When the woman ate the
forbidden fruit nothing happened. (3:6b)
It
was when the man ate the man ate the forbidden fruit that things changed:
3:7a Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
and they
knew that they were naked . . .
This
story began with a wordplay – ARUM (sounds like “ah-room”).
ARUM means subtle, shrewd,
clever, crafty, and cunning.[i]
After he ate the fruit they both knew something new -- they were EYROM (sounds like “ey-rome”)
which means “naked.” Hadn’t they been naked since the day they were
made? Wasn’t the snaked naked too? The point is, “they now knew they were
naked,” which means they saw each other differently than before they ate
the forbidden fruit. They saw what made them different and wanted to look the
same again.
3:7b . . . and they
sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.
And
then, guess who shows up?
3:8 They heard the sound of Yahweh the god walking in
the garden . . .
and the man
and woman hid themselves . . . .
The
Hebrew text indicates that the man immediately looked for a place to hide and left
the woman standing there. She had to find her own place to hide. Why did the
man suddenly want to hide from Yahweh?
Did he think Yahweh was coming to kill him for eating the forbidden fruit?
3:9 And Yahweh the god called to the man . . . "Where are you?"
Didn’t
Yahweh know everything? Keep in mind that monotheism didn’t exist at the
time the ancient Hebrew text was written. However, when Yahweh called to the
man, the man now had to make a decision to stay hidden or not.
3:10 And he said, "I
heard your voice in the garden.
I was afraid because I was naked. I hid myself."
Yahweh
heard that the man was afraid of him. He was afraid because he knew he was
naked. Those words caught Yahweh’s attention.
3:11a And Yahweh said,
"Who told you that you were naked?
The
man didn’t respond.
3:11b From the tree that I
commanded you not to eat from
it,
have you eaten?"
Have
you noticed that the roles of the man and woman have been reversed? Now she is
the one standing silently by, listening to the conversation between Yahweh and
the man.
3:12 And the man said,
"The woman whom you gave to be with me,
she gave to me from the tree, and I ate."
I
bet that caught her attention! Put yourself in her shoes when suddenly Yahweh turned
to her and said:
3:13 And Yahweh said to the woman, "What
is this you have done?"
Yahweh
asked her “what” she had done, but before she answers that question, she tells
him “why” she did what she did.
And the woman said,
"The snake deceived me, and I ate."
When
Yahweh heard that, he immediately turned to the snake.
3:14-15 And Yahweh said to the snake,
"Because you have
done this, cursed are you more than all cattle,
and more than every
beast of the field. On your belly shall you crawl,
and dirt shall you eat
all the days of your life. And I will put hatred
between you and the
woman, and between your seed and her seed.
He shall crush your
head, and you shall crave[ii]
his heel."
Notice
that Yahweh did not ask the serpent what it did or why? Yahweh deals with the
animal in a different manner than he did with the humans. Be sure to note that Yahweh
cursed the snake. But it must be noted that the snake shamed the
humans. Shame plays a
different role in Middle Eastern cultures than it does in the West.
● Shame must
be understood in the context of group culture; it implies a failure to live
up to internalized parental and larger societal goals.
● Shame is a
powerful operative dynamic in Jewish tradition where individual personal and
religious destiny can only be truly fulfilled through membership in the larger
units of family, tribe, and nation.
● From the
first chapters of Genesis on, we see humankind struggling to resolve interpersonal
and intergroup conflict -- characters wrestling with powerful and
sometimes contradictory impulses.[iii]
Yahweh hasn’t
finished with the man and woman yet. We will discuss that in the next email.
Jim Myers
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[i] A Dictionary
of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerrushalmi, and Midrahic Literature:
Volume I; complied by Marcus Jastrow; Printed in Israel; p. 1115a.
[ii] A
Commentary on the Book of Genesis: Part One From Adam to Noah by Umberto
Cassuto; p. 161.
[iii] “Shame and
Illness: A Jewish Perspective” by Michelle E. Friedman, M.D.; The Yale Journal
for Humanities in Medicine; Spirituality, Religious Wisdom and the Care of the
Patient. http://yjhm.yale.edu/archives/spirit2004/shame/mfriedman.htm
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