21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 3:1, the serpent

Genesis 3:1

 

ג א וְהַנָּחָשׁ֙ הָיָ֣ה עָר֔וּם מִכֹּל֙ חַיַּ֣ת הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשָׂ֖ה יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֑ים וַיֹּ֨אמֶר֙ אֶל־הָ֣אִשָּׁ֔ה אַ֚ף כִּֽי־אָמַ֣ר אֱלֹהִ֔ים לֹ֣א תֹֽאכְל֔וּ מִכֹּ֖ל עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן:

 

Translation:     But the nachash was shrewd beyond every wild animal that the Lord Gd had made; he said to the woman “…even though Gd has said, you don’t eat from every tree of the garden?”

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

אַף	Even though
עָרוּם	shrewd
נָּחָשׁ	serpent

 

You never in your life imagined that this verse could be translated like that so let’s go through it.

 

1.         Remember, mi can mean “beyond”. It’s pretty obvious that the serpent would have to be smarter than all the other wild animals to talk and to understand what Gd told the people about the trees.

2.         Notice that arum has the identical letters to erom except that there’s a plural ending on erom in the previous verse.  This will become important later when this root shows up again.

3.         Yes, there’s a zaqef on elohim, marking that phrase off from the other clause.

 

So whatever these two were saying before is missing, but we get the clue that the woman mis-quoted Gd. The serpent thinks that Gd told them they could eat from every tree, but he has noticed that they don’t do that. So he is implying that the people aren’t obeying Gd.

 

Now, what about that “but”. What is this in contrast to?

 

Well, Torah is full of what I call sidebars. They’re all crucial but they’re not part of the straight line of the story. In a sense, there’s an arrow that points from where we said that Adam found no ezer among the animals, to this verse. Sort of, “if Adam had really wanted to, he could have found a companion in the serpent, who was shrewder than all the other wild animals. But that wasn’t really his natural counterpart. So Gd created woman, and now the jealous serpent is bugging her.”

 

Midrash Breshit Rabbah 99:11 has it the other way around. Now that Gd has created woman, the serpent is the only one without an ezer. Midrash Breshit Rabbah 18:6 says he saw them consummating their marriage (about which more later) and got jealous and wanted her for himself. This discussion was supposed to pry her loose from Adam.

 

So I’m following the grammar and trop, not the midrash, and since I’m a yachid (just one person) you don’t have to agree with me on the meaning.