verb. Old-fashioned translations achieve this emphasis by adding the word surely and then going on with their lives. Midrash prefers to find a separate meaning for each verb. In Gen 2:7, where we first saw the words מ֥וֹת תָּמֽוּת, Genesis Rabbah explains tamut to mean that the earthling will die and the added mot to mean that the rest of humanity would die as well.
Contemporary translators have a harder job, because we must understand why the writer added the extra emphasis and then must figure out how to express it. In this particular case, if The Bible Guy™ were a podcast instead of a blog, I would not say “totally” at all. I would simply let my voice drip with amused contempt at the very thought that anyone might imagine she would die for eating a piece of fruit: “Youuuuu’re not gonna die.”
This woman did die, of course, as will we all — though like William Saroyan I of course presume an exception will be made in my case. The man certainly died, at age 930 according to Gen 5:5 and to his Wikipedia entry, which also tells us that he was “born” at 1 AM on Day 6 in the Garden of Eden. (Neither that verb nor the location is correct, and I am dubious about 1 AM, all of which is a great reminder to be careful when you use Wikipedia.)
We must extrapolate that the woman died, since there is no mention of it in the Bible. Nonetheless, Gen 7:22 tells us that everything on land that breathed died in the Flood, and it is a reasonably good bet that we’d have been told if this woman was one of the four women on the boat who didn’t drown.
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