Metabiblical

I’m moving to the country
I’m gonna eat a lot of peaches
Peaches come from a can … — The Presidents of the United States

As the Presidents know, a slower, simpler existence might be imagined to involve eating fruit that grows in the countryside. This is true not only in popular English-langauge music, but also in Genesis.

Let’s start with English. In English, we have the common verb to eat. It is a transitive verb, which means that when you are eating, you are eating something, and most commonly that something is what the nerds call the direct object of the verb eat.

So if we are going to use a typical construction, we might put our direct object right after the word eat when we construct a sentence. I’m gonna eat peaches or, I’m gonna eat a lot of peaches. In these examples peaches and a lot of peaches are the direct object.

Now language is tricky, and sometimes something can stand in the grammatical position of direct object of eat without being literally eaten. For example, consider the sentence, I’m gonna eat a whole can of peaches. In this case, via a figure of speech, you use the word can, when what you really literally mean is the contents of a can. If you eat a can of peaches, you will still have your can at the end. In this way, cans are unlike cake.

If we are perhaps not yet in the country, and we do not have a can of peaches handy, perhaps we might eat McDonald’s, in which McDonald’s is in the grammatical position of direct object. In this case, what we really mean is that we will eat food from McDonald’s. We eat not the corporation itself, but the fast food the corporation sells us.

Let us turn to Hebrew, where the word ʾakal serves a similar function. It is also a transitive verb. When you eat something, you ʾakal something. Just as English has the forms eat, ate, eaten, eating, eats, the Hebrew language has various forms of ʾakal. From now on, for convenience, I will drop the ʾ, and just write akal.

Suppose we wish to talk about eating fruit. We might not directly mention the fruit. We might instead mention the tree that the fruit comes from, and then use a preposition, mi- (“from”) to describe the eating.

See Genesis 2:16

waytsaw YHWH elohim al-haadam lemor mi-kol ets-ha-gan akol tokel

And YHWH God commanded the man, saying, From every tree of the garden you may eat.

Likewise in Genesis 2:17

u-me-ets hadaat tov wara lo tokal mimmennu ki beyom akalka mimmennu mot tamut

But from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you must not eat from it, because in the day you eat from it you will surely die.

Likewise in Genesis 3:1

we-ha-nahash hayah arum mikkol hayyat ha-sadeh asher YHWH elohim wayyomer el-ha-isha af ki amar elohim lo toklu mi-kol ets ha-gan

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which YHWH God had made. And he said to the woman, Has God really said, You must not eat from any tree of the garden.

So far, all the examples have been about people eating (implied) fruit from (mi-) trees. There is also another use of mi-. It can mean “some of”. So even in cases where fruit is mentioned directly, it might come after the preposition mi- instead of being in the direct object position. Here’s Genesis 3:2 and 3:

wattomer ha-isha el-ha-nahash mi-peri ets ha-gan nokel	And the woman said to the serpent, From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat.
u-mi-pri ha-ets asher betok-ha-gan amar elohim lo toklu mimmennu we lo tigu bo pen-temutun	And from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said, You must not eat from it, nor touch it, or you die.

The snake, however, says that God is up to no good here, and is forbidding a very good thing.

ki yodea elohim ki beyom akalkem mimmenu wenifqehu eineikem vihyitem kelohim yodei tov vara

for God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.

So far, the word eat always takes the preposition mi-, and no direct object. But now, in Genesis 6, we will see the verb just without a direct object at all, and no mi- (at least, no mi- attached to the verb akal):

wattere ha-isha ki tov ha-ets lemaakal weki taawah-hu la-einayim we-nehmad ha-ets lehashkil wattiqah mippiryo wattokal wattitten gam-le-ishah immah wayyokal

And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and that it was desirable to make one wise, and she took some of its fruit, and she ate, and gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.

In the aftermath of their fruit-eating, God arrives and suspects what has happened. Here ate appears with mi- again. Genesis 3:12

wayyomer me higgid leka ki eirom atta ha-min-ha-ets asher tsiwitika lebilti akal-mimmenu akalta?

And he said, Who told you that you were naked? From the tree, of which I told you not to eat from it, have you eaten?

In Genesis 3:13, the mi- is not present, but still no direct object.

wayomer YHWH elohim la-ishah mah-zot asita wattomer ha-ishah ha-nahash hishiani waokel.

And YHWH God said to the woman, What is this you have done? And the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate.

If I’m counting right, we’ve now seen thirteen instances of akal in nine different verses, and not once does the verb take a direct object.

But when God curses the serpent, suddenly, for the first time akal takes a direct object.

wayyomer YHWH elohim el-ha-nahash ki asita zot arur atta mikkol-ha-behemah u-mi-kol hayyat ha-sadeh al-gehonka teled we-afar tokal kol-yemei hayyeika

And YHWH God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all wild animals. On your belly you will go, and you will eat dust all the days of your life.

Now, consider what happens in the next verse that contains the verb akal.

we-le-adam amar ki-shamatta leqol ishteka wattokal min-ha-ets asher tsiwitika lemor lo tokal mimmenu arura ha-adamah ba-abureka be-itsabon tokalennah kol yemei hayyeika

And to the man he said, Because you listened to the voice of your wife, and ate from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, you shall not eat from it, cursed is the ground on your account. In paint you shall eat it all the days of your life.

Above I have rendered the Hebrew text perhaps too literalistically. But let’s follow the grammar briefly. In the expression tokalennah, we have first tokal “you shall eat”, and then -ennah is a suffix representing a third-person feminine pronoun (here “it”). Grammatically, it needs to refer back to a feminine noun, and the only reasonable candidate here is ha-adamah, the ground.

That is, “you shall eat” (tokal) “the ground”. Literally speaking, then, the man, like the snake, is a given a curse which, uniquely in this story, includes the word akal, a direct object that refers to dirt, and then the words “all the days of your life”.

I do not remember, at this point, whether I came to this opinion on my own, or whether I have borrowed it from someone whose name I no longer remember, but this seems to me to be too much of a coincidence, especially given the way that eating and dirt are both clearly key words for the author of Genesis 2-3.

Adam, like the snake, “eats dirt”.

How to translate this is another question, because here we have a difference between English and Hebrew usage. In English, we might say someone “eats McDonalds”, and the reader will understand that this person is eating not the McDonalds corporation, or any specific McDonald’s restaurant, but rather food from McDonalds.

In the same way, idiomatically, perhaps, we should understand that when Adam eats the ground, he is in fact eating what the ground produces. But notice that even in 3:17 itself, the first two uses of akal use the construction akal mi-, “eat from”. It would seem to me that this switch to a much less common construction is intentional, and is meant to stress that the serpent and the man share in a common curse of, as it were, eating dirt.

Here I must confess that I am not sure at this point whether I came to this idea independently or whether I read it somewhere long ago. I am sure I am not the first person to have come up with this, and whether or not I have read this specific idea in someone else’s work, my understanding of Genesis owes enough to the work of previous interpreters that I make no claim of originality for this line of thinking.

I can say, at least, that it is not a commonplace in the commentaries on Genesis.