Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
Genesis 2 gave us the story of the Creation of MAN; Genesis 3 now reflects the supplanting of the ancient animal-totem cults by the new matriarchy, and then the conquest of the matriarchy by the patriarchy, through the defeat of the serpent-costumed shaman of the goddess Tahamat, and of her priestess, the surrogate-on-Earth of the goddess of the Beney Yisra-El, known as Chavah (Eve), equivalent of Circe, Hebe, Hepta, Persephone, Anat, Inanna, Ishtar... (no? that isn't what you have always been told Genesis 3 was really about?). A number of different versions, or even different stories, will be seen to have become mixed up here; as the constant changing from YHVH ELOHIM to just ELOHIM or just YHVH particularly indicates. The key notion in all of this is that of Shamanism, for the Shaman was the spiritual leader of the community - and will become so again, in a modified form, when the Prophet re-emerges in post-Solomonic Yisra-El. Under the primitive matriarchy, the Shaman was the Priestess-Prophetess-Oracle-Soothsayer etc, who later monotheism reduced to witchcraft; under the patriarchy begins the notion of the priest-king, whose apogee was King David, and whose functions would later be divided between church and state.
3:1 VE HA NACHASH HAYAH ARUM MI KOL CHAYAT HA SADEH ASHER ASAH YHVH ELOHIM VA YOMER EL HA ISHAH APH KI AMAR ELOHIM LO TO'CHLU MI KOL ETS HA GAN
וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל הָאִשָּׁה אַף כִּי אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן
KJ (King James translation): Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden.
BN (BibleNet translation): Now the snake was more subtle than any of the beasts of the field which YHVH Elohim had made. And he said to the woman, "Has Elohim really told you not to eat of every tree in the garden?"
VE HA NACHASH HAYAH (והניש היה): NACHASH (נחש) = "to hiss, whisper"; the term was used for the predictions of soothsayers, from which it came to have the meanings of practicing enchantment, sorcery, black magic; also "to augur, forbode, divine"; it thus also means "an omen". Divination by serpents (see Exodus 4 and 7:10 ff) was a common practice connected to the serpent deity, including the dressing of the oracle in a serpent costume. Was it then a serpent, or a representative of a cult, as in King Sha'ul's visit to the ba'alat ov, known as the Witch (some modern translations are more generous, they translate it as "Medium") of Eyn Dor, in 1 Samuel 28?
NACHASH (נחש) also means "to shine", whence NECHOSHET (נחשת) = "brass"; this may have been a borrowing from the Chaldean, where NACHASH meant either "copper" or "brass" or "base metals" (the scholars are uncertain which) and was connected to alchemy. Ezekiel 16:36 uses it for money, but indirectly, associating the "filthiness" of harlotry with its financial cost; and this is the source of the modern English use of "brass" as slang for money.
Job 26:13 refers to the constellation of the snake or dragon in the northern sky, probably Ophiuchus, the snake bearer.
NECHUSHTAN (נחשתן), was the serpent of brass which was Mosheh's banner that Chizki-Yah (Hezekiah) destroyed (2 Kings 18:4) because it had become an object of worship in itself. It was connected to the Ophic cult in Egypt, and through its dragon-side to the phoenix cult of On-Heliopolis where Yoseph (Joseph) was governor.
ARUM (ערום): See note to Genesis 2:25, where the word is used to describe the nakedness of the man and woman, without any suggestion of their being sly, cunning or in any way demoniacal.
ELOHIM: No YHVH on this occasion.
3:2 VA TOMER HA ISHAH EL HA NACHASH MI PERI ETS HA GAN NO'CHEL
Job 26:13 refers to the constellation of the snake or dragon in the northern sky, probably Ophiuchus, the snake bearer.
NECHUSHTAN (נחשתן), was the serpent of brass which was Mosheh's banner that Chizki-Yah (Hezekiah) destroyed (2 Kings 18:4) because it had become an object of worship in itself. It was connected to the Ophic cult in Egypt, and through its dragon-side to the phoenix cult of On-Heliopolis where Yoseph (Joseph) was governor.
ARUM (ערום): See note to Genesis 2:25, where the word is used to describe the nakedness of the man and woman, without any suggestion of their being sly, cunning or in any way demoniacal.
ELOHIM: No YHVH on this occasion.
3:2 VA TOMER HA ISHAH EL HA NACHASH MI PERI ETS HA GAN NO'CHEL
וַתֹּאמֶר הָאִשָּׁה אֶל הַנָּחָשׁ מִפְּרִי עֵץ הַגָּן נֹאכֵל
KJ: And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
BN: And the woman said to the snake: "We may eat from the fruit trees in the garden ...
3:3 U MI PERI HA ETS ASHER BETOCH HA GAN AMAR ELOHIM LO TO'CHLU MIMENU VE LO TIG'U BO PEN TEMUTUN
וּמִפְּרִי הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִמֶּנּוּ וְלֹא תִגְּעוּ בּוֹ פֶּן תְּמֻתוּן
KJ: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
BN: "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, Elohim has said, 'You shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'"
BETOCH: Means "inside", and not "the midst", as in "the centre. We tend to think of Eden as a walled, or at least an enclosed garden, but that probably wasn't the original intention; this word suggests that there was an enclosed space somewhere in the garden, and that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was inside that, while Adam and Chavah were roaming the rest of the open orchard. Only after the expulsion of Adam does the whole garden become enclosed. (Though, if Chavah was indeed the priestess of the garden-shrine, the Tree would have been her sacred tree, and she would have been its guardian; which transforms our understanding of the tale utterly).
VE LO TIG'U BO (ולא תגעו בו): They may not even touch it; obviously because it is itself the divinity, or at least a sacred idol of the divinity: the World Tree, the totem pole at the heart of the totem cult. Yet this was not stated in the original injunction; only the eating was outlawed. One Midrash suggests that it was the hyperbole, not the eating, which was Chavah's original sin! On the other hand, if the tree were more than just a fruit tree, but itself a sacred arbour in a sacred grove, then touching it would indeed be out of order. The same tabu exists around the pages of a Torah scroll, which are never touched by hand, but only with a Yad, a metal pointing-finger.
TEMUTUN (תמתון): Is this Aramaic or simply archaic? The question is important because it helps us date the text - Aramaic makes it later than 586 BCE, the date at which the Aramaic language entered Yisra-El.
Note that here again we have gone back to Elohim with YHVH.
3:4 VA YOMER HA NACHASH EL HA ISHAH LO MOT TEMUTUN
The idea of ha Satan needs explaining, because Christian versions of the tale wrongly assume that the serpent of Eden was Satan, or a form of Satan, which is to say that Faustian invention Mephistopheles, or the earlier (though not actually that much earlier, and still very much mediaeval) Lucifer, the brightest light, probably a male version of Venus, or perhaps the northern star, whose rebellion against the supreme leader of the heavenly pantheon led to his fall, and his occupation of the underworld of Hell. The original Hell, or Hel, was never a place for the wicked, but simply the land of the dead: She'ol to the Beney Yisra-El, Hades to the Greeks; and actually not even that, originally, but the name of the goddess who ruled there, a monstrous figure who should be seen in trinity with her sea- and land-monster equivalents, Tiamat and Bohu (by whichever of their many names you prefer).
In the Mabynogion, Blodeuwedd betrays Lleu Llaw Gyffes and is transformed into an owl. The owl was Athene's symbol in Athens, specifically at the Akropolis. Robert Graves suggests that Lilith was an owl-goddess and that the Lilim were her devotees. Is Lilith thus connected with Athene (or Athena, as you prefer)? The owl in Greek is skops, the hill to the north-west of Yeru-Shala'im, known in Biblical Yehudit and modern Ivrit as Har HaTsofim (הַר הַצּוֹפִים) or the "Mount of the Watchmen" has long been known in English as Mount Scopus. Scopus is Greek for "watchmen" (as in telescope etc), but the odd linguistic connection between skops and scopus, plus the presence of the owls and the location of the cults... there is also an apparent connection through Babylonian Anu, who became Ana, as in Di-Ana, Beit Anatot/Bethany, Ur-Ana/Uranus, and Anatha, who comes from Inanna. I have to say I think this may be one of those cases of Graves pushing his speculations "beyond", rather than merely his usual "to" the scholarly limits, but it will need more forensic research before it can be rejected.
Graves also claims that YHVH was not in the original creation story; in his version Chavah throws Adam out of her grove for caprifying fig trees or some-such abuse of her prerogatives; similarly Triptolemus, a favourite of Demeter, was sent from Eleusis in Attica with a bag of seed to teach the world agriculture, and departed in a car drawn by serpents. The curse on women, he argues, (correctly on this occasion) is also erroneous; in his reading, with Raphael Patai, the sacred king Adam and the serpent (the priestess' wizard or shaman) compete for the goddess' favours; Adam is fated to bruise his head; he to wound Adam's heel; thus bringing each other to annual death.
The Yehudit name for Byblos in the Lebanon was Gebal. Solomon's Temple, built with cedar wood provided from the hills around Byblos, resembles that of the Aegean great goddess at Hierapolis. A Dana'an colony is known to have settled at Byblos around 1400 BCE, and evidence in many places suggests that Dana'an was the Phoenician, later the Greek name, for the tribe of Dan, who the Bible also tells us moved from the central coastal plain of Kena'an into the Lebanon, to evade the Pelishtim (Philistine) colonists. The founding Dana'an hero was called Adamos, or Adamas, or Adamastos, which means "unconquerable"; the same name is also a Homeric epithet for Hades, borrowed from his mother the death goddess, daughter of Eurystheus. Red was the colour of death in Greece and Britain, with red ochre found in megalithic burials e.g. Salisbury Plain. A fuller explanation of this can be found in my essay "The Leprachauns of Palestine".
According to the Gnostics, Adam and Chavah also had a daughter named Norea, who later on set fire to No'ach's Ark. There is no reference to this woman in any Biblical or Midrashic tale, except for the statement in Genesis 5:4 that "the days of Adam after he had begotten Shet (Seth) were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters". Daughters, plural, but un-named.
TEMUTUN (תמתון): Is this Aramaic or simply archaic? The question is important because it helps us date the text - Aramaic makes it later than 586 BCE, the date at which the Aramaic language entered Yisra-El.
Given that Death has not yet been introduced into the world, we are left to question how Chavah knows this, or can even articulate it. That certain fruits are poisonous, and will kill you, is a consequence of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil; and of course this condition was probably true of the fruit of several other trees in the garden too, but none are mentioned, and no warning is given against eating them. So we can again understand that this is not a regular tree, but a metaphorical tree; this is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose leaves are books, whose trunk is wisdom, whose branches are informed opinions, whose fruit is the understanding of the differences between right and wrong. This is fruit that will make human life complicated, but without the inevitable consequence of death. But here "Lest you die" has to be interpreted as a direct threat: publish and be burned, in the words of the Inquisitors.
3:4 VA YOMER HA NACHASH EL HA ISHAH LO MOT TEMUTUN
וַיֹּאמֶר הַנָּחָשׁ אֶל הָאִשָּׁה לֹא מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן
KJ: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
BN: And the snake said to the woman, "You will not die".
How does he know that, unless he has had the same thought-process as the one described above – in which case he must have eaten from the tree himself already? Or else Elohim, or perhaps YHVH Elohim, created him for a purpose, which was to make sure that humans got out from under the Bodhi tree and confronted reality with open eyes, rather than sitting there contemplating unreality in their nakedness, consciousnessless as animals, forever; because they will never be able to perform their 8th day responsibilities otherwise. Once again, we need to stop seeing the serpent as Satan, and reinstate him as the hero of this story.
And why my seemingly facetious allusion to the Bodhi tree? The Tree of Enlightenment in Buddhism equates to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil here; and if you followed the link on Bodhi, above and again here, you will have seen that Buddhism regards that tree as... the fig. See my note and illustrations to Genesis 2:17; and then my note to verse 6 below.
3:5 KI YOD'E'A ELOHIM KI BE YOM ACHALCHEM MIMENU VE NIPHKECHU EYNEYCHEM VI HEYIYTEM KE ELOHIM YOD'EY TOV VA RA
3:5 KI YOD'E'A ELOHIM KI BE YOM ACHALCHEM MIMENU VE NIPHKECHU EYNEYCHEM VI HEYIYTEM KE ELOHIM YOD'EY TOV VA RA
כִּי יֹדֵעַ אֱלֹהִים כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְכֶם מִמֶּנּוּ וְנִפְקְחוּ עֵינֵיכֶם וִהְיִיתֶם כֵּאלֹהִים יֹדְעֵי טוֹב וָרָע
KJ: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
BN: "But Elohim knows that, on the day that you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you shall be like Elohim, knowing what is good and what is evil."
VENIPHKECHU EYNEYCHEM (ונפקחו עיניכם): "To open the eyes", metaphorically we presume, and must deduce that the metaphor means seeing things otherwise hidden from the eyes of mortals; i.e. special knowledge or initiation. But of course Elohim himself names it as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so is he deliberately tempting them, does he actually want them to find out?
YOD'EY (ידעי): plural = knowers of...
3:6 VA TEREH HA ISHAH KI TOV HA ETS LE MA'ACHAL VE CHI TA'AVAH HU LA EYNAYIM VE NECHMAD HA ETS LEHASKIL VA TIKACH MI PIRYO VA TO'CHAL VA TITEN GAM LE ISHAH IMAH VA YO'CHAL
ANOCHI (אנכי): The full pronoun for the first personal singular: I. Probably this was the original form (see Gesenius) and ANI (אני) an abbreviation; in the same way that the first person plural ANACHNU (אֲנַחנוּ) can be reduced to ANU (אנו).
VA ECHAV'E: it is difficult to hide in a garden, but quite easy to hide in a wood. This makes us question again the concept of Gan Eden as a garden - at least in the Betjemanic sense that we English think of gardens, with mown lawns, and hedgerows of anis and sumach, and carefully hybrid roses, and pretty maids of dandelion and marigold all in a row. Much more likely it was a sacred grove, a hypothesis given extra weight when we remember that its epithet, Paradise, comes from the Persian word Pardes, which means a fruit-orchard; and generally, like this rather sour tale, a citrus fruit orchard; though we should also note the Sumerian Tilmun, Akkadian Dilmun, the "paradise" created between the Tigris and the Euphrates when Enki brought the sweet waters of the underworld of Abzu to those salt-marshes, and the Bread Wheat and the Emmer Wheat evolved in consequence (see under Enki in my page on the Mesopotamian deities)
And then there is the theological problem: why does he assume it is wrong to have made clothes to hide his nakedness; he ate the fruit, looked at the woman, she at him, they both realised they were naked; they were ashamed. That is not the normal, natural reaction of human adults, especially those who feel an immediate sexual attraction and move to fulfill the divine commandment to multiply; and remember that these have just been married, and are on their honeymoon. If the command is valid, then the nakedness cannot be a matter of shame. So was making fig leaves an act of rebellion? Not much of one if it was – straight into hiding, and defensive when challenged. No, he says he hid because he was naked; but in reality he hid because he ate, and understood that he had broken an important rule. However, this too is problematic, because we have been told that, by eating, he becomes like god, knowing good and evil. So when the god calls, why not just stand up and say: I stole fire; I, Prometheus; chain me in the Caucasus if you like; send eagles to feast on my liver; but fire is known now; you cannot change that. Or: I opened the box – I, Pandora; the bees are buzzing; you cannot put them back. But Adam does none of these. He cowers, apologises, accepts his punishment, and spends eternity yearning for a return to the naivety of Paradise, dreaming that the Messiah will come to take him back there (and will the Messiah then come naked?).
3:11 VA YOMER MI HIGID LECHA KI EYROM ATAH HA MIN HA ETS ASHER TSIVIYTIYCHA LE VILTI ACHAL MIMENU ACHALTA
BUT: I have been trying, throughout these early chapters, to identify just how much of what we call science the ancients understood, and we have seen a remarkable amount of it. None quite so significant as this though, because what is being described here, in the form of a rather silly and simplistic fable it is true, but nonetheless, this is it, the moment when primoridal ape, squatting in his tree, an intelligent life-form but not yet an intelligent species, endures that painful, traumatic moment, that explosion of energy known among the brain surgeons as Evolution, that dreadful trauma from which we are still struggling to recover, and probably never will, the moment when we threw off the false skin of our animal natures, and put on human clothing. Pandora as the first woman, Prometheus as the first of the Titans, have virtually identical experiences, likewise in fable form. And how else can the gods expect us to take responsibility for the planet - to protect the other species, to ward off global warming, to keep the unspoiled places from spoliation, to resist pollutants; just as we do - if we are not encouraged to pick, indeed to harvest, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge?
3:12 VA YOMER HA ADAM HA ISHAH ASHER NATATAH IMADI HI NATNAH LI MIN HA ETS VA OCHEL
APHAR (עפר): see my previous note (at Genesis 2:7), and especially the connection with the word for a young calf, which extends the pun on cattle in the sanitised Yehudit version.
Clearly, at one level, the original legend was aetiological - intended to explain the workings of nature; and the priestly editors reworked it to make a morally didactic fable.
3:15 VE EYVAH ASHIT BEYNCHA U VEYN HA ISHAH U VEYN ZAR'ACHA U VEYN ZAR'AH HU YESHUPHCHA ROSH VE ATAH TESHUPHENU AKEV
KJ: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
BN (provisional translation - see after the commentary here, and then verse 16, for the final translation): "And I will create hatred between you and the woman, and between your progeny and her progeny; they will stamp on your head, and you will bite their heels."
Other than as an explanation for Ophidiophobia the verse just does not make any sense if it is translated in this way: future generations of humans will trample on snakes wherever they see them, and snakes will bite human ankles at every opportunity? For the key tale in the Creation myth, when Death and Human Ratiocination Capacity are being introduced into the human world, and the consequences of the awakening of consciousness are being determined. This is it?
Let us see if we can do better:
If we read it as though it were VA OYVAH (ואיבה), so that we can see the key verb in the sentence: from the root AYAV (איב) = "to be an adversary, enemy". It is from this that the strange concept of HA SATAN (הסטן) appears to have been very much later evolved (see Dictionary Of Names and note that its entire spelling is foreign: Samech and Tet rather than Seen and Tav).
ASHIT (אשית): cf SHAYIT (שית) = "a thorn" or "thorn-hedge" set round gardens and vineyards; which would suggest ELOHIM physically dividing the serpent from his priestess by ringing the garden round with thorn hedges. This proves insufficient, as we will see with the KERUVIM (כרבים) and the flaming sword of 3:24.
YESHUPHCHA ROSH (ישופך ראש): Usually translated as "he will bruise your heel", but SHAPHACH (שפך) = "to pour out", and ROSH (ראש), as we have seen, is not only "a head" but also "the source of a river". This could therefore be read as "he will empty your river at its source" - i.e. it will become dry; therefore, as given, it will eat dust - for he is not only the serpent-god but also the river-god, as referred to earlier in the four rivers from the single source and from his naming as both Giychon and Piyshon. Why though is it HU (הוא) = "he", and not HI (היא) = "she", if Chavah is the doer? And why does the Chumash translate it as though it were plural? I ask that rhetorically; the answer by now should be self-evident.
* we will appreciate this more when we get to Exodus 7 and the 10 plagues, of which actually there would have been 12, and they were not plagues, they were phases in a liturgical drama, with each god or goddess represented in their totem form... and which god or goddess was the locust? Set, the slayer of Osher (Osiris), who will appear shortly, in this very Adam & Eve story, precisely as their progeny, the third son, Shet in the Yehudit, Seth in most English versions.
ESEV HA SADEH: "herb of the field" makes it sound like we have to eat the wildflowers and the nettles, where what this is really giving is a more detailed explanation of "toil" in the previous verse (and see verse 23 for confirmation); "you will have to farm your own crops; do not expect the gods to provide for you beyond the fruits of the trees that you have already been given. Plant crops, especially the cereal crops".
APEYCHA (אפיך): APH (אף) = "nose"; also "anger", as explained in a previous note, from the root ANAPH (אנף) = "to breathe, to be angry". The ANAPHAH (אנפה) is an unclean bird that dwells in hollows and river banks, possibly the sandpiper or parrot. The word is usually used to signify the eagle, the symbolic bird of Elohim (cg Leviticus 11:19 where it is listed among the birds of prey).
YOD'EY (ידעי): plural = knowers of...
3:6 VA TEREH HA ISHAH KI TOV HA ETS LE MA'ACHAL VE CHI TA'AVAH HU LA EYNAYIM VE NECHMAD HA ETS LEHASKIL VA TIKACH MI PIRYO VA TO'CHAL VA TITEN GAM LE ISHAH IMAH VA YO'CHAL
וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל
KJ: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
BN: Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and a delight to the eyes, and it was pleasing that a tree should encourage wisdom, so she took one of its fruits, and ate; and she gave one to her husband as well, and he ate.
TA'AVAH (תאוה): from the root AVAH (אוה) = "to lust" or "desire". The word will come up repeatedly in the lists of ordinances and prohibitions, as well as the lists of punishments, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, though its precise meaning will vary, as we shall see.
LEHASKIL (להשכיל): SACHAL (שכל) = "to look at, behold, turn the mind to". SECHEL (שכל) = "understanding, prudence"; all this seems to be connected to the eyes. The word will occur frequently as a title of many of the Psalms.
But there is a problem. The eating of the fruit, we were told in the previous verse, will lead to the opening of the eyes and the ability to distinguish good from bad – which includes aesthetic distinctions alongside the moral. Yet here she is, before eating, already able to make that distinction.
And that problem leads to a secondary problem. If this tree stands in the centre of the garden, and she was given explicit instructions about it, but about no other tree, then we can deem it a racing certainty that she looked at it, at least once. And did she not "see", before this time, that the tree was good for food etc. We could regard this as a subtle distinction being made between looking and actually seeing – the student in the classroom who is listening, but never actually learns; but that would be reading too much into the text. More likely, she did not need the serpent to know that she wanted to eat from the tree; she only needed the serpent to nudge her into doing it, to give her somebody to blame.
What kind of fruit was it? I have previously suggested the fig - but which fig? There are many to choose from, but the probability is the sycamore-fig, known in Yehudit as the SHIKMAH (שִׁקמָה). For three reasons. The first is that the Tree in question was a fruit tree, and there is a strict limit on the number of fruit-bearing trees that could grow in the flatlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates where Eden is located. The second is the connection with the Egyptian goddess Hat-Hor, whose sacred tree was the sycamore (click here for more information, and see also my notes to Exodus 9:15). The third, and most significant, however, lies in the very next verse where, having eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Chavah will realise that they are naked, and instantly make clothing out of the most available leaves, in order to cover themselves up; the leaves in question are fig-leaves, so it is reasonable to assume that this was a grove of sycamore-figs, because sycamores self-seed in the most prolific manner unless planned forestation is involved, and steal all the nitrogen from any other tree that might think to muscle in on its territory.
3:7 VA TIPAKACHNA EYNEY SHENEYHEM VA YED'U KI EYRUMIM HEM VA YITPERU ALEH TE'ENAH VA YA'ASU LAHEM CHAGOROT
VA YITPERU ALEH TE'ENAH (ויתפרו עלה תאנה): ALEH (עלה) from the root ALAH (עלה) = "to go up", whence "a leaf". BUT! OLAH (עולה) = "that which is laid on the altar as an offering"; and in Ezra ALAH (עלה) = "a burnt offering", though there are hints of the same meaning in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The name of the Prophet Shemu-El's (Samuel's) adopted father, the priest Eli (עלי), is also connected to this root.
HA ADAM VE ISHTO: Usually translated as "the man and his wife", but that is not what it says: "the man and his woman" is not the same. The difference is formal marriage, of which there has been none. French would not have this problem: "l'homme et sa femme". The problem is actually cultural, not linguistic.
RU'ACH: Wind, or spirit, or ambience, or atmosphere; this is not an anthropomorphic deity walking around his yard, but something like the "still, small voice" that Eli-Yahu (Elijah) hears in the cave in 1 Kings 19. The same Ru'ach that "hovered" ovet the abyss in the prologue to Creation, Genesis 1:2.
LEHASKIL (להשכיל): SACHAL (שכל) = "to look at, behold, turn the mind to". SECHEL (שכל) = "understanding, prudence"; all this seems to be connected to the eyes. The word will occur frequently as a title of many of the Psalms.
But there is a problem. The eating of the fruit, we were told in the previous verse, will lead to the opening of the eyes and the ability to distinguish good from bad – which includes aesthetic distinctions alongside the moral. Yet here she is, before eating, already able to make that distinction.
And that problem leads to a secondary problem. If this tree stands in the centre of the garden, and she was given explicit instructions about it, but about no other tree, then we can deem it a racing certainty that she looked at it, at least once. And did she not "see", before this time, that the tree was good for food etc. We could regard this as a subtle distinction being made between looking and actually seeing – the student in the classroom who is listening, but never actually learns; but that would be reading too much into the text. More likely, she did not need the serpent to know that she wanted to eat from the tree; she only needed the serpent to nudge her into doing it, to give her somebody to blame.
What kind of fruit was it? I have previously suggested the fig - but which fig? There are many to choose from, but the probability is the sycamore-fig, known in Yehudit as the SHIKMAH (שִׁקמָה). For three reasons. The first is that the Tree in question was a fruit tree, and there is a strict limit on the number of fruit-bearing trees that could grow in the flatlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates where Eden is located. The second is the connection with the Egyptian goddess Hat-Hor, whose sacred tree was the sycamore (click here for more information, and see also my notes to Exodus 9:15). The third, and most significant, however, lies in the very next verse where, having eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Chavah will realise that they are naked, and instantly make clothing out of the most available leaves, in order to cover themselves up; the leaves in question are fig-leaves, so it is reasonable to assume that this was a grove of sycamore-figs, because sycamores self-seed in the most prolific manner unless planned forestation is involved, and steal all the nitrogen from any other tree that might think to muscle in on its territory.
3:7 VA TIPAKACHNA EYNEY SHENEYHEM VA YED'U KI EYRUMIM HEM VA YITPERU ALEH TE'ENAH VA YA'ASU LAHEM CHAGOROT
וַתִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי שְׁנֵיהֶם וַיֵּדְעוּ כִּי עֵירֻמִּם הֵם וַיִּתְפְּרוּ עֲלֵה תְאֵנָה וַיַּעֲשׂוּ לָהֶם חֲגֹרֹת
KJ: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
BN: And the eyes of both of them were opened, so that they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves loin-cloths.
VE TIPAKACHNA (ותפקחנה): like TEMUTUN, above, this is another ancient verb form, and therefore another hint at the text coming from a pre-Yehudit source.
VA YITPERU ALEH TE'ENAH (ויתפרו עלה תאנה): ALEH (עלה) from the root ALAH (עלה) = "to go up", whence "a leaf". BUT! OLAH (עולה) = "that which is laid on the altar as an offering"; and in Ezra ALAH (עלה) = "a burnt offering", though there are hints of the same meaning in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The name of the Prophet Shemu-El's (Samuel's) adopted father, the priest Eli (עלי), is also connected to this root.
Likewise TE'ENAH (תאנה) does indeed come from the root meaning "a fig tree", but TA'ANAH (תאנה) = "coitus", from the root ANAH (אנה). Yirme-Yahu (Jeremiah) uses it to refer to "the lust of the wild she-ass" in Jeremiah 2:24. Is there a hint of some sexual rite accompanied by sacrifice and not the accepted meaning? Or is this simply a naive way of saying they had not realized till now the sexuality of their own bodies? The root of Christian "original sin" depends on this interpretation.
CHAGOROT (חגרת): CHAGAR (חגר) = "to gird".
3:8 VA YISHME'U ET KOL YHVH ELOHIM MIT'HALECH BA GAN LE RU'ACH HA YOM VA YIT'CHAB'E HA ADAM VE ISHTO MI PENEY YHVH ELOHIM BETOCH ETS HA GAN
CHAGOROT (חגרת): CHAGAR (חגר) = "to gird".
3:8 VA YISHME'U ET KOL YHVH ELOHIM MIT'HALECH BA GAN LE RU'ACH HA YOM VA YIT'CHAB'E HA ADAM VE ISHTO MI PENEY YHVH ELOHIM BETOCH ETS HA GAN
וַיִּשְׁמְעוּ אֶת קוֹל יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם וַיִּתְחַבֵּא הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ מִפְּנֵי יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים בְּתוֹךְ עֵץ הַגָּן
KJ: And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
BN: And they heard the voice of YHVH Elohim wafting around the garden in the stillness of the day; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the face of YHVH Elohim among the trees of the garden.
ET KOL: Reminiscent of Eli-Yahu (Elijah) in his cave (1 Kings 19:11-13); but what actually was the voice on this occasion? A god speaking words? And if so, then in what language? Not Yehudit, which will not come into being as a recognisable tongue until well after the time of Yehoshu'a (Joshua). Chaldean? Sumerian? Subaru? A dialect of Chitite? Something even more primordial? Or should we read the phrase allegorically: the still, small voice of their own just-awakened consciences, getting the first pang of guilt that maybe they did not grasp right and wrong as fully as they might, because no one has given them guidelines and benchmarks yet? This is key, for all the frivolity of the expressing of it here: in the former, the god is anthropomorphised; in the latter, human conscience and consciousness are given autonomy.
YHVH ELOHIM: Are three different versions now getting mixed up?
HA ADAM VE ISHTO: Usually translated as "the man and his wife", but that is not what it says: "the man and his woman" is not the same. The difference is formal marriage, of which there has been none. French would not have this problem: "l'homme et sa femme". The problem is actually cultural, not linguistic.
RU'ACH: Wind, or spirit, or ambience, or atmosphere; this is not an anthropomorphic deity walking around his yard, but something like the "still, small voice" that Eli-Yahu (Elijah) hears in the cave in 1 Kings 19. The same Ru'ach that "hovered" ovet the abyss in the prologue to Creation, Genesis 1:2.
BETOCH ETS HA GAN: Trees, plural, would be ETSEY HA GAN; and yet BETOCH infers a plurality of trees, because you cannot walk "between" a single one.
3:9 VA YIKRA YHVH ELOHIM EL HA ADAM VA YOMER LO AI'ECHA
3:9 VA YIKRA YHVH ELOHIM EL HA ADAM VA YOMER LO AI'ECHA
וַיִּקְרָא יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶל הָאָדָם וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ אַיֶּכָּה
KJ: And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
BN: And YHVH Elohim called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"
He speaks to the man, not the woman; but if he is omnipresent and all-knowing, he does not need to ask. The question is not intended to find the man, but to bring the man to smart attentiveness. Teachers in class do the same to children staring out of the window: "Johnny, where are you?"
3:10 VA YOMER ET KOL'CHA SHAMA'TI BA GAN VA IYRA KI EYROM ANOCHI VA ECHAV'E
וַיֹּאמֶר אֶת קֹלְךָ שָׁמַעְתִּי בַּגָּן וָאִירָא כִּי עֵירֹם אָנֹכִי וָאֵחָבֵא
KJ: And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
BN: And he said, "I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. So I hid."
VA IYRA (ואירא): from the root YAR'E (ירא) = "to fear". How does this compare with PACHAD YITSCHAK, the "fear of Isaac" (Genesis 31:42), which is a later epithet for the god? It is worth a seminar to consider why for the ancients it was "fear of", but for us moderns "belief in"; both matters of faith rather than reason, but the one in the bowel, while the other likes to pretend to be in the brain.
ANOCHI (אנכי): The full pronoun for the first personal singular: I. Probably this was the original form (see Gesenius) and ANI (אני) an abbreviation; in the same way that the first person plural ANACHNU (אֲנַחנוּ) can be reduced to ANU (אנו).
VA ECHAV'E: it is difficult to hide in a garden, but quite easy to hide in a wood. This makes us question again the concept of Gan Eden as a garden - at least in the Betjemanic sense that we English think of gardens, with mown lawns, and hedgerows of anis and sumach, and carefully hybrid roses, and pretty maids of dandelion and marigold all in a row. Much more likely it was a sacred grove, a hypothesis given extra weight when we remember that its epithet, Paradise, comes from the Persian word Pardes, which means a fruit-orchard; and generally, like this rather sour tale, a citrus fruit orchard; though we should also note the Sumerian Tilmun, Akkadian Dilmun, the "paradise" created between the Tigris and the Euphrates when Enki brought the sweet waters of the underworld of Abzu to those salt-marshes, and the Bread Wheat and the Emmer Wheat evolved in consequence (see under Enki in my page on the Mesopotamian deities)
And then there is the theological problem: why does he assume it is wrong to have made clothes to hide his nakedness; he ate the fruit, looked at the woman, she at him, they both realised they were naked; they were ashamed. That is not the normal, natural reaction of human adults, especially those who feel an immediate sexual attraction and move to fulfill the divine commandment to multiply; and remember that these have just been married, and are on their honeymoon. If the command is valid, then the nakedness cannot be a matter of shame. So was making fig leaves an act of rebellion? Not much of one if it was – straight into hiding, and defensive when challenged. No, he says he hid because he was naked; but in reality he hid because he ate, and understood that he had broken an important rule. However, this too is problematic, because we have been told that, by eating, he becomes like god, knowing good and evil. So when the god calls, why not just stand up and say: I stole fire; I, Prometheus; chain me in the Caucasus if you like; send eagles to feast on my liver; but fire is known now; you cannot change that. Or: I opened the box – I, Pandora; the bees are buzzing; you cannot put them back. But Adam does none of these. He cowers, apologises, accepts his punishment, and spends eternity yearning for a return to the naivety of Paradise, dreaming that the Messiah will come to take him back there (and will the Messiah then come naked?).
3:11 VA YOMER MI HIGID LECHA KI EYROM ATAH HA MIN HA ETS ASHER TSIVIYTIYCHA LE VILTI ACHAL MIMENU ACHALTA
וַיֹּאמֶר מִי הִגִּיד לְךָ כִּי עֵירֹם אָתָּה הֲמִן הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִיךָ לְבִלְתִּי אֲכָל מִמֶּנּוּ אָכָלְתָּ
KJ: And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
BN: And he said, "Who told you you were naked? Have you been eating from the tree, the one from which I specifically instructed you not to eat?"
Is this the god using sarcasm? Pretending that he doesn't know! The reality is that the man knows that he is naked precisely because he has eaten. The act of eating has given him the knowledge.
BUT: I have been trying, throughout these early chapters, to identify just how much of what we call science the ancients understood, and we have seen a remarkable amount of it. None quite so significant as this though, because what is being described here, in the form of a rather silly and simplistic fable it is true, but nonetheless, this is it, the moment when primoridal ape, squatting in his tree, an intelligent life-form but not yet an intelligent species, endures that painful, traumatic moment, that explosion of energy known among the brain surgeons as Evolution, that dreadful trauma from which we are still struggling to recover, and probably never will, the moment when we threw off the false skin of our animal natures, and put on human clothing. Pandora as the first woman, Prometheus as the first of the Titans, have virtually identical experiences, likewise in fable form. And how else can the gods expect us to take responsibility for the planet - to protect the other species, to ward off global warming, to keep the unspoiled places from spoliation, to resist pollutants; just as we do - if we are not encouraged to pick, indeed to harvest, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge?
3:12 VA YOMER HA ADAM HA ISHAH ASHER NATATAH IMADI HI NATNAH LI MIN HA ETS VA OCHEL
וַיֹּאמֶר הָאָדָם הָאִשָּׁה אֲשֶׁר נָתַתָּה עִמָּדִי הִוא נָתְנָה לִּי מִן הָעֵץ וָאֹכֵל
KJ: And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
BN: And the man said, "The woman who you gave me, she gave me of the tree, and yes, I ate."
Typical male, passing the buck to the female! Yes, but she is going to pass the buck too, to the serpent; and he is going to pass it back to the god, saying, "You created me, you made me part of your divine plan, so you are responsible". And in the meanwhile, here is the god blaming Adam. Perfect circles of impunity! How human! The origins of "Polish Death Camps" syndrome.
3:13 VA YOMER YHVH ELOHIM LA ISHAH MAH ZOT ASIT VA TO'MER HA ISHAH HA NACHASH HISHIY'ANI VA OCHEL
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לָאִשָּׁה מַה זֹּאת עָשִׂית וַתֹּאמֶר הָאִשָּׁה הַנָּחָשׁ הִשִּׁיאַנִי וָאֹכֵל
KJ: And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
BN: And YHVH Elohim said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" And the woman said, "The snake made me, so I ate."
HISHIY'ANI (השיאני): Yet one more example of Christian reinterpretation of a text to meet its ideological needs; the same process employed by Ezra to create this version of the Bible in the first place. The translation establishes the dogma, which is then adopted, often unconsciously; and it is also interesting to see the many occasions on which Jewish interpreters living for centuries inside Christian culture have absorbed the same dogma back into Judaism. The instance here is HISHIY'ANI, which does not mean "beguile", nor "seduce", nor any of the other terms that might hint at the great Christian morality tale. It means "to force" or "impel" or even "compel"; which meaning does not allow any blame to be ascribed to CHAVAH/Eve. Yet how did the serpent force her - unless the serpent was not a serpent at all, but a human priest dressed as a serpent in the Ophic rite using drugs or magic to oblige the subject to partake of the body of the god (as in communion, as in the Dionysic rites) as part of the process of initiation. Which enables us to realise that the ritual intended here is a parody of the Ophic ritual, staged by the Ezraic Jews as a kind of "nativity play" to show how the serpent-cult was overthrown (for more detail on the tale as the "script" for a religious pantomime - click here)
3:14 VA YOMER YHVH ELOHIM EL HA NACHASH KI ASIYTA ZOT ARUR ATA MI KOL HA BEHEMAH U MI KOL CHAYAT HA SADEH AL GECHONCHA TELECH VE APHAR TO'CHAL KOL YEMEY CHAYEYCHA
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶל הַנָּחָשׁ כִּי עָשִׂיתָ זֹּאת אָרוּר אַתָּה מִכָּל הַבְּהֵמָה וּמִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה עַל גְּחֹנְךָ תֵלֵךְ וְעָפָר תֹּאכַל כָּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ
KJ: And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
BN: Then YHVH Elohim said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you from among all animals, and from among all the creatures of the field; on your belly you shall go, and you shall you eat dust all the days of your life."
A mythological tale exists to answer basic questions about the universe, and often there are multiple questions being answered within the same fable. So, here: "daddy, why don't worms and snakes have legs?"
GECHONCHA (גחנך): Again see the note (at Genesis 2:13) to the river GIYCHON (גיחן). GACHAN (גחן) = "to bend, to bow oneself down", but is not the same as LEHISHTACHAV which is used liturgically for "to prostrate oneself". Note that the Yisra-Eli format for prayer was prostration and not kneeling. GACHON (גחון) also = "belly" (of a reptile). The implication being that, until now, the Serpent had legs like any other creature. But also, we can see that the serpent has been transformed into one of the four rivers of Eden!
ARUR (ארור): ARAR (ארר) = "to curse"; in Arabic = "to abhor, detest". But see the earlier note (at Genesis 2:7) connecting him to ARURU, the Babylonian goddess who created the first Man by kneading him from the clay
MI KOL HA BEHEMAH: This is most curious. By the standard English translation, the serpent is being separated, not from all other species of animal, but specifically from the cattle; was there some ancient belief that snakes were originally cows? It seems unlikely. So can we conclude that we are misreading the word BEHEMAH when we say "cattle" – now go back to the notes in Creation (Genesis 1:2) where Tohu and Bohu are shown to be variants of Tahamat and Behemot, the sea-serpent and land-serpent of the Ophic creation myth; and we will see that this verse must originally have read "You are Aruru [Aruru, not Arur], the holy one, [Kaddish, as we have seen, means "holy" in the sense of "separated from" and here he is being separated], the priest of Behemah, the land-serpent [whom the gods bifurcated in order to make dry land]; your holy river is Giychon" [listed in the first Creation story as one of the four source rivers and identified, as we saw with the Solomonic reference in my note to Genesis 2:13, with the principal water-source in Yeru-Shala'im itself].
Later on, especially in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we will find BEHEMAH used to mean animals in general (eg Leviticus 18:23, 24:18, Deuteronomy 4:17, 14:4)
GECHONCHA (גחנך): Again see the note (at Genesis 2:13) to the river GIYCHON (גיחן). GACHAN (גחן) = "to bend, to bow oneself down", but is not the same as LEHISHTACHAV which is used liturgically for "to prostrate oneself". Note that the Yisra-Eli format for prayer was prostration and not kneeling. GACHON (גחון) also = "belly" (of a reptile). The implication being that, until now, the Serpent had legs like any other creature. But also, we can see that the serpent has been transformed into one of the four rivers of Eden!
APHAR (עפר): see my previous note (at Genesis 2:7), and especially the connection with the word for a young calf, which extends the pun on cattle in the sanitised Yehudit version.
Clearly, at one level, the original legend was aetiological - intended to explain the workings of nature; and the priestly editors reworked it to make a morally didactic fable.
3:15 VE EYVAH ASHIT BEYNCHA U VEYN HA ISHAH U VEYN ZAR'ACHA U VEYN ZAR'AH HU YESHUPHCHA ROSH VE ATAH TESHUPHENU AKEV
וְאֵיבָה אָשִׁית בֵּינְךָ וּבֵין הָאִשָּׁה וּבֵין זַרְעֲךָ וּבֵין זַרְעָהּ הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ וְאַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב
KJ: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
BN (provisional translation - see after the commentary here, and then verse 16, for the final translation): "And I will create hatred between you and the woman, and between your progeny and her progeny; they will stamp on your head, and you will bite their heels."
Other than as an explanation for Ophidiophobia the verse just does not make any sense if it is translated in this way: future generations of humans will trample on snakes wherever they see them, and snakes will bite human ankles at every opportunity? For the key tale in the Creation myth, when Death and Human Ratiocination Capacity are being introduced into the human world, and the consequences of the awakening of consciousness are being determined. This is it?
ASHIT (אשית): cf SHAYIT (שית) = "a thorn" or "thorn-hedge" set round gardens and vineyards; which would suggest ELOHIM physically dividing the serpent from his priestess by ringing the garden round with thorn hedges. This proves insufficient, as we will see with the KERUVIM (כרבים) and the flaming sword of 3:24.
VE ATAH (ואתה): Is ATAH here a simple printing error? If not, why is it not in the feminine, AT (את), since Elohim is apparently speaking to CHAVAH/Eve
TESHUPHENU AKEV (תשופנו עקב): More simple mistakes - can it be! Usually this too is translated as "bruise", because by misreading the text it sees the same word repeated. This is not in fact the case. In the previous clause we had SHAPHACH (שפך), here we have SHAPHAN (שפן) = "to cover" or "hide", especially under the earth. (A SHAPHAN is also "a hare" or "coney", but this is not connected). Therefore not "and you will bruise his heel" as usually given, but "you will cover him under a mound of earth" – inferring that this is all leading to a concept of an Underworld, where the serpent cult will rule, under its ritual priestess - the Greek Persephone story is the easiest parallel to demonstrate this: Chavah as the Mother of all Living in the Persephone role, as we have already seen; the soon-to-be-born Shet playing the Orpheus role, as the young David will later, when he is pursued into She'ol - the Underworld - by Sha'ul (King Saul).
And so, we can now see, the prediction was absolutely correct: eat of this fruit and you will die, for what we are really reading is the introduction of Death into the world. How do I know? From the above, but especially from the next.
Because the AKEV (עקב) is crucial here, as throughout Genesis. AKAV (עקב) = "to be elevated", like a mound, arched vault, heap etc, and is the principal term for an ancient burial mound or barrow, which Av-Raham apparently replaced by the use of tombs (implying YAH-EKEV - יעקב - Ya'akov - Jacob - as a variation of the god of the underworld! exactly what he should be, if we are correct in seeing the patriarchs as Trimurti). The mound must therefore suggest pre-Av-Rahamic and pre-Beney Yisra-Eli cults, which makes sense here. The word also means "to supplant", and later, in the story of Ya'akov, is given the meaning of "following" or even "tracking", a device intended to hide the true origins of Ya'akov in the goat cult of Kena'an. This commentary will return to the importance of the heel, and its complement the thigh, later on - though in fact we have already encountered it in the references to Oedipus ("swollen foot") and Achilles ("sacred heel") previously. Here the proper reading should be "and you will cover his sacred shrine beneath a mound of earth", in brief, the creation of the first tumulus, and with it the concept of She'ol, the Underworld; which is logical, as both Death and a division between Good and Evil have just been introduced into the human world. We will see this in much more detail later on, with Devorah (Deborah), Rivkah's (Rebecca's) "wet-nurse".
The Yehudit offers a "Samech" break here (ends of strophes are indicated by "Pey" breaks).
3:16 EL HA ISHAH AMAR HARBAH ARBEH ITSVONECH VE HERONECH BE ETSEM TELDI VANIM VE EL ISHECH TESHUKATECH VE HU YIMSHAL BACH
TESHUPHENU AKEV (תשופנו עקב): More simple mistakes - can it be! Usually this too is translated as "bruise", because by misreading the text it sees the same word repeated. This is not in fact the case. In the previous clause we had SHAPHACH (שפך), here we have SHAPHAN (שפן) = "to cover" or "hide", especially under the earth. (A SHAPHAN is also "a hare" or "coney", but this is not connected). Therefore not "and you will bruise his heel" as usually given, but "you will cover him under a mound of earth" – inferring that this is all leading to a concept of an Underworld, where the serpent cult will rule, under its ritual priestess - the Greek Persephone story is the easiest parallel to demonstrate this: Chavah as the Mother of all Living in the Persephone role, as we have already seen; the soon-to-be-born Shet playing the Orpheus role, as the young David will later, when he is pursued into She'ol - the Underworld - by Sha'ul (King Saul).
And so, we can now see, the prediction was absolutely correct: eat of this fruit and you will die, for what we are really reading is the introduction of Death into the world. How do I know? From the above, but especially from the next.
Because the AKEV (עקב) is crucial here, as throughout Genesis. AKAV (עקב) = "to be elevated", like a mound, arched vault, heap etc, and is the principal term for an ancient burial mound or barrow, which Av-Raham apparently replaced by the use of tombs (implying YAH-EKEV - יעקב - Ya'akov - Jacob - as a variation of the god of the underworld! exactly what he should be, if we are correct in seeing the patriarchs as Trimurti). The mound must therefore suggest pre-Av-Rahamic and pre-Beney Yisra-Eli cults, which makes sense here. The word also means "to supplant", and later, in the story of Ya'akov, is given the meaning of "following" or even "tracking", a device intended to hide the true origins of Ya'akov in the goat cult of Kena'an. This commentary will return to the importance of the heel, and its complement the thigh, later on - though in fact we have already encountered it in the references to Oedipus ("swollen foot") and Achilles ("sacred heel") previously. Here the proper reading should be "and you will cover his sacred shrine beneath a mound of earth", in brief, the creation of the first tumulus, and with it the concept of She'ol, the Underworld; which is logical, as both Death and a division between Good and Evil have just been introduced into the human world. We will see this in much more detail later on, with Devorah (Deborah), Rivkah's (Rebecca's) "wet-nurse".
The Yehudit offers a "Samech" break here (ends of strophes are indicated by "Pey" breaks).
3:16 EL HA ISHAH AMAR HARBAH ARBEH ITSVONECH VE HERONECH BE ETSEM TELDI VANIM VE EL ISHECH TESHUKATECH VE HU YIMSHAL BACH
אֶל הָאִשָּׁה אָמַר הַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה עִצְּבוֹנֵךְ וְהֵרֹנֵךְ בְּעֶצֶב תֵּלְדִי בָנִים וְאֶל אִישֵׁךְ תְּשׁוּקָתֵךְ וְהוּא יִמְשָׁל בָּךְ
KJ: Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
BN (provisional translation): To the woman he said, "I shall greatly multiply your pain and your labour; in pain you shall give birth to children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you."
Let us take this at face value first, but satirically; satire is a useful way of distancing oneself from a familiar tale and thereby seeing it afresh, objectively. The god creates the world, out of his almightiness, using intelligent design and a billion year strategic plan. Within a week, it has gone wrong; in his stupidity he created fallible human beings and a sly, mischievous snake, put them in the very garden where he had put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that he did not need to put anywhere at all, since no one is allowed to eat from it anyway, but he points it out so that they cannot possibly miss it, and then becomes furious when they do eat, and starts issuing hyperbolous punishments that actually go against his own plan and force him to re-write parts of it. Go forth and multiply, like I told you, but now it's going to hurt, forever. Take responsibility for the Earth – but do it as a job, not as a labour of love, so that you hate every minute of it. And get out of Paradise. It's locked, bolted, unenterable ever again. Go live in the desert and tend sheep, if you can find water. O, and love me all the while, of course. A divine tantrum resulting from his own bad decision-making! This is not just bad parenting, this is bad godding. No one in their right mind is going to believe in such a god, worship such a god, follow such a god.
Or let us say it more boringly: theologically this just does not work.
But face value is not the way to look at this. The mis-readings and secret readings really do begin to suggest a genuine conspiracy, with a text for simpletons concealing another, almost masonic one, for the initiated alone! Hence:-
HARBAH (הרבה): = "to multiply, increase". The usual reading is "I will multiply" but that would require an Aleph as first letter. What is given here is actually the imperative form, an order to the woman – "increase!"
HARBAH (הרבה): = "to multiply, increase". The usual reading is "I will multiply" but that would require an Aleph as first letter. What is given here is actually the imperative form, an order to the woman – "increase!"
ARBEH (ארבה): Apparently from the same root, and therefore translated as "greatly" + "multiply". But in fact this time there is an Aleph, and the form is a noun; so while it may well be an aural pun, it is most definitely not the same word; correctly the root is ARBEH (ארבה) = "a locust", one of the most prolifically procreative of all the ancient symbols of the mother-goddess – a translation the Rashis of the world automatically ignore, because they cannot see any possibility of it being correct; but we shall see that it is.
ITSVONECH (עצבונך): does indeed mean "your sorrow", from the root ATSAV (עצב) = "to toil with pain, be grieved, suffer". This, however, is clearly late Yehudit, for in the Hiphil (causative) form, as in Assyrian, Chaldean et al, the root ATSAV (עצב) = "to labour, form, fashion"; having the sense of cutting wood or stone, and for the very specific purpose of making an OTSEV (עוצב), a carved image of the divinity. In the Hiphil it means "to serve an idol" or "to worship" and is used particularly for worship of the Queen of Heaven.
VE HERONECH (והרנך): HARAH (הרה) does indeed mean "to conceive". But the complete phrase, even if one accepts the mistakes, does not make much sense: "I will greatly multiply your sorrows and your conception"; taken by Christians to mean that Woman will now have to endure the great misery of having lots of children. This is hardly likely from a god whose number one order is Go Forth And Multiply! HERONECH (הרנך) more likely roots from HARAN (הרן) which we know from the story of Av-Ram, and has the specific meaning, from HAR (הר) = "a hill" or "mountain", of a mountaintop or hilltop shrine.
BE ETSEV TELDI BANIM (בעצב תלדי בנים): Bearing in mind the explanation of ETSEV (עצב) given above, a better reading would be: "in the service of the Queen of Heaven bear your children" - but the Ezraic Redactor was in the business of removing the Queen of Heaven from the cult, and so...
TESHUKATECH (תשוקתך): Usually given as from the root NASHAK (נשק) = "to kiss, desire", but actually it comes from the root SHAKA (שקה) = "to water, irrigate".
YIMSHAL (ימשל): "To rule"; but also "to assimilate". Deciding which is correct is easy, for the preposition that follows is BA (ב) and not AL (על) or EL (אל).
Taking the phrase as a whole then, based on this reading, we have a very different text (revised provisional reading, but still provisional):
To the priestess of the river-god he said, "Increase the number of images of the locust which are your symbol*, and likewise the number of your mountaintop shrines, and in service of the Queen of Heaven bear children, and irrigate the land of your husband the Earth-god, and let his cult be assimilated into yours".In other words, it belonged, originally, to the liturgy of the Queen of Heaven, but was adapted to suit the needs of patriarchalisation; instead of praising female sexuality, which leads to fertility, the fertility goddess must now suffer the consequences of her fertility: joy is turned into pain. And the man who once served her is now her lord.
Again a "Samech" break is offered here. Does it suggest that the phrase was a late insertion?
3:17 U LE ADAM AMAR KI SHAMA'TA LE KOL ISHTECHA VA TO'CHAL MIN HA ETS ASHER TSIVIYTIYCHA LEMOR LO TO'CHAL MIMENU ARURAH HA ADAMAH BA AVURECHA BE ITSAVON TO'CHALENA KOL YEMEY CHAYEYCHA
3:17 U LE ADAM AMAR KI SHAMA'TA LE KOL ISHTECHA VA TO'CHAL MIN HA ETS ASHER TSIVIYTIYCHA LEMOR LO TO'CHAL MIMENU ARURAH HA ADAMAH BA AVURECHA BE ITSAVON TO'CHALENA KOL YEMEY CHAYEYCHA
וּלְאָדָם אָמַר כִּי שָׁמַעְתָּ לְקוֹל אִשְׁתֶּךָ וַתֹּאכַל מִן הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִיךָ לֵאמֹר לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ בְּעִצָּבוֹן תֹּאכֲלֶנָּה כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ
KJ: And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
BN: And to Adam he said, "Because you listened to the voice of your wife, and ate from the tree, despite my instruction to you, my saying to you, 'Do not eat from it', cursed shall the ground be for your sake, in toil you shall eat from it all the days of your life."
ARURAH HA ADAMAH BA AVURECHA (ארורה האדמה בעבורך): Adam is cursed like the serpent (whereas Christianity usually reckons that it is Chavah who is so cursed), but also the Earth which is his domain, the Adamah from which he, Adam, was himself formed; presumably the uncursed parts are those tended and irrigated by Chavah; as in verse 16. So the original Divine Plan is now abandoned in its entirety, everything that was made sacred now being cursed. So, once again, Intelligent Design, which might have worked if there had been some intelligence designing it, has failed.
BE ITSAVON TO'CHALENA (בעצבון תאכלנה): "In the service of the Queen of Heaven you will eat dust" – is this a way of formalising the introduction of the concept of death and burial?
But of course, if we take out the anthropomorphisation of the god, and treat the god as pure El, a metaphor for the pulse of life itself, then we can read this simply as an aetiological myth: why is childbirth paintful, why do we have to go out and work for a living, why do we die? But to do so we have to think in reverse. Rather than the god creating the world, and then making it like this; the story says "this is how the world is: painful childbirth, working for a living, death in the end. Life [the gods] made it this way." A good translation back into Yehudit for "this is how the world is" might be "Eheyeh asher eheyeh" (Exodus 3:14).
3:18 VE KOTS VE DARDAR TATSMIY'ACH LACH VE ACHALTA ET ESEV HA SADEH
But of course, if we take out the anthropomorphisation of the god, and treat the god as pure El, a metaphor for the pulse of life itself, then we can read this simply as an aetiological myth: why is childbirth paintful, why do we have to go out and work for a living, why do we die? But to do so we have to think in reverse. Rather than the god creating the world, and then making it like this; the story says "this is how the world is: painful childbirth, working for a living, death in the end. Life [the gods] made it this way." A good translation back into Yehudit for "this is how the world is" might be "Eheyeh asher eheyeh" (Exodus 3:14).
3:18 VE KOTS VE DARDAR TATSMIY'ACH LACH VE ACHALTA ET ESEV HA SADEH
וְקוֹץ וְדַרְדַּר תַּצְמִיחַ לָךְ וְאָכַלְתָּ אֶת עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה
KJ: Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
BN: "And thorns and thistles will grow there for you; and you shall eat the grass of the field."
VE KOTS (וקוץ): = "to be weary, to fear, to besiege a city, to cut off, to cut up"; hence KOTS (קוץ) = "a thorn, briar". Also KEVUTSOT (קוצות) = "locks of hair that have been cut off", which is not insignificant given that Adam as Earth-god has a similar function to Shimshon (Samson) and Esav (Esau) as sun-heroes.
Reckoning ADAM as the Edomite people, this could be read as a secret message:
DARDAR (דרדר) is a luxuriantly growing but utterly useless weed of a plant, from the root DARAR (דרר) = "to fly in a circle, to wheel in flight"; so something like a dandelion; if you have ever played at blowing their seeds, you will recognise the image immediately; also "to flow out", in the sense of flooding.
"Your cities will be besieged, your famous red hair will be cut off, your harvests ruined; weeds will grow in your fields, your armies will be routed, your rivers will go into flood."
If one compares this with the Isaiac and Jeremiac warnings to the Edomites written at precisely the same period, this may not be as barmy as it may at first appear.
On the other hand, what is prescribed for the human diet sounds more like an animal's diet: why should this be? Were humans originally vegetarian?
ESEV HA SADEH: "herb of the field" makes it sound like we have to eat the wildflowers and the nettles, where what this is really giving is a more detailed explanation of "toil" in the previous verse (and see verse 23 for confirmation); "you will have to farm your own crops; do not expect the gods to provide for you beyond the fruits of the trees that you have already been given. Plant crops, especially the cereal crops".
It was the discovery of Emmer and then Bread Wheat (see Ancestry of the Patriarch 2) around 7,000 BCE that enabled humans to become sedentary, and started agriculture as a way of life - though every farmer will tell you how much time is spent digging out the thorns and thistles one by one, removing the self-seeding but unwanted nettles and tree-saplings, and how much "toil" that involves, even in a good year, when the gods send the rains when you need them and not at other times, and turn their sunny face to shine on the crops, rather than shrivelling them with too much, or hiding behind clouds...
3:19 BE ZE'AT APEYCHA TO'CHAL LECHEM AD SHUVCHA EL HA ADAMAH KI MIMENAH LUKACHTA KI APHAR ATAH VE EL APHAR TASHUV
3:19 BE ZE'AT APEYCHA TO'CHAL LECHEM AD SHUVCHA EL HA ADAMAH KI MIMENAH LUKACHTA KI APHAR ATAH VE EL APHAR TASHUV
בְּזֵעַת אַפֶּיךָ תֹּאכַל לֶחֶם עַד שׁוּבְךָ אֶל הָאֲדָמָה כִּי מִמֶּנָּה לֻקָּחְתָּ כִּי עָפָר אַתָּה וְאֶל עָפָר תָּשׁוּב
KJ: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
BN: "With sweat on your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the earth; for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return."
BE ZE'AT (בזעת) : ZA'AH (זעה) = "sweat".
APEYCHA (אפיך): APH (אף) = "nose"; also "anger", as explained in a previous note, from the root ANAPH (אנף) = "to breathe, to be angry". The ANAPHAH (אנפה) is an unclean bird that dwells in hollows and river banks, possibly the sandpiper or parrot. The word is usually used to signify the eagle, the symbolic bird of Elohim (cg Leviticus 11:19 where it is listed among the birds of prey).
TO'CHAL LECHEM (תוכל לחם): For reasons that are not quite as obscure as might at first appear, the root LACHAM (לחם) evolves into both LECHEM (לחם) = "bread" and MILCHAMAH (מלחמה) = "war"; presumably because that was what the ancients mostly fought over, as in truth we still do today. LACHEM (לחם) = "to besiege". LE'ECHOL LECHEM (לאכל לחם) however is an idiom meaning "to endure war" and should not be translated as "you will eat bread", while "return to the ground" is a euphemism for death, not for farming.
Therefore verse 19 might equally be translated as:
VE EL APHAR TASHUV (ואל עפר תשוב): APHAR with an Aleph, where Ephron was spelled with an Ayin - see verse 14, which also spelled APHAR with an Ayin, and where my note invites you to see my previous note at Genesis 2:7. "To the dust you will return." In other words, you will no longer be immortal (and there is no afterlife). Yet 3:22 makes it clear that he was not immortal anyway: so why this? Whatever explanation, it establishes from the outset a fundamental conflict within the religion of the Beney Yisra-El, and still now in Judaism. You cannot have this verse, and a place in "Heaven" in "the afterlife" - I have placed both concepts in quotation marks because there are two schools of Judaism, one of which believes in both concepts, the other of which dismisses them altogether. Theologically the problem lies in the fact that you cannot have this verse, and "mechayeh meytim", the resurrection of the dead, when the Messiah comes.
3:20 VA YIKRA HA ADAM SHEM ISHTO CHAVAH KI HI HAYETAH EM KOL CHAI
Therefore verse 19 might equally be translated as:
"The eagle (Assyria?) shall oppress you; you shall be engaged in war until you return to the land of Edom (Eden?) from where you came. For you were the people of Ephron, and you shall be Ephronim again".The Ephronim were of course the Chitites, of whom the god Phoroneus is known to us through the Greek myths, as well as from the selling of the Cave of Machpelah to Av-Raham by Ephron the Chitite (Genesis 23:8 ff; 49:29; 50:13); less well-known is that he was Phoenician before he became Greek, and to the Phoenicians he was... their Adam, the first man, and it was he, not Prometheus, who discovered fire (click here, or on his name three lines ago). His sister-wife was Yah (יה), who gave her name to the Ionian Sea, and who was the principal moon and mother goddess of the Psalms and the Orphean cult of David (Hallelu-Yah).
VE EL APHAR TASHUV (ואל עפר תשוב): APHAR with an Aleph, where Ephron was spelled with an Ayin - see verse 14, which also spelled APHAR with an Ayin, and where my note invites you to see my previous note at Genesis 2:7. "To the dust you will return." In other words, you will no longer be immortal (and there is no afterlife). Yet 3:22 makes it clear that he was not immortal anyway: so why this? Whatever explanation, it establishes from the outset a fundamental conflict within the religion of the Beney Yisra-El, and still now in Judaism. You cannot have this verse, and a place in "Heaven" in "the afterlife" - I have placed both concepts in quotation marks because there are two schools of Judaism, one of which believes in both concepts, the other of which dismisses them altogether. Theologically the problem lies in the fact that you cannot have this verse, and "mechayeh meytim", the resurrection of the dead, when the Messiah comes.
3:20 VA YIKRA HA ADAM SHEM ISHTO CHAVAH KI HI HAYETAH EM KOL CHAI
וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁם אִשְׁתּוֹ חַוָּה כִּי הִוא הָיְתָה אֵם כָּל חָי
KJ: And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
BN: And the man gave his wife the name "Chavah"; because she was the mother of all living things.
CHAVAH (חוה): from the root LECHIYOT (לחיות) = "to breathe, live"; whence CHAI (חי), CHAYAH (חיה), CHAYIM (חיים) = "life", "animals", "creatures" etc. From the same root comes CHIVI, (חוי), the Chivites (Hivites) of the foot of Mount Chermon (Hermon) in the land of Mitspeh (Joshua 11:3; Judges 3:3), and also at Giv-On (Gibeon) (Genesis 34:2, Joshua 11:19, 2 Samuel 21:2, 1 Kings 9:20 et al). But the key is not only that she was the Chivite mother-goddess, who is here marrying the Edomite Earth-god, one of many cultic assimilations, absorptions, conquests, subsumations etc that we will witness throughout the Tanach (see notes to CHAVAH); what is also key here, and the reason why I have given these reference-links to Giv-On, is the tale of the "trick" played by the Beney Giv-On on Yehoshu'a (Joshua 11:3), the enslavement of the Beney Giv-On as a consequence, and especially their status forever afterwards - the Beney Giv-On became the Harijan or Dalit of Yisra-El, a fact that will become hugely significant in the story of David and Sha'ul, which is itself a mythological tale about the Underworld. Click here for the full explanation.
EM KOL CHAI (אם כל-חי): cf stories of Circe, Ceres, Persephone, etc, for the mother-goddess and earth-goddess. And no one hearing this verse at the time of the Redaction, or in any of the several millennia before it, would have had any other unerstanding that this denotes her as a deity, not a human. The title was given to every leading goddess in the ancient world.
Hertz's attempt to remove the mother goddess implication is rather amusing; by stating categorically that his own translation is incorrect! He wishes EM KOL CHAI to mean "mother of all Humankind", because that is easier to cope with. The fact is that it means what it means: the fertility goddess herself, the original Mother Mary: Ishtar, Inanna, Isis, et al. There is no escaping it.
3:21 VA YA'AS YHVH ELOHIM LE ADAM U LE ISHTO KATNOT OR VA YALBISHEM
Hertz's attempt to remove the mother goddess implication is rather amusing; by stating categorically that his own translation is incorrect! He wishes EM KOL CHAI to mean "mother of all Humankind", because that is easier to cope with. The fact is that it means what it means: the fertility goddess herself, the original Mother Mary: Ishtar, Inanna, Isis, et al. There is no escaping it.
3:21 VA YA'AS YHVH ELOHIM LE ADAM U LE ISHTO KATNOT OR VA YALBISHEM
וַיַּעַשׂ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לְאָדָם וּלְאִשְׁתּוֹ כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם
KJ: Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
BN: And YHVH ELOHIM made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.
Proof that it was not the nakedness that was the sin - if it were, he would have instricted them to remove the fig-leaves and get back to being naked; nor was the sexual attraction induced by the aesthetics of nakedness the sin, because very soon afterwards they are going to start producing children. So the Original Sin was never the Original Sin; or the Original Sin was disobedience, the same complaint that the major Prophets will make and go on making.
But odd nonetheless that YHVH Elohim should turn tailor and provide the clothes, when he had just told Adam to become a farmer and grow his own food. Why not also tell him: if you have a problem with being naked, make your own clothes? (To which I think the answer has to be: because humankind has not yet been given permission to kill animals, for food or otherwise, and so the only clothes they can make are the fig-leaves they are now wearing. Killing for food, and using the skins for clothing, requires permission - the basic reason for sacrifices as a ritual and ceremonial act, as we shall see later in the Bible).
Pey break; end of strophe. End of fourth fragment
3:22 VA YOMER YHVH ELOHIM HEN HA ADAM HAYAH KE ACHAD MIMENU LADA'AT TOV VA RA VA ATAH PEN YISHLACH YADO VE LAKACH GAM ME ETS HA CHAYIM VE ACHAL VE CHAI LE OLAM
3:22 VA YOMER YHVH ELOHIM HEN HA ADAM HAYAH KE ACHAD MIMENU LADA'AT TOV VA RA VA ATAH PEN YISHLACH YADO VE LAKACH GAM ME ETS HA CHAYIM VE ACHAL VE CHAI LE OLAM
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע וְעַתָּה פֶּן יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם
KJ: And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
BN: And YHVH Elohim said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing how to distinguish good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand, and take from the tree of life as well, and eat, and live for ever..."
So the serpent was right in what he said when tempting Chavah to eat! And any lingering doubt that immortality was ever intended is here put to rest. Not only did he not give it, it appears to be something the god dreads Humankind acquiring, even more than the knowledge of good and evil. Indeed, though it was never stated explicitly, Death must have been introduced into the world on one of the 6 days of Creation - or was it, perhaps, a part of the condition before Creation, an element of the Darkness, the Chaos, the Void, the realm of Choshech and Tohu and Bohu?
And anyway, all of this is only meaningful if the god is anthropomorphic. If the god is simply the combined kinetic impulses of the universe, operating without morality (hurricanes and earthquakes do not have moral consciences, let alone divine plans), this interpretation of the story is rendered "meaningless" (by which I mean, reduced an extremely meaningful metaphor, but meaningless from a literal perspective). Similarly the Jewish notion that the god cannot be depicted in wood or stone; he is depicted in stories like this one, and in anthropomorphic concepts like Avinu malkeynu, Our Father, Our King. Rabbinic Judaism has in fact replaced abstract monotheism with a primitive sky god, "Eheyeh asher eheyeh" with Rabbinically ordained "halachah". Orthodox Judaism is in fact a reversion to the pagan!
HEN...MIMENU (הן...ממנו): "One of us". To whom is this spoken? One god speaking to another, self-evidently. This then is a pre-monotheistic, a polytheistic tale.
HEN...MIMENU (הן...ממנו): "One of us". To whom is this spoken? One god speaking to another, self-evidently. This then is a pre-monotheistic, a polytheistic tale.
GAM ME ETS HA CHAYIM (גם מעץ החיים): Do we now need to go back and look again at this issue of "One Tree or Two Trees?" Or is the god-statement here likewise entirely metaphorical? Certainly it is entirely unequivocal: here, there are two trees.
And if we do, then are we talking about two trees at the same shrine, or two competing shrines? And why did the god(s) not forbid them to eat from this tree earlier, when the other was prohibited? Logically, all the death references in this tale link it to the Tree of Life, not to the Tree of Knowledge, and it is only the Tree of Life that will require protection by Keruvim and a flaming sword after the expulsion of Adam (and Chavah?).
And if we do, then are we talking about two trees at the same shrine, or two competing shrines? And why did the god(s) not forbid them to eat from this tree earlier, when the other was prohibited? Logically, all the death references in this tale link it to the Tree of Life, not to the Tree of Knowledge, and it is only the Tree of Life that will require protection by Keruvim and a flaming sword after the expulsion of Adam (and Chavah?).
VE ACHAL (ואכל): He is apparently free to, and capable of, eating from the tree; the key here being the word "free".
...At which point the direct speech that is apparently being addressed to his fellow gods ("one of us!") ends, and reported speech takes over...
3:23 VA YESHALCH'EHU YHVH ELOHIM MI GAN EDEN LA'AVOD ET HA ADAMAH ASHER LUKACH MI SHAM
3:23 VA YESHALCH'EHU YHVH ELOHIM MI GAN EDEN LA'AVOD ET HA ADAMAH ASHER LUKACH MI SHAM
וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִגַּן עֵדֶן לַעֲבֹד אֶת הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח מִשָּׁם
KJ: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
BN: Then YHVH Elohim sent him out of the garden of Eden, to go out and work the land from which he had been taken.
English translations add the word "therefore" here - an obvious give-away. "Therefore" implies a punishment; but the word does not appear in the Yehudit. It is not LACHEN (לכן) but simply VA (ו). The point is that Adam is sent away, not as a punishment, but to protect the position of the gods themselves from the result of his eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge - which of course is paralleled in the story of the Tower of Bavel in Genesis 11. It is worth comparing the punishments of Prometheus and Sisyphus in this context! Especially as Adam, at the mythological level, as First Man, really is Prometheus (and Prometheus, to the Greeks, was the son of Iapetus, who makes two significant appearances in the Tanach, the first as Yaphet or Japheth, one of the three sons of No'ach; the second as Yiphtach, in Judges 11 and again in 1 Samuel 12, whose sacrifice of his daughter echoes the Greek tale of Iphigenia)!
Nothing in this verse suggests that Chavah was expelled from the garden. But it may be that, being made from his rib and therefore his property, her expulsion is implicit in his.
3:24 VA YEGARESH ET HA ADAM VA YASHKEN MI KEDEM LE GAN EDEN ET HA KERUVIM VE ET LAHAT HA CHEREV HA MIT’HAPECHET LISHMOR ET DERECH ETS HA CHAYIM
KJ: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
BN: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Keruvim, and a swastika, a fire-wheel which rotated and rotated, guarding the way to the Tree of Life.
VA YEGARESH ET HA ADAM (ויגרש את-האדם): There is a problem here - and not simply the change from YESHALCH'EHU in the previous verse to YEGARESH here - that simply notes Adam's reluctance, and the fact that he has to be pushed when he apparently refuses to go of his own accord. According to the text it is ADAM alone who is kicked out, and not CHAVAH/Eve (or are we once again expected to read HA ADAM as Humankind, on the principal that ADAM was created Male and Female?) The answer... GARASH (גרש) = "to expel, drive out"; but also "to divorce" (and wives cannot divorce husbands under Jewish law, but only husbands can divorce wives!); other meanings are "to plunder" and "to spoil"; "to drive cattle to pasture", "to put forth fruit"; "to be stormy" (of sea). The clear indication is that (Christians again take note) ADAM is expelled from Eden, but CHAVAH/Eve remains there, whether herself the Earth/Mother goddess and Eden signifying Nature, or perhaps simply in the form of her priestess, whose duty ever after is to keep the shrine. This is very different from the traditional interpretation!
ET HA KERUVIM (את-הכרבים): And now, meet for the first time that darling little baby, plump and healthy, with blue eyes and a white bib - this at least is how the cherub has come to be depicted (illustrations and a Christianised explanation here), since approximately the 12th century CE. Alas, it will not do. First, it is pronounced KERUVIM, and not CHERUBIM. According to Ezekiel 1 & 10, the KERUV (כרוב) was a being of sublime and celestial nature, composed of four parts (just like the rivers of Eden and the quarters of the heavens, which compare here!); man, ox, lion and eagle, the three animals symbolising power and wisdom and, with the man, happening to be the four parts of the mandala (see image below). The function of the KERUVIM is to bear the throne of Elohim on their wings through the clouds (2 Samuel 22:11). Wooden statues of them, overlaid with gold, stood in the innermost part of the holy tabernacle (Exodus 25:18 ff) and of the temple of Shelomoh (Solomon) (1 Kings 6:23) where figures of them were also carved on the walls.
The root is KARAV (כרב) = "to be near" i.e. to be near to Elohim, as were his ministers. In middle Yehudit the word came to mean "relatives", as in "nearest and dearest". In Farsi (the language of Persia) KERUV = "griffins", the phoenix-like birds whose principal duty was to guard the gold-producing mountains of Chaldea. It is possible that the meaning in the Yehudit changed at some point through confusion with the Chaldean KARUZ = "a herald"; whence the Yehudit root KARUZ (כרז) = "to proclaim, cry out"; whence also "a herald". More significant than all this however is the fact that, in Farsi, Chaldean and in Yehudit, the word KARUV indicates a swastika! And the flaming sword mentioned in the same phrase was almost certainly a swastika, as evidenced by its turning every-which-way (see below).
LAHAT (לחט): = "to burn, flame". LIHET (לחט) = "to kindle", and also has the sense of concealment, as in the use of occult and magical arts. LAHAT (לחט) = "a flame", especially flaming steel; but LAHATIM (לחטים) are "incantations". The ancients used fire-sticks to light fires, and mostly they kept just one fire going for an entire community, it being in the temple or sacred grove, and with young vestals (hence the name, from Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth), both male and female, whose job it was to keep the fire alight.
HA CHEREV (החרב): from the root CHARAV (חרב), but note the pun on KERUV (כרב) and CHARAV (חרב); the latter means "to be dried up" (water, earth, river), "to become dry, desolate, laid waste" (cities); also "to be amazed, astounded". In only one sense does CHEREV mean sword, and this is oblique to say the least. From the same root comes CHOREV (חרב) = Mount Chorev (Horeb), another of the sacred mountains of the Beney Yisra-El, or simply another name for the same sacred mountain (click here to follow that thought through). ET HA KERUVIM VA ET LAHAT HA CHOREV may therefore mean "the shamans and magical arts of the shrine of Chorev (Horeb)", in which case it is again worth looking at the punctuation after MI KEDEM LE GAN EDEN.
HA MIT'HAPECHET (המתהפכת): Turning every way, not simply north or south or east or west as did the four rivers; but now we can see that it was indeed the fire-wheel; and what was the fire wheel but the original swastika, the wheel of power of Persia; and it being a Persian (actually a Hindu symbol, but the Yehudim learned it while in exile in Persia), we can now date the writing of this piece much more precisely - and confirm so many other Persian references noted earlier.
Is there not an extraordinary irony though, to discover that the Garden of Eden is mezuzahed by a swastika? The only comfort is to learn that the Nazis got the swastika wrong, and drew it in its mirror-form, backwards.
LISHMOR ET DERECH ETS HA CHAYIM (לשמר את דרך עץ החיים): Peculiarly translated as "the way of the Tree of Life"; when it makes much more sense to say "the way to the Tree of Life"; the intention, after all, being to prevent humans from eating from it and therefore becoming immortal like the gods; exactly the same as Fafner, in Wagner's version of the Niebelungen Saga, protecting the way to the Ring, or the unnamed dragon in the Jason story, protecting the way to the Golden Fleece. "The way of" does not really mean very much - unless it might be read in a Zoroastrian/Christian sense of "I am the Way"; but that is clearly not the intention here. But at least it helps us understand what this tree was – the World Tree, in every pagan myth. The one that grew in Sieglinde's house, in the Niebelungen Saga, with Wotan's sword stuck, precisely like Excalibur, in its trunk: Yggdrasil by name (see verse 3). The totem pole, in Amerindian rites.
Again a "samech" break follows. The next episode, the story of Kayin (Cain) and Havel (Abel), follows on as part of the same story, with no end of strophe or fragment but merely the "samech" break.
N.B. There is no reference to a man named "ADAM" anywhere, but only to HA ADAM, "Man" or "the man", except in 4:21, and only then if we read it as LE-ADAM and not as LA-ADAM.
End of Chapter Three
A Modern Prose Rendition of the Traditional Translation of this Chapter
The snake was more flagrant than any other animal that YHVH Elohim had made. He said to the woman,
"Has Elohim really told you not to eat from every tree in the garden?"
And the woman replied to the snake,
"We are allowed to eat the fruit of all the trees in the garden. Only from the tree in the centre of the garden has Elohim forbidden us to eat, or even to touch it, on pain of death."
Then the snake said to the woman,
"You won't die from eating it. But Elohim knows that, on the day that you do eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like gods yourselves, because you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil."
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasing to the eye, and that education was desirable, and so she plucked a piece of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. At once, both of their eyes opened, and they realised that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves clothing. Then they heard the voice of YHVH Elohim moving through the garden in the heat of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the face of YHVH Elohim among the trees of the garden.
But YHVH Elohim called to the man saying,
"Where are you?"
And he replied,
"I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and so I hid."
And he said,
"Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you even to touch?"
And the man said,
"The woman you gave me gave me one of the fruits from the tree, and I ate."
And YHVH Elohim said to the woman, "What have you done?"
And the woman said,
"The snake persuaded me to eat."
And YHVH Elohim said to the snake,
"Because you did this you are accursed among all cattle and all beasts of the field; you will walk on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. And there will be enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; it shall bruise your head and you will bite its heel."
And to the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your anguish by increasing your fertility; in pain you will give birth to children, and all your desire shall be to please your husband, and he shall rule over you."
And to the man he said,
"Because you listened to the woman's voice and ate from the tree which I forbade you, the earth is now cursed because of you sake. You will regret eating it throughout all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles will grow in it to hamper your farming, you will live on the grasses that grow in the fields. In the sweat of your brow you will eat bread until you too return to the soil; for out of it you were taken; you were made from the dust, and when you die you will return to the dust."
And the man named his wife Chavah, for she was the mother of all living things. And YHVH Elohim made coats out of animal-skins for Adam and his wife, and he allowed them to go dressed.
But then YHVH Elohim said, "I can see that Humankind has become like one of us, able to distinguish good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand and eat from the Tree of Life too and become immortal..."
So YHVH Elohim expelled him from the garden of Eden, and made him work the soil from which he was made. So he drove out the man, and at the eastern end of the garden of Eden he placed as guardians Keruvim, and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to protect the way to the Tree of Life.
The Babylonian parts were presumably added to this during the Exile; they deal with the gods Marduk, Tehom, Tohu and Bohu etc. Can we identify any other differences between the Edomite sacred garden myth and the Babylonian "four rivers"?
Where and what was the garden? Probably Chevron (Hebron) in the Edomite version of the myth - though even at its largest, the borders of Edom never (as far as we know) stretched as far as Chevron - a sacred grove or early orchard, connected to the cave of Machpelah which was the oracular cave of Ephron the Chitite, also known as Phoroneus by the Greeks. And in the Babylonian?
But even if the Edomite borders did not extend that far north, Yisra-Eli tradition placed Adam's skull on the hill of Golgot-Yah in Yeru-Shala'im, and Chavah in the cave of Machpelah - so was an Edomite tradition from the south carried north, or was Chevron indeed Edomite before the Chitite conquest? In those versions, Adam was created in Chevron (Hebron), though his earliest myths are also found in the hill-towns that would become Yeru-Shalayim. Genesis 2 and 3 are clearly Edomite, but they also reflect a Yerachme-Elite legend from the Negev; it was probably taken over and Babylonised after the exile (586 BCE). The Yerachme-Elite version includes a Paradise located on a high mountain, and a sacred grove. Then was the Chevron version originally Yerachme-Elite?
וַיְגָרֶשׁ אֶת הָאָדָם וַיַּשְׁכֵּן מִקֶּדֶם לְגַן עֵדֶן אֶת הַכְּרֻבִים וְאֵת לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת לִשְׁמֹר אֶת דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים
KJ: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
BN: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Keruvim, and a swastika, a fire-wheel which rotated and rotated, guarding the way to the Tree of Life.
VA YEGARESH ET HA ADAM (ויגרש את-האדם): There is a problem here - and not simply the change from YESHALCH'EHU in the previous verse to YEGARESH here - that simply notes Adam's reluctance, and the fact that he has to be pushed when he apparently refuses to go of his own accord. According to the text it is ADAM alone who is kicked out, and not CHAVAH/Eve (or are we once again expected to read HA ADAM as Humankind, on the principal that ADAM was created Male and Female?) The answer... GARASH (גרש) = "to expel, drive out"; but also "to divorce" (and wives cannot divorce husbands under Jewish law, but only husbands can divorce wives!); other meanings are "to plunder" and "to spoil"; "to drive cattle to pasture", "to put forth fruit"; "to be stormy" (of sea). The clear indication is that (Christians again take note) ADAM is expelled from Eden, but CHAVAH/Eve remains there, whether herself the Earth/Mother goddess and Eden signifying Nature, or perhaps simply in the form of her priestess, whose duty ever after is to keep the shrine. This is very different from the traditional interpretation!
As indicated previously, the opening of Frazer's "The Golden Bough" provides the real mythological source of this tale; though it is noted that many scholars now challenge the validity of Frazer's readings.
VA YASHKEN MI KEDEM LE GAN EDEN (וישכן מקדם לגן-עדן): It is worthwhile looking closely at the punctuation here; usually this phrase is reckoned to be part of the following phrase; but it could be read as part of the preceding phrase; in which case it makes an interesting comparison with the expulsion of Kayin (Cain). Either way "east of the garden of Eden" appears in both stories, once as protecting the way to the Tree of Life, once as the place where Kayin wanders. Is the inference an "eastern gate"; in which case can we assume northern, southern and western gates as well? As there were in all temples and at all shrines!
VA YASHKEN MI KEDEM LE GAN EDEN (וישכן מקדם לגן-עדן): It is worthwhile looking closely at the punctuation here; usually this phrase is reckoned to be part of the following phrase; but it could be read as part of the preceding phrase; in which case it makes an interesting comparison with the expulsion of Kayin (Cain). Either way "east of the garden of Eden" appears in both stories, once as protecting the way to the Tree of Life, once as the place where Kayin wanders. Is the inference an "eastern gate"; in which case can we assume northern, southern and western gates as well? As there were in all temples and at all shrines!
ET HA KERUVIM (את-הכרבים): And now, meet for the first time that darling little baby, plump and healthy, with blue eyes and a white bib - this at least is how the cherub has come to be depicted (illustrations and a Christianised explanation here), since approximately the 12th century CE. Alas, it will not do. First, it is pronounced KERUVIM, and not CHERUBIM. According to Ezekiel 1 & 10, the KERUV (כרוב) was a being of sublime and celestial nature, composed of four parts (just like the rivers of Eden and the quarters of the heavens, which compare here!); man, ox, lion and eagle, the three animals symbolising power and wisdom and, with the man, happening to be the four parts of the mandala (see image below). The function of the KERUVIM is to bear the throne of Elohim on their wings through the clouds (2 Samuel 22:11). Wooden statues of them, overlaid with gold, stood in the innermost part of the holy tabernacle (Exodus 25:18 ff) and of the temple of Shelomoh (Solomon) (1 Kings 6:23) where figures of them were also carved on the walls.
Is there not an extraordinary irony though, to discover that the Garden of Eden is mezuzahed by a swastika? The only comfort is to learn that the Nazis got the swastika wrong, and drew it in its mirror-form, backwards.
 |
| 'Eagle-Boy' totem pole, Alaska |
Note that it is only the Tree of Life that needs to be protected: not the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, nor the rest of the Garden.
Again a "samech" break follows. The next episode, the story of Kayin (Cain) and Havel (Abel), follows on as part of the same story, with no end of strophe or fragment but merely the "samech" break.
N.B. There is no reference to a man named "ADAM" anywhere, but only to HA ADAM, "Man" or "the man", except in 4:21, and only then if we read it as LE-ADAM and not as LA-ADAM.
End of Chapter Three
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A Modern Prose Rendition of the Traditional Translation of this Chapter
The snake was more flagrant than any other animal that YHVH Elohim had made. He said to the woman,
"Has Elohim really told you not to eat from every tree in the garden?"
And the woman replied to the snake,
"We are allowed to eat the fruit of all the trees in the garden. Only from the tree in the centre of the garden has Elohim forbidden us to eat, or even to touch it, on pain of death."
Then the snake said to the woman,
"You won't die from eating it. But Elohim knows that, on the day that you do eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like gods yourselves, because you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil."
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasing to the eye, and that education was desirable, and so she plucked a piece of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. At once, both of their eyes opened, and they realised that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves clothing. Then they heard the voice of YHVH Elohim moving through the garden in the heat of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the face of YHVH Elohim among the trees of the garden.
But YHVH Elohim called to the man saying,
"Where are you?"
And he replied,
"I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and so I hid."
And he said,
"Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you even to touch?"
And the man said,
"The woman you gave me gave me one of the fruits from the tree, and I ate."
And YHVH Elohim said to the woman, "What have you done?"
And the woman said,
"The snake persuaded me to eat."
And YHVH Elohim said to the snake,
"Because you did this you are accursed among all cattle and all beasts of the field; you will walk on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. And there will be enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; it shall bruise your head and you will bite its heel."
And to the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your anguish by increasing your fertility; in pain you will give birth to children, and all your desire shall be to please your husband, and he shall rule over you."
And to the man he said,
"Because you listened to the woman's voice and ate from the tree which I forbade you, the earth is now cursed because of you sake. You will regret eating it throughout all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles will grow in it to hamper your farming, you will live on the grasses that grow in the fields. In the sweat of your brow you will eat bread until you too return to the soil; for out of it you were taken; you were made from the dust, and when you die you will return to the dust."
And the man named his wife Chavah, for she was the mother of all living things. And YHVH Elohim made coats out of animal-skins for Adam and his wife, and he allowed them to go dressed.
But then YHVH Elohim said, "I can see that Humankind has become like one of us, able to distinguish good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand and eat from the Tree of Life too and become immortal..."
So YHVH Elohim expelled him from the garden of Eden, and made him work the soil from which he was made. So he drove out the man, and at the eastern end of the garden of Eden he placed as guardians Keruvim, and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to protect the way to the Tree of Life.
*****************************
ADAM AND EVE: The Edomite Version
NOTES AND DISCUSSION POINTS
The Edomites worshipped an Earth-god named Adam, and a moon/fertility goddess named Chavah, also known by the sobriquet Em-Chol-Chay: the Mother of All Living Things. In the Semitic languages Adamah means "earth", from the root DAM meaning "blood"; whence the colour Adom (red), the land Edom, the Odem (a rust-red jewel worn in the High Priest's breastplate as well as being the tribal stone of Edom), and the eponymous progenitor Adam who was created "min ha adamah", from the red earth of the land of Edom - the most famous piece of whose redness was the valley of Petra.
NOTES AND DISCUSSION POINTS
The Edomites worshipped an Earth-god named Adam, and a moon/fertility goddess named Chavah, also known by the sobriquet Em-Chol-Chay: the Mother of All Living Things. In the Semitic languages Adamah means "earth", from the root DAM meaning "blood"; whence the colour Adom (red), the land Edom, the Odem (a rust-red jewel worn in the High Priest's breastplate as well as being the tribal stone of Edom), and the eponymous progenitor Adam who was created "min ha adamah", from the red earth of the land of Edom - the most famous piece of whose redness was the valley of Petra.
The Edomites inhabited the Jordanian desert to the south and east of Yam ha Melach (the Dead Sea)., though at different points of Biblical history the western border moved further south-east), and later still the Nabateans inhabited the most easterly part, taking their name from Mount Nevo (Nebo), where Mosheh (Moses) went to die. Shortly we will hear of three outcast brothers, all first-born sons of sacred kings, who will become central to the history of the Edomite people: Kayin, Esav and Yishma-El. So we will see the extent to which Biblical history was created by assimilating Edomite history, though to what extent it actually was history, and how far it was itself simply mythology, is less easy for the archaeologists to determine.
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This is told as a fable of the creation of Humankind, but in it the Earth-god marries the fertility goddess and the mingling of their juices causes the world to blossom into existence, and at its end the humans are "akin to gods". So has Humankind in fact been created, or is this simply an Edomite equivalent of the Greek Titans?
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The Babylonian parts were presumably added to this during the Exile; they deal with the gods Marduk, Tehom, Tohu and Bohu etc. Can we identify any other differences between the Edomite sacred garden myth and the Babylonian "four rivers"?
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In Yehudit the Edomite word Adam was adopted to mean any man, but the Egyptian word for woman, feminised in Yehudit, was favoured over Chavah, for woman. A woman is thus Ishah, from Ish, which divinely doubled gives Ishah-Ishah or Eshet-Eshet, which in Greek is Isis, "the Woman of Women" in the sense of "The Supreme". In Babylonian (for example in "The Epic of Gilgamesh") the first man was named Lullu; whence perhaps the female equivalent Lilit (Lilith), which was the name of Adam's wife according to Midrash?
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Where and what was the garden? Probably Chevron (Hebron) in the Edomite version of the myth - though even at its largest, the borders of Edom never (as far as we know) stretched as far as Chevron - a sacred grove or early orchard, connected to the cave of Machpelah which was the oracular cave of Ephron the Chitite, also known as Phoroneus by the Greeks. And in the Babylonian?
Golgot-Yah is one of several possible pronunciations of the name. Gulgolet-Yah is just as possible in the Yehudit. Galgaltah - גָלגָלתָא - is the Aramaic. Golgotha in English, when it isn't simply "The Hill of the Skull" - on one of the seven hills of Yeru-Shalayim, and as to which one... how else could it be any other one than Calvary, given that the skull of Adam was buried there and Jesus on his four-pointed Edenic Mandala-Cross, at exactly the same age that Midrash insists that was when he was born, is the resurrection of Paradise incarnate. And where then would you expect to find Jesus buried, if not in the same place - and so indeed it was, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre erected on precisely the site of Gulgot-Yah - click here for Christian confirmation of these "facts".
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The idea of ha Satan needs explaining, because Christian versions of the tale wrongly assume that the serpent of Eden was Satan, or a form of Satan, which is to say that Faustian invention Mephistopheles, or the earlier (though not actually that much earlier, and still very much mediaeval) Lucifer, the brightest light, probably a male version of Venus, or perhaps the northern star, whose rebellion against the supreme leader of the heavenly pantheon led to his fall, and his occupation of the underworld of Hell. The original Hell, or Hel, was never a place for the wicked, but simply the land of the dead: She'ol to the Beney Yisra-El, Hades to the Greeks; and actually not even that, originally, but the name of the goddess who ruled there, a monstrous figure who should be seen in trinity with her sea- and land-monster equivalents, Tiamat and Bohu (by whichever of their many names you prefer).
[It may also be worth pointing out that, in almost every culture, the name of the god or goddess of the Underworld ends up as the pet-name for the Underworld itself, as with both Hel and Hades; further forensic evidence in TheBibleNet's conviction that Sha'ul (King Saul) had precisely the same role, and that the story of the boy David is in fact a variant on the tales of Herakles and Eurystheus, and of Orpheus in the Underworld.]
But to return ... the wickedness of ha Satan belongs to a later dualism that was largely inspired by Persian Zoroastrianism. Among the Beney Yisra-El, as in other early Middle Eastern cultures, ha Satan was simply "The Adversary", the official name for the prosecution lawyer in any court case (in the way that debating teams have "The Proposer" and "The Opposer"), but the word came to mean negative impulses that operated in the universe in contrast to the positive impulses connected with the sun-god - a primordial version of YETSER HA TOV and YETSER HA RA (for which see my notes to Genesis 2:7 and the Dictionary of Names page on YETSER). The idea of Satan as a fallen angel does not occur until Yesha-Yah's (Isaiah's) time.
But to return ... the wickedness of ha Satan belongs to a later dualism that was largely inspired by Persian Zoroastrianism. Among the Beney Yisra-El, as in other early Middle Eastern cultures, ha Satan was simply "The Adversary", the official name for the prosecution lawyer in any court case (in the way that debating teams have "The Proposer" and "The Opposer"), but the word came to mean negative impulses that operated in the universe in contrast to the positive impulses connected with the sun-god - a primordial version of YETSER HA TOV and YETSER HA RA (for which see my notes to Genesis 2:7 and the Dictionary of Names page on YETSER). The idea of Satan as a fallen angel does not occur until Yesha-Yah's (Isaiah's) time.
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In the Mabynogion, Blodeuwedd betrays Lleu Llaw Gyffes and is transformed into an owl. The owl was Athene's symbol in Athens, specifically at the Akropolis. Robert Graves suggests that Lilith was an owl-goddess and that the Lilim were her devotees. Is Lilith thus connected with Athene (or Athena, as you prefer)? The owl in Greek is skops, the hill to the north-west of Yeru-Shala'im, known in Biblical Yehudit and modern Ivrit as Har HaTsofim (הַר הַצּוֹפִים) or the "Mount of the Watchmen" has long been known in English as Mount Scopus. Scopus is Greek for "watchmen" (as in telescope etc), but the odd linguistic connection between skops and scopus, plus the presence of the owls and the location of the cults... there is also an apparent connection through Babylonian Anu, who became Ana, as in Di-Ana, Beit Anatot/Bethany, Ur-Ana/Uranus, and Anatha, who comes from Inanna. I have to say I think this may be one of those cases of Graves pushing his speculations "beyond", rather than merely his usual "to" the scholarly limits, but it will need more forensic research before it can be rejected.
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Graves also claims that YHVH was not in the original creation story; in his version Chavah throws Adam out of her grove for caprifying fig trees or some-such abuse of her prerogatives; similarly Triptolemus, a favourite of Demeter, was sent from Eleusis in Attica with a bag of seed to teach the world agriculture, and departed in a car drawn by serpents. The curse on women, he argues, (correctly on this occasion) is also erroneous; in his reading, with Raphael Patai, the sacred king Adam and the serpent (the priestess' wizard or shaman) compete for the goddess' favours; Adam is fated to bruise his head; he to wound Adam's heel; thus bringing each other to annual death.
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The Yehudit name for Byblos in the Lebanon was Gebal. Solomon's Temple, built with cedar wood provided from the hills around Byblos, resembles that of the Aegean great goddess at Hierapolis. A Dana'an colony is known to have settled at Byblos around 1400 BCE, and evidence in many places suggests that Dana'an was the Phoenician, later the Greek name, for the tribe of Dan, who the Bible also tells us moved from the central coastal plain of Kena'an into the Lebanon, to evade the Pelishtim (Philistine) colonists. The founding Dana'an hero was called Adamos, or Adamas, or Adamastos, which means "unconquerable"; the same name is also a Homeric epithet for Hades, borrowed from his mother the death goddess, daughter of Eurystheus. Red was the colour of death in Greece and Britain, with red ochre found in megalithic burials e.g. Salisbury Plain. A fuller explanation of this can be found in my essay "The Leprachauns of Palestine".
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According to the Gnostics, Adam and Chavah also had a daughter named Norea, who later on set fire to No'ach's Ark. There is no reference to this woman in any Biblical or Midrashic tale, except for the statement in Genesis 5:4 that "the days of Adam after he had begotten Shet (Seth) were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters". Daughters, plural, but un-named.
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