21st Century Bible Hebrew -- sequential -ah

Genesis 3:11-12

 

יא וַיֹּ֕אמֶר מִ֚י הִגִּ֣יד לְךָ֔ כִּ֥י עֵירֹ֖ם אָ֑תָּה הֲמִן־הָעֵ֗ץ אֲשֶׁ֧ר צִוִּיתִ֛יךָ לְבִלְתִּ֥י אֲכָל־מִמֶּ֖נּוּ אָכָֽלְתָּ:

יב וַיֹּ֖אמֶר הָֽאָדָ֑ם הָֽאִשָּׁה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר נָתַ֣תָּה עִמָּדִ֔י הִ֛וא נָֽתְנָה־לִּ֥י מִן־הָעֵ֖ץ וָֽאֹכֵֽל:

 

Translation:     He said: who told you, that you are naked; did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?

The man said: the woman that you gave with me, she gave me from the tree and I ate.

 

I gave you the conjugation of natan in lesson 56 on Genesis 1:17. Natatah in this verse looks like the perfect aspect but what’s that ah doing on the end of it?

 

This is something I started wondering about after I read Dr. Cook’s dissertation because it looks like one of the modal morphologies he wrote about, the volitive. But that modality – which we haven’t seen an example of yet – is based on the imperfect not on the perfect. So what is this?

 

So I started up my handy dandy application that lets me search the entire Tannakh for all occurrences of specific words, and it showed up 65 times. When I studied all 30 of the examples in Torah, it looked as if they required a sequence of events.

 

So the man is saying “the woman that you [later] gave with me.”

 

This is the final confirmation that Gd told Adam about the tree and the woman came along later.

 

Adam is kind of saying, you know, if you had made her and then told both of us, none of this would have happened. But you made her later. Deal with it.

 

But at least he didn’t say she ate. So when he got to her, he saw the fruit in her hand with a bite taken out of it, but she was not chewing at the time. He doesn’t know from that, that she’s the one who took the bite out of the apple, and he doesn’t pretend that he does know.

 

There’s nothing more childish than saying “well, he did it first!” when you’ve been caught doing something wrong. But it’s still pretty childish to say “He made me do it.” All Chavvah did was put the fruit in his hand. He didn’t have to eat.

 

Which now that I think of it, suggests that Adam also thought touching the tree might kill them. As soon as he gets the fruit in his had, he doesn’t drop dead. So he comes to the same conclusion as Chavvah, and he eats. Hm.

 

By the way, don’t pin Lilith onto this “later”. The oldest material I can find on Lilith is from about 1000 CE (not BCE), after the Talmud and Midrash Haggadah and Halakhah had been written down.