Metabiblical

As is our usual practice, let us begin by assembling a chart of notable differences between the ASV and WEB.

Verse	ASV	WEB
3:1	beast of the field	animal of the field
3:2	Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat	We may eat fruit from the trees of the garden
3:5	eat thereof	eat it
3:6	he ate	he ate it, too
3:7	And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew	Their eyes were opened, and they both knew
3:7	aprons	coverings
3:8	And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking	They heard Yahweh God’s voice walking
3:10	And he said	The man said
3:14	cattle … beast of the field	livestock … animal of the field
3:15	enmity	hostility
	seed	offspring
3:16	thy pain and thy conception	your pain in childbirth
	thy desire shall be to thy husband	Your desire will be for your husband
3:17	in toil	with much labor
3:18	bring forth	yield
3:21	coats of skins	garments of animal skins
	the Cherubim	cherubim

Verse 1, 14. We have previously mentioned that “beast of the field” is better in several ways than “animal of the field”.

Verses 2-17. Here we come to a repeated issue which is a bit subtle, but still a question of consistency. Suppose someone is eating, that is, the verb akal, and what they are eating is fruit, peri. There are at least two ways you could express this. Suppose there is some fruit in front of you on a table, and you are going to eat the fruit. In that case, you might use et, the direct object marker, to show the relationship between the eating and the fruit, as in Exodus 10:15

… and they ate (et) all the crops of the field, and (et) all the fruit of the trees

וַיֹּאכַל אֶת־כָּל־עֵשֶׂב הָאָרֶץ וְאֵת כָּל־פְּרִי הָעֵץ

Or perhaps, in poetry, you might leave off the et, and just place peri directly after a verb to indicate that it is a direct object. This we find in Psalm 105:35.

… and they ate the fruit of the ground.

וַיֹּאכַל פְּרִי אַדְמָתָם

On the other hand, consider a situation in which you are faced with a giant pile of fruit and are sitting down to eat. You are not going to eat “the fruit” in the sense of eating all of it. You are going to eat some of the fruit, and in Hebrew this can be expressed with the preposition mi- before the term for fruit. You could also use mi- to say, without directly mentioning a fruit, that you are going to eat some of the fruit from a tree.

We find this sort of language three times Genesis 2:16-17. Below is the Hebrew text next to the WEB translation. In all three cases, the WEB reads mi- as “of”. This is somewhat dated, but clear enough.

Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

וַיְצַו יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים עַל־הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר מִכֹּל עֵץ־הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל׃ וּמֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְךָ מִמֶּנּוּ מוֹת תָּמוּת׃

In Genesis 3:1, the WEB continues consistently translating this Hebrew phenomenon (You shall not eat of any tree …). In Genesis 3:2, however, this begins to break down, as the WEB here replaces the ASV’s “of the fruit” (Hebrew mipri) with merely “fruit”.

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees of the garden.”

Why the change? If it is necessary, one would think the WEB would make it consistently. Whatever the reason, the WEB now starts sticking direct objects onto “eat”. In 3:3, “of the fruit” becomes “the fruit” again. Likewise, in Genesis 3:5, akalkem mimmennu becomes “you eat it”.

In Genesis 3:6, we find two instances of ate without a direct object. In the first case, the WEB translates wattokal quite literally, “and ate”, full stop. But in the second case, wayyokal, translated “and he did eat” in the ASV, grows into “and he ate it, too” in WEB. Similarly, in Genesis 3:12, “and I did eat” becomes, “and I ate it”.

In Genesis 3:17, there are two instances of the mi- construction in Hebrew, both translated with “of” by the ASV. However, the WEB changes the first instance to “from”, while leaving the second as is. (Emphasis added below.)

To Adam he said, Because you have listened to your wife’s voice, and have eaten from the tree, about which I commanded you, saying, You shall not eat of it, the ground is cursed for your sake. …

I think it would be better to simply to back to the of construction consistently than to go about this in a haphazard fashion.

Verse 7. There may be little ultimate difference in meaning between the ASV and WEB, but it is worth noting that on this verse, the ASV is sticking closer to the structure of the Hebrew text. In verse 7, the humans, newly realizing they are naked, improvise hagorot for themselves out of fig leaves. The ASV calls these things aprons, which is unfortunate, while the WEB’s coverings is a bit better. It might be more accurate to translate them as loincloths.

Verse 8. From time to time, the WEB replaces a construction of the form “X of Y” with one of the form “Y’s X”. In general, this shouldn’t do any harm. However, in this case, it does something odd. The ASV has “they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden”. The most straightforward under standing of this wording is that the first pair hear God’s voice while God is walking in the garden. But the WEB has They heard Yahweh’s voice walking. Is it really the voice that is walking?

But I think we can do better than both the WEB and ASV if we keep in mind that qol can mean not only “voice”, but more generally “sound”. And so, They heard the sound of Yahweh God walking.

Verse 10. The ASV’s And he said follows the Hebrew closely. The WEB supplies a subject: The man said. But this is unnecessary.

Verse 14. WEB’s “livestock” is better than ASV’s cattle.

Verse 15. WEB’s “hostility” is a bit clearer than “enmity”. I would be tempted to say the same about “seed”, but seed functions as a metaphorical image in English, just as zera does in Hebrew. Genesis makes it clear that all sorts of life produces seed, starting with fruits and grains and trees, in Genesis 1, and then including humans and all animals (Genesis 7:4). The WEB takes an inconsistent approach to zera: first, it is seed in Genesis, then offspring here, then child in Genesis 4:25. Later, we will return to seed for the offspring of animals in Genesis 7:3. We read even of “the seed of man … and the seed of animal” in Jeremiah 31:27.

And so this raises questions. If we can trust the reader to figure out that an animal’s seed is its offspring, but without explicitly using the word offspring, why can’t we do the same for the seed of men? Or consider the case of Onan. The use of multiple meanings of “seed” is a very noticeable feature of Genesis 38:9.

And Onan knew that the seed would not be his, and so, when he went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled it on the ground, so as not to give seed to his brother.

Notice how delicately the Hebrew text dances around the question of what, precisely is being spilled, while still making it clear to the discerning reader. I can assure you that the WEB exhibits no such gracefulness. The WEB informs us that it is semen that gets spilled. But why stop there? If we cannot trust the reader to figure out what is going on in this indirect but quite clear reference to a crude but mostly effective form of birth control, why assume the reader knows the facts of life at all? Perhaps the footnotes should contain a brief anatomically correct description of how babies are and aren’t made.

Verses 16 and 17. Verses 16 and 17. Both of these verses contain the difficult word ˁiṣṣabon, and one puzzling feature of many translations is an inconsistency between the two uses. Applied to the woman, the word is “pain” in the ASV and WEB, while applied to the man, it is “toil” (ASV) or “much labor” (WEB). These two verses, along with Genesis 5:29, contain all the biblical usages of this term, and so it would be strange if it were necessary to interpret this word in two different ways. I am convinced by Eskanazi that there is no justification for this.¹

Verse 16. The Hebrew expression ˁiṣṣᵉboneka wᵉheroneka is read in the ASV as thy pain and thy conception. The WEB, like a good number of contemporary translations, takes this as a hendiadys for “pain in childbearing”. For an argument against reading as hendiadys, see Carol Meyers (1988), Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context, pp. 99-109 (Oxford University Press).

The change is how the WEB handles the bit about desire is reasonable.

Verse 17. In this verse, both ASV and WEB read read ˀadam as Adam, and as a strict translation of the Masoretic Text as pointed, this is correct. However, while the Masoretes did not insert the article, the context suggests they should have, and so a better translation of the consonantal text is the man.

Verse 16. The Hebrew expression ˁiṣṣᵉboneka wᵉheroneka is read in the ASV as thy pain and thy conception. The WEB, like a good number of contemporary translations, takes this as a hendiadys for “pain in childbearing”. For an argument against reading as hendiadys, see Carol Meyers (1988), Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context, pp. 99-109 (Oxford University Press).

Verse 18. Where ASV reads bring forth and WEB yield, I prefer sprout.

Verse 21. Where ASV has coats of skins, the WEB’s garments of animal skins is clearer.

Verse 24. In the ASV, God places the Cherubim east of Eden, while in the WEB both the article and the capitalization disappear, and we find simply cherubim. It seems to me that the capitalization can go, but the article is found in the Hebrew, and I’m not sure why we would drop it in English.

Alongside the cherubim, God places lahaṭ haḥereb ha-mithapeket to guard the way to the tree of life. The ASV translates this as the flame of a sword which turned every way, while the WEB reads a flaming sword which turned every way. The ASV’s rendering sticks closer to the syntax of the Hebrew, while an even closer rendering is that used by Ronald Hendel, “the flame of the whirling sword”. If we are to interpret this as some kind of “flaming sword”, this creates a strange mental picture: is the sword autonomously moving around and guarding the site itself? Hendel argues that the flame is a minor deity, and the whirling sword is its characteristic weapon. See Hendel (1985), “’The Flame of the Whirling Sword’: A Note on Genesis 3:24” (JBL). See also Watson, “Flame”, and Hendel, “Resheph” in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, (2^nd ed., 1999).

1 Now the serpent was more clever than any beast of the field which Yahweh God had made. And he said to the woman, Has God really said, You may not eat of any tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said to the serpent, Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, 3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said, You shall not eat of it, nor touch it, or you die.

4 And the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die, 5 for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil. 6 And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating, and pleasing to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. And she took some of its fruit, and she ate, and gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves loincloths. 8 And they heard the sound of Yahweh God walking about in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden.

9 And Yahweh God called to the man, and said to him, Where are you?

10 And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid.

11 And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

12 And the man said, This woman that you placed with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.

13 And Yahweh God said to the woman, What is this you have done?

And the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate.

14 And Yahweh God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, and above all beasts of the field: upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat, all the days of your life. 15 And enmity will I put between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; they will strike your head, and you will strike their heels.

16 To the woman he said, Greatly I will increase your hard labor and your conception; in hardship you will bring forth children, and toward your husband will be your desire, and he will rule over you.

17 And to the man he said, Because you listened to the voice of your wife, and took of the tree which I commanded you not to eat of it, cursed is the ground for your sake. By hard labor you shall eat of it all the days of your life. 18 And thorns and thistles it will sprout for you, and you shall eat the crops of the field. 19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, for from it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

20 And the man called the name of his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

21 And Yahweh God made for the man and for his wife garments of animal skins, and clothed them.

22 And Yahweh God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever — 23 and Yahweh God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 And he drove out the man, and placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flame of the whirling sword, to guard the way of the tree of life.

Super Academical Footnotes

1. Tamara Cohn Eskanazi (2024), “Death and Life in the Hands of the Translators”. ↩︎