Genesis 3:20 seems to be out of place…it appears seemingly from left field.
Prior to the passage, God is arraigning Adam, Eve and the serpent for their sins…then suddenly out of the blue the writer returns to a previous theme from Genesis 2 just before Adam names the animals.
20And Adam named his wife Eve,e because she would be the mother of all the living.
Then the writer appears to return back to the events after the arraignment…clothes and then the boot out of the Garden in the East of Eden.
Anyone else think perhaps this is a textual error or variation?
It would have to be one of the weirdest “out of order intervals” i think I’ve read in the bible…its a very strange statement to insert at that point in the story. Its like the writer forgot what they were actually writing about, or lost concentration, got distracted and blurted this out, then returned to the actual topic without remembering to fix/remove this stuff up?
Perhaps it is not that much out of order, as it closely follows the statement “I will make your pangs in childbirth exceedingly great;
in pain you shall bring forth children,"
Since Eve appears to be the Hebrew word for “living” and Adam the word for “the man, or mankind” it would only follow that she would be named that in relation to her role in giving birth.
I actually find it stranger in a way that this is the first time she is named. Before, she is just referred to as “the woman”. Perhaps it goes back to the idea of naming defining function and order, and for life outside of Eden, the so called curse placed upon them was a statement of what their functional status would be, to give birth in Eve’s case, and grovel out a living, also painfully, in Adam’s.
The name Eve may mean more than just living, but also symbiosis. At this point in the story, Adam and Eve go from representing our common decent with single celled organisms to clonal and then later as multi-celled organisms. Before Genesis 5, Adam is not even properly named, the word for Adam just meaning “mankind”, but God called “their name Adam” when they became multicellular, living together as one flesh.
Gen 5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; 2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
but doesnt that kinda present the idea that prior to them actually receiving their own names, this habit (if you like) wasn’t important or, worse, wasn’t necessary?
Given that God had already said “be fruitful and multiply” this suggests to me that (and I’m going to struggle to adequately explain my thoughts here)… its almost like mankind was no different to the animals that Adam had already named (kinds/species whatever one wishes to call it).
Animals had an overall name and “man” had an overall name up until sin. Then all of a sudden, man sins, then unique individual names were given. Why now in the story and not earlier? Why should a unique name appear in the story only after sin and not before?
The bible says Adam called her Eve because she would become the mother of all living…but remember God had already told them to produce offspring in Genesis 1:28.
28God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth.”*
it seems to suggest to me that giving an individual a name, which surely is linked to morality, that morality either did not exist in Genesis chapter 2, or wasn’t a social issue.
I think Ethans reply here seems to reinforce that notion that is rattling around in my head
i hope I’m making sense there…its a new thing and i haven’t nutted this out in my own head yet. Usually, this is when i need to be “in my shed literally talking to myself whilst tinkering around fixing something”
I don’t have a critical text of the Hebrew but there is no indication in my Bible for alternative texts. I will point out that actually Adam first named his female partner “Woman” back in 2:23.
The interesting thing is that yes, she was called “women” in 2:23, however the name Eve is not recorded in the bible until after the fall. The question is, why?
I do not think it has anything to do with Near Eastern goddesses…if we believe that then we must also accept the notion that Moses, a prophet of God who received his communication directly from sources such as God, cannot be credible if he fabricates a story.
If Moses copies all this stuff from heathen sources, then the entire foundation of the Bible is a fairytale…that is destructive to the entire Christian religion (and Islam as well). Given that the Mosaic recording of the Old Testament Sanctuary service and Tabernacle design very specifically points to and describes the plan of salvation from the wages of sin, then such a claim would be the evidence that scholars such as Bart Erhmann need to lead many people away from God. This would also mean that Christs death on the cross was nothing more than a criminals execution…we are therefore wasting our time and the end of our lives is “kaput”!
Maybe there was no need for a name before then; Adam may have just called her “woman”, the designation God had given.
Then Adam accused “the woman you gave me”. but after the curse he may not have wanted to be reminded of how he tried to evade responsibility, so he gave her a name.
I’m sure it’s created by some sort of editing but that’s not any different from thousands of other spots in the Bible.
I don’t see any significant discussions on it within the various biblical scholars I follow and have never heard it brought up and mentioned.
Genesis 3 seems to all belong to the same source.
I don’t see any significant argument over words in verses 20-21.
If I had to guess I would think that whenever some reductionist was adding in their understanding of the descendants in Genesis 5 they had a name for the woman and it was Eve and they simply added it in along with all the stuff they edited together in Genesis 5.
One of the rabbis I knew in grad school had an answer to this: he said that Adam, faced with the curse, suddenly realized that humans had become individuals, “islands unto themselves”, by losing the connection through God. That makes sense to me since one of the things Jesus accomplished was to restore that connection to God and thus link us together as “one body”.
I don’t see any connection to morality. Care to explain?
The only actual variants in this set are a spelling difference due to pronunciation shift and an upper case letter instead of lower case – both in the Septuagint; there are no Hebrew variants.
The only variant here is that the first Septuagint reading (Swete) leaves off the possessive in “woman”, making it “the woman” rather than “his woman”.
The only “variant” is that the second Septuagint reading leaves off the accents on the two names – a not uncommon practice when dealing with non-Greek names.
That’s silly – we should expect Moses to use phrasing that would bring to mind ANE goddesses! That was one way theological truths were conveyed back then; in this case a way of saying, “No, it wasn’t those goddesses, it was the woman YHWH-Elohim created”. It’s an instance of the very thing that Moses did in the first Creation account: take the pagan story structure and use it to say, "You guys are all wrong; your gods are things YHWH-Elohim created to serve Him (and serve humanity). In this case it serves as a slap in the face of Mut, the Egyptian mother-goddess – an assertion that if he had made it in Egypt would have gotten Moses executed.
Who says he copied anything? He used the theological argument forms of the day to smack down all the claims about the gods of the nations/Gentiles and let the people know that whatever the Egyptians (or others) might say, it was YHWH-Elohim Who created everything, and the things that the Egyptians attributed to their gods all belonged to YHWH-Elohim.
The Tabernacle design very specifically copied Pharaoh’s military command tent. That’s a priceless message to both the Israelites and the Egyptians: Pharaoh isn’t the commander of hosts/armies, YHWH-Elohim is! It served as an announcement that the people of Israel weren’t just a bunch of nomads, they were the army of the living God.
St Roymond, have you ever actually studied textual criticism?
To be honest, I’m more interested in the textual variant comment you made… in textual criticism, the term variants refers to “any” difference in the various manuscripts, papyri, and codeces that we have.
Given the above, I’m a Christian…I’m not interested in attempting to reconcile my Christian faith through pagan interpretations or pagan rituals. What you are doing there is absurd and I cannot understand how you can even claim to be Christian and do that? Doing that purely to support anti-biblical writings is a woeful corruption of Christianity.
This has absolutely nothing to do with who it was that came up with the design first. The fact is, Moses tells us where the design came from
Whilst the Egyptian tabernacle may look vaguely similar to the Egyptian ones, this does not mean that it was the Egyptians who came up with the idea or the design in the first place. For example, how do you suppose that the Egyptians got knowledge of Babylonian/Summerian science? Was it not likely because Abraham brought it to them from the east? That is certainly worthy evidence to consider.
Then we have even more evidence that the Egyptians were not so smart as it claimed…why, after being warned of the dream of an oncoming famine, would pharoah and all his wise men need Josephs solution of building store houses and taxing the fruits of the field in preparation for said drought? This suggests that even that evidence proves that ancient Egypt was not in fact as advanced as we think…and that at least some of the significant knowledge that it developed came from other regions that align with visits from major bible characters!
Huh? The only writings I referred to were the Hebrew text and the Septuagint!
What are you even talking about???
In a way it does – the fact that it was a copy of Pharaoh’s command tent provides a theological message.
They had it before Israel did.
What you should be asking is, “Why did God choose to copy the Egyptian Pharaoh’s command tent?” – that’s how you do theology, by taking what is actually there and asking what God is/was up to.
Through trade with them.
Not at all likely – there is no reason for us to think that Abraham was some sort of ancient scholar, especially nothing in the text.
Don’t add to the text – it doesn’t say the Egyptians needed any ideas from Joseph; we only know that Joseph launched into that advice immediately after interpreting the dreams. The Egyptians already knew about storehouses and collecting taxes, so the question is why did God have Joseph say that? Two possibilities come to mind: first, that it was to emphasize that the situation was serious and God wanted Egypt to do well in the crisis; second, that it was because by saying it Joseph was put in the position of the obvious person to oversee the job and that’s where God wanted him. The second is actually obvious from the context.
Interesting assertion, but it boils down to wishful thinking – there’s no evidence for it. There’s also no evidence that God cared about science or technology.
I would say that, yes, the names are important in the story at the point when they are named. Names describe a function, role, order, or ‘habit’ as you say. Those functions were not important and perhaps did not even exist beforehand.
God did not already say that in my view, in which the garden of Eden story happens over the course of Days 1-4. Day 5 begins when Adam and Eve are kicked out of Eden and the first instance of “be fruitful and multiply” is said to the animals created on Day 5.
In Gen 2:4-5, compare “in the day the Lord made the earth and the heavens”, and “before” plants were in the earth, and “before” there was rain, and “before” man, compare all that with the conditions on Day 1 where there was heavens and the earth created as well as light, but nothing else.
Gen 2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
Then in verse 6 and 7, compare the mist rising up from the earth with the waters being divided on Day 2. The whole face of the ground is watered, the whole earth is a water world with water above and below the “firmament” named “Heaven” (the dwelling place of God) in Genesis 1 and “Eden” (paradise, heaven is paradise) in Genesis 2.
Gen 2:6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 7And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Mankind is not equal to human. God defines what “mankind” or “man” is, (120. אָדָם adam) and that is dust, earth (flesh) plus breath of life (spirit) in verse 7. God had Moses think of the smallest thing he could see to describe the creation of mankind, and that was dust. Moses did not have a microscope to see the smallest living things, to describe single celled organisms like bacteria. There is a path, a progression of mankind, adam from single celled organisms to humans, and Adam names the animals, which are all his children.
Before going to the next point, let me back up and continue looking at next verses and compare with Day 3:
Gen 2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
So we now have this progression of Days 1-3 shown in Genesis 2:4-9, and this story progresses very slowly over many millions of years as mankind multiplies asexually with different kinds including the “serpent” introduced in the next chapter. After Adam and Eve sin and their eyes are opened (Gen 3:7), they can see the lights in the sky on Day 4. The sun and moon were of course created on Day 1 but had not function, no purpose in measuring “signs, seasons, days and years” before there were eyes to see them.
Even if these first eyes were just “eye spots” like on a mushroom… a mushroom looking like a “naked” tree, hiding under the fig tree? …And as a fungus eats of the rotting (bad) fruit fallen to the ground. Oh, to know that you don’t belong in the plant kingdom anymore, its time to give Adam and Eve “animal skins” and send them out into the wild.
Those names are not being given after sin as if names have something to do with sin, but because there was a new function or habit, formed after sin. There were names given before that. God is named “Yahweh” as in He is Lord over creation… there is nothing to “lord” over before all things were created. Also the garden is named “Eden” before sin.
What you are coming up against is the composite nature of the Hebrew Bible. Most scholars agree that the Hebrew Bible reached its final form in the Persian and Hellenistic periods in the few centuries before Christ. That meant they were drawing together various traditions into a new whole. Sometimes the amalgamation worked, other times, not so much.
It is worth remembering that there were at least five different manuscript traditions of the Hebrew Bible found amongst the Dead Scrolls. The proto-Masoretic tradition was just one of them. So, amalgamating the stories could run in a number of directions.
One of the products of these centuries was a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek for those Jews who could no longer understand Hebrew. (It was called the Septuagint, usually abbreviated as LXX). It differs in places from the proto-Masoretic manuscript tradition, but there appear to be Hebrew manuscripts amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls which suport it. In that translation, the name given to the woman in Genesis 3:20 is also translated to have the same meaning. The woman is called “Zoe”, from the Greek word for “life”.
Imagine yourself as one of those scribes editing the final edition of the Hebrew Bible. You have two different stories of Adam naming the “woman” and “Eve”. Each has a slightly different angle,and you have the task of melding them into a single narrative.
The consensus, as I understand it, is that 3:20 is a copyists error and was originally Genesis 4:1. In support of this, many scholars now believe Genesis 3:20 to be a later insertion, or perhaps a kind of copy error called a parablepsis. For more details you can look up (Wenham G. J., Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15, 1987) pp.68-269.
What evidence is there for a composite nature? I don’t think the manuscript traditions which are just different groups doing their own work in copying and preserving the texts makes it composite. I believe there was indeed an original text and the masoretic tradition is the one that has preserved it.
The proto-Masoretic tradition is not just one of them but the preeminent one:
The text of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Peshitta read somewhat in-between the Masoretic Text and the old Greek. However, despite these variations, most of the Qumran fragments can be classified as being closer to the Masoretic Text than to any other text group that has survived. According to Lawrence Schiffman, 60% can be classed as being of proto-Masoretic type, and a further 20% Qumran style with a basis in proto-Masoretic texts, compared to 5% proto-Samaritan type, 5% Septuagintal type, and 10% non-aligned.
That’s a total of 80% of the Dead Sea fragments aligning closest to the Masoretic Text.
If the Masoretic version is the one and only true Old Testament, then the Dead Sea Scrolls are extremely good news for Bible believers, Jewish or Christian. The Masoretic manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are astonishingly similar to the standard Hebrew texts 1,000 years later, proving that Jewish scribes were accurate in preserving and transmitting the Masoretic Scriptures.
Only if you are giving equal weight to all the copiest traditions.
I see no reason to believe it was inserted, or a copy error. It only seems out of place if we dont understand why it is there. See my earlier reply here.
There’s lots of evidence of editing, including some merging of sources into single stories.
The Masoretes weren’t entirely honest in their work; there are places where it is certain that they changed the text. On the flip side, they were honest enough when the text was gibberish to not try to figure it out.
Prior to that, many scholars believe that Ezra altered the original text of the Torah.
There are none! The earliest Masorete work is found in the fifth century A.D.!
The evaluation of the number of proto-Masoretic fragments amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls is open for debate, but even before that evaluation we have to challenge the assumption that the number of fragments can be used to determine the authoritative nature of the proto-Masoretic manuscripts. To do that, we simply ask, if the proto-Masoretic manuscripts were so authoritative, why did the scribes at Qumran continue to copy manuscripts from the other textual traditions?
The mystery deepens. If the proto-Masoretic tradition was the sole authoritative one, why did the translators of the Septuagint - the Hebrew Bible into Greek - apparently use a different Hebrew “vorlage” than the proto-Masoretic one?
These sources were fragments though. Can you give an example of a fragment that reads continuous but skips across portions that are in the end product? Perhaps Genesis 3:20 or maybe another example that “looks” like it may have been inserted later like Genesis 2:10-14?
I do not doubt that errors were ever made, but these changes they made to the text could be a correction to a previous error. The original source now being lost.
I was quoting the article. The proto-Masoretic manuscripts in the Dead Sea scrolls support that the text that the Masoretes began working with was already “astonishingly similar”.
I think it makes sense to view 3:20 like a new paragraph, but not to start a new chapter. 3:20-24 complete the Garden of Eden narrative.
Perhaps what the scribes were storing in the caves was not all their own work?
I do not see the Septuagint as authoritative. It is a translation, and in my understanding is more of a “thought for thought” rather than a “word for word” translation. Additionally, among other things, they took liberty to change when all the patriarchs begat children, not knowing the meaning or importance of those numbers in showing our common decent will all life. For more on common decent see my study and discussion here.
The literal standard version (LSV) actually goes so far as to put the ages presented in the Septuagint in parenthesis after the actual ages from the MT. Example:
Gen 5:3 (LSV) And Adam lives one hundred and thirty years [[or two hundred and thirty years]], and begets [a son] in his likeness, according to his image, and calls his name Seth. 4 And the days of Adam after his begetting Seth are eight hundred years [[or seven hundred years]], and he begets sons and daughters.
This kind of practice, putting what is authoritative into question, right into the text instead of as a margin note, just confuses and should really be frowned upon.
Perhaps what the scribes were storing in the caves was not all their own work?
The same applies to the proto-Masoretic manuscripts. The fact is, they regarded the other textual traditions as being equally worthy of keeping.
Most translators nowadays regard the dynamic equivalence (meaning for meaning) approach as being more accurate than the formal correspondence (word for word) approach. Your dependence on the so-called Literal Standard Version fails to understand this.
The literal standard version (LSV) actually goes so far as to put the ages presented in the Septuagint in parenthesis after the actual ages from the MT. Example:
Gen 5:3 (LSV) And Adam lives one hundred and thirty years [[or two hundred and thirty years]], and begets [a son] in his likeness, according to his image, and calls his name Seth. 4 And the days of Adam after his begetting Seth are eight hundred years [[or seven hundred years]], and he begets sons and daughters.
This kind of practice, putting what is authoritative into question, right into the text instead of as a margin note, just confuses and should really be frowned upon.
I can see why you are frowning. The alternative information from the Septuagint blows your theories to pieces. However, I think you have the logic back-to-front. It is not a matter of saying “the Septuagint blows my theory to pieces, therefore the Septuagint cannot be authoritative”, but rather “the Septuagint was regarded as authoritative, so my theory is blown to pieces”.