Where does this passage begin? Determining the place of what MZB calls the "literary break" between this and the preceding story involves, naturally, both deciding where one ends and where the other begins. Reasons for placing the end of the first passage where we do (following many scholars) have already been given (see my notes on 2:1 and 2:4a).
Source critics have also long held that the texts preceding and following the middle of verse 2:4 originated from different sources on the basis of detailed internal analysis. It is suggested that the word élle 'these' in 2:4a (NBIE): élle tol'dot hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz b'hibbar'am 'and this is the story of the sky and the land when they came to be made' refers back to the account just read, and not, as is implied by the conventional translations, forward to the "second creation account" which is about to begin; in fact, this sentence forms an inclusio with the first verse of Genesis which uses the verb b-r-' 'create' and the phrase hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz, thereby signalling the beginning and end of the first story.
It is suggested that 2:4b: b'yom ‛asot YHWH elohim éretz w'shamáyim... 'when Our Lord God made [or: began to make] land and sky...' is not part of the same sentence as 2:4a but part of the next sentence, which continues in 2:5 (EF) with: w'khol síax hassade Térem yihye va'áretz... 'no bush of the field was yet on earth...', and so on and so forth (it's a long sentence). Indeed, if 2:4a goes with what precedes then 2:4b pretty much has to go with what follows to provide a context, an introduction: when God started to make everything, there was nothing growing yet, because if not, i.e. if this story starts "cold" in 2:5 with There was nothing growing yet, then we would be in trouble because the last thing we just heard was an account of God's creation of everything on the earth in six days, including the vegetation!
Besides, the prose just flows better if b'yom ‛asot... is the beginning of something, not the concluding words of the preceding creation story - not to mention that b'yom literally means 'on the day...' and we just heard that it took six days, which would make it an odd choice if it belonged to the same unit, even though b'yom need not be understood literally but as a way of saying 'when...'.
There are also other details of style and vocabulary which point to a different source text or at least a different chapter having begun here; such details may only seem like that, details, individually, but taken all together they add up to a feeling that we just started a new section: for example, it was just hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz 'the heaven and the earth' both in 1:1 and in 2:4a, and yet now all of a sudden it is éretz w'shamáyim 'earth and heaven', which is as different as possible a way to say the same thing, since the words are in the opposite order and the definite artice is omitted. Not to mention the subject of this clause (and many others that follow), YHWH 'the Lord', when throughout the first creation story God is exclusively referred to as elohim 'God.' Again, this sentence straight away says ‛asot, a form of the verb ‛-s-h 'make', whereas in the first story what God did was prominently described as b-r-' 'create'. All those differences are just in the first six-word clause of the new passage!
In this the best known of all Bible stories, widespread familiarity with its details extends to "details" that aren't even in the story. There is no mention anywhere of an apple, for example, and it doesn't say that the serpent is the devil either. These and many other preconceptions about the Adam and Eve story are later interpolations. Perhaps most importantly of all, the whole doctrine of Original Sin is a theory that was built up out of this narrative by Christian theologians; the authors of Genesis were not consulted on whether that is what the story meant to them. According to MZB, on the contrary, it is a legend about "immortality lost and sexuality gained".
To put the issue in an ecological perspective: for survival in a world with limited (no matter how vast) resources, immortality and reproduction are incompatible, it has to be one or the other, or else drastic overpopulation is guaranteed! As we know, nature in its wisdom has made its choice: we shall reproduce, but we shall therefore have to die too, to make room for more babies. In the Adam and Eve allegory, the first humans God created had a choice, possibly (who knows?) represented by the two forbidden trees. There is an enigma here because, for starters, why were they forbidden then? And we don't know (and it is rather hard to guess) what the arrangement would have been had Eve not been tempted by the serpent. Anyhow, one tree offered [sexual] knowledge, with all its consequences (babies), and the other tree offered everlasting life, also with its own consequences, I'm sure: do you want the red pill or the blue pill? But not both! So when Adam and Eve ate the fig (or whatever fruit you prefer to imagine), God's hand was forced, in a manner of speaking: they could no longer stay in Eden, lest they also eat the fruit of the Tree of Life. Of course, God already foresaw all this from the beginning, and it gives quite a different twist to God's statement to Adam (often considered problematic in more conventional commentaries): ki b'yom akholkha mimmennu mot tamut 'for if you eat from it you're going to die'. Perhaps this means, '...you will become mortal' (2:17), or as Speiser puts it in his translation: 'for the moment you eat of it, you shall be doomed to death'. The reason this has worried many commentators is that in fact, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they do not die (immediately).
Put that way, the symbolic potential of the story is huge. Whether or not we have got it quite right, the main point is that it's an allegory, and therefore symbolic. The Original Sin hypothesis is relatively narrow and superficial: according to it, Adam and Eve did something wrong (they ate the fruit, or were tempted by Satan, or became aware of their bodies [huh?]) and that was the beginning of all man's and woman's woes. If only they had behaved!
The CB commentary, on p. 104, points out something that's rather fun to think about. Assuming for a moment that Genesis was all cut from a single piece of cloth, then we must now worry about how to reconcile the statement that, on the sixth day of creation, God saw everything he had created and it was very good (1:31), with the appearance of a satanic snake who now proceeds to bring about the downfall of God's creation. What's very good about that? There are two answers, of course, and I think they're both right: the snake isn't Satan, it's just a talking snake, one of the strange and wonderful animals that God had made, and Adam and Eve's story is nothing so simplistic as an infantile tale of confrontation between the "good side" and the "bad side" but an old legend which allows itself to be spun into a much more sophisticated allegory; and this and the six-day creation account are texts from different sources, neither of which alludes in any way to the other.
Traditional commentaries have not only taken the serpent to be the villain of the piece but also gone much further and adopted it as the symbolic incarnation of all evil and hence of Satan himself. It is important, especially as translators, to remember that none of this is present in the text before us, and it is none of our business to assume anything of the sort. Even in the passage where God dictates his sentence to the serpent (3:14-15), there is no reason for reading any metaphors into the enmity established by God between snake and woman (here the latter perhaps stands in for all humankind): it says what it says, namely that snakes bite people and people can't stand snakes, which happens to be true. The hatred of snakes seems to be inbred in the human race, it is part of our DNA, and on one level, this story is all about explaining that fact through a myth. Such myths which present an allegorical explanation (which may be fictional) of some well-known fact or phenomenon are known as etiological (from the Greek aitios 'cause, reason'), and there are others in Genesis, such as the account of creation to explain the observance of the Sabbath, the tower of Babel to explain why people speak different languages, or the story of Lot's wife to explain the existence by the Dead Sea of a pillar of salt. What I call "name games" are also a kind of etiology. It should be understood that that is all an etiology is! (In EAS, Speiser quotes the dictum of S.R. Driver, author of The Book of Genesis and Introduction to the literature of the Old Testament: "We must not read into the words more than they contain.") Just as name games are sometimes referred to as folk etymology, such etiological notes may be thought of as folk science. This particular etiology seeks to answer three questions: why snakes have no legs and move on their bellies, why they flick their tongues out (actually we know now that this is to collect information about the environment, but may look as if the snake is "eating dust"), and why so many people (especially women, perhaps?) have a phobia for snakes. Actually the story is a multiple etiology, as the following paragraphs go on to explain why women give birth in pain, why they desire their husbands, and why men's lives are so hard.
Brettler raises some interesting questions. First of all, who said what Adam and Eve did was bad? Maybe it was just a choice that had to be made so they made it. Even if they did have sex (God forbid!), we must remember that the writers of Genesis, as they demonstrate in some other parts of the Bible, were not prudish Victorians; they seem to have had considerably more open-minded attitudes than some of their later interpreters, to judge from what they wrote, so how can we be sure that was the first thing humans ever did "wrong"?
The narrative only says: Eve took the fruit, and ate it, and gave it to her husband and he ate it too. And then God asked them: Did you eat the fruit I told you not to? And they said, yes. And God said, Because you have done this, etc. etc. He says "Because you did this..." but he doesn't say it was a punishment (except, probably, the lot of the serpent). What it says is that God told Adam that from now on men would grow their own food, and he told Eve that from now on women would give birth to children (there was no reliance on agriculture or experience of childbirth before then, so these had never been painless; arguably men and women are not now punished with pain when growing their food and having babies, they are empowered to grow their own food and reproduce!). And at the same time, God took away their access to the Tree of Everlasting Life, which now becomes a necessary precaution for reasons we have seen. All of which is as if to say, that now history began, triggered by the actions of human beings who assumed the responsibility and the consequences that come with choice.
So there is really no need to introduce the word sin into this story and in fact, the Genesis authors didn't! Another interesting point Brettler makes is that it doesn't say anything about all this being the woman's fault. Eve was the one who made the choice, yes. But what if it was the best choice they could make, and she was the one who made it, and all Adam did was follow Eve's initiative?
The section by Brettler (MZV pp. 45-7) concludes:
It is difficult to determine the attitude of this mythmaker toward the new state that he is describing. Is he happy that a boring life as asexual immortals in Eden has been traded for a challenging, sexual life outside of Eden?... In various places, [the Hebrew Bible] sees women in particular (in contrast to men) as very sexual beings (see especially Proverbs 1-9). Thus, it is quite reasonable within a biblical context to see Eve as a type of Pandora figure, who is to be commended for bringing sex into the world.Central to the narrative is, of course, a particular tree called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (see my note on 2:9 below), the fruit of which Adam and Eve taste, and also the Tree of Life, of which they do not. So we might say it is a story about trees. We tend not to think too much of the meaning of these trees as trees because our attention is focused instead on the moral issues raised: the trees almost seem to be mere props. However, CB quotes a Robert Smith as saying: "There is abundant evidence that in all parts of the Semitic area trees were adored as divine." When we think about it, there are examples of other trees to which special importance is attached in Genesis, e.g. the terebinths of Mamre, and what about God in Exodus speaking to Moses from the burning bush?! Is one of the many strands hidden away inside the story of Eden a reflection of a time of tree-worship? We can hardly deny the possibility, for how could we prove the negative? But I do wonder whether, from a present-day vantage point, the idea of this attention to trees being something specifically Semitic still holds up. My guess is that the idea of sacred trees and the like is well-nigh universal among the world's traditional cultures.
From a purely literary viewpoint, verses 2:10-14 about the rivers that go through Eden constitute a fine poetic interlude in the main story, but their specific relevance to the plot is doubtful. This has irritated readers and commentators only intent on knowing "what happened", from which perspective the interlude is an annoying interruption, and comes inconveniently just after the first mention of the two trees so we never find out what they were actually for! Geographically speaking, too, what is now said about the four rivers appear to be nonsense. To start with, a river doesn't just split into four like that all of a sudden. Four rivers might join into one, but the four mentioned don't. Nonetheless, Speiser disagrees (EAS p. 19-20): "Recent data on the subject demonstrate that the physical background of the tale is authentic." He believed the story does refer to the convergence (real or imagined) of four streams 'near the head of the Persian Gulf, to create a rich garden land to which local religion and literature alike looked back as the land of the blessed.' Changing sea levels over the millennia have altered the location of the coastline, so this must now remain conjecture. Anyway, let's not get bogged down in details: the general idea is that, as we have already been told in 2:8, Adam and Eve's garden was located in an unknown place called ‛éden which is miqqédem 'to the east' - whether that means Mesopotamia, east of Mesopotamia, or perhaps just a mythical "East" beyond the known world. True, the Tigris and Euphrates seem to situate Eden in Mesopotamia, but in the place and at the time when this legend was composed, perhaps there were no reliable maps on hand.
But there must have come a time, if it was not already the case at the time of composition, when this paragraph functioned not as a real geographical description but as a list of exotic names and words conjuring up a vague, imagined setting and a misty ambience. The exact coordinates are as uncertain as the precise nature of the mysterious ed which rose from the ground to water the earth, and perhaps for the greater purpose of the composition are no more important. But the verses about the rivers of Eden are important in a different, literary sense. They situate the story, not through any detailed information they contain (what is bdellium? where is Havilah? and what difference does it make??), but poetically: the mention of exotic names and things and the dreamlike abundance of rivers flowing out of each other leads to a flight of the listerner's imagination towards a place and a time so distant as to be unreachable. Whether or not Gihon and Pishon are names of real rivers is not to the point, so let us not insist.
On the literary level, the naming of the rivers early in the narration is balanced by the story's poetic climax near the end, which is undoubtedly the "three curses" (3:14-19): that of the snake, the woman and the man (in that order). The woman's curse is the shortest of the three, the man's the longest, but they seem to present a roughly similar structure in all three cases: each "curse" can be seen as consisting of a preface, containing a "reason clause", i.e. a preamble saying "because you did this" or "because you listented to your wife", followed by a "sentence" beginning with the word arur 'cursed'; the preface is then followed by three parts or curses proper, of which the second and third form a complementary pair of sorts. This is repeated for each protagonist in turn, except that there is no preface for the woman - thus she is the only one not described as arura. The snake's particular curses are: (1) ‛al g'xonkha telekh... 'you will move about on your belly and eat dust', (2) hu y'shufkha rosh, the woman's progeny will hate you and 'crush your head', and (3) w'atta t'shufennu ‛aqev 'you will bite his heel' (notice the complementarity of numbers 2 and 3). The woman's curses are: (1) harba arbe ‛itzvonekh 'I will make you suffer a lot' in labour and childbirth, (2) w'el ishekh t'shuqatekh 'your desire will be towards your husband' and (3) w'hu yimshol bakh 'he will boss you about' (again, the complementarity of 2 and 3). The man's curse is not quite so clearly structured, but there is a preface with a reason clause and the word arur, strangely not applied to the man but to the ground (adama), which will from now on be arura "on account of the man"; this statement is frankly enigmatic, given the proper meaning of arur. It would seem that man's particular three curses are perhaps (1) b'‛itzavon tokhlenna kol y'me xayékha 'with suffering you will eat [from the earth] all life long', (2) w'qotz w'dardar tatzmíax lakh '[the earth] will sprout thorns and weeds for you' and (3) w'el ‛afar tashuv for from it you were taken: you are just clay 'and to clay you will return', i.e. you are only mortal; once again, there is a symmetry between the last two statements about what the soil will provide to man and man's destiny to turn back into soil.
So on that note, what started out as a naive story about careless naked beings living happily in a wonderland of nature which the Greeks called paradeisos has morphed into a grim reminder or humankind's real lot: biting snakes, domineering men and at the end of all the bitter toil, death. The story tells us that all this has been ordained by God, and there is a reason: ki ‛asíta zot 'because you have done this'. But does that mean as a punishment, or because of necessity, or, here is a third option, is it for our own protection? Is it, as Buber intimates (MB, p. 21), as a kindness that God gives man death as an escape from the unthinkable consequences of his own hopeless perversity if no limits were set?
We can also interpret the story as an allegorical "explanation", an etiology, of the change of humanity's principal modus vivendi now referred to as the Agricultural Revolution. The change from a hunting-gathering economy to an agricultural society was concomitant with such a huge population increase (since agriculture and a cereal-based diet can support vastly greater numbers of people) that it created the essential conditions for the beginning of civilisation. So historically the clause w'akhalta et ‛ésev hassade 'you will eat the grass of the field' (e.g. wheat?) contains more than a grain of truth: there is, indeed, a two-way causal relationship between human reproduction (Eve's curse) and the practice of farming (Adam's curse). It was insightful of the authors to have drawn this link, perhaps not immediately obvious to us, connecting what is, in this allegory, the woman's curse of suffering to bear children and the man's of working the land by the sweat of his brow. Given the fact of death (symbolilzed by the expulsion from Eden), the only way for life to continue is through making babies and giving them something to eat: a truth at the centre of everybody's consciousness in the pre-technological world.
In other words, then, Adam and Eve's "curse" (which we may now see as two complementary parts of one whole, since the marriage between a woman and a man creates a team - ‛al ken ya‛azov ish et aviw w'et immo w'davaq b'ishto w'hayu l'vasar exad 'therefore a man leaves his father and mother and attaches himself to his wife and they become a single flesh,' 2:24) is a representation of "life as we know it" (in the perspective of whoever composed this): a summary of ordinary people's life in an agricultural society. You find and stick to a mate, you strive to bring children into the world, you work your noggin off to feed everyone, and eventually you die and return to the ground from whence you came. God gave humans this life because they rejected the alternative that was offered: an eventless life in Eden with everything provided and probably no fun to be had, and the forbidden fruit forever dangling there. Maybe it had to happen!
2:5 w'...
Following 2:4b, which however we look at it is certainly a time clause (JPS: 'when the Lord God made earth and heaven'), the next clause, in 2:5, begins with w'khol síax hassade '[and] no shrub of the field...'. I have added '[and]' simply to show where the H conjunction w' occurs, but the fact is, it doesn't necessarily have to be translated as and, and probably shouldn't be in this case. It is not unusual for w' to occur following an introductory time clause in BH. We saw an example at the beginning of ch. 1, where verse 3 begins: wayyómer elohim y'hi or '[and] God said, Let there be light', though it too is preceded by a time clause according to our analysis ('in the beginning of God's creation of...' etc. etc.). Hence the NBIE translation: 'When Our Lord God began to make land and sky, there was neither a single tree yet nor any grass...' etc.
adam and adama
See my notes on 1:25 and 1:26 regarding these words. Their occurrence together in this sentence, and again in 2:7, is certainly not coincidental, it is word play at work. EF calls it 'the first folk etymology in the Bible'. But not the last! Both these words are constantly repeated in the passage: adam in 19 verses and adama in eight. The "etymological" implication of the present occurrence of them together might be that adam is so called because he was formed from adama (although so were the animals and birds, actually, see 2:19), but the passage also can be seen to be playing with several other ways in which man and earth are connected, two of which, in particular, come to the fore in the last two verses where adama occurs: the mention of Adam's eventual return to earth (shuv'kha el ha'adama, 3:19) and that of Adam's need to obtain his sustenance from it (wayy'shalxéhu YHWH elohim miggan ‛éden la‛avod et ha'adama 'YHWH expelled him from the garden of Eden to work the earth', 3:23) which, the text pointedly remarks, is the very same earth out of which Adam himself came (...asher luqqax missham '...out of which he had been taken'). Interestingly, from a modern perspective, this very ancient story thus seems to contain quite a clear "ecological" message, similarly to other indigenous primitive folktales of this kind ("primitive" not because of a lack of sophistication of the minds who created them but in the sense that such stories "go back to beginnings"), by developing poetically a dense network of intimate connections between human beings and the earth, and subordination of the former to the latter: man as a product of the earth, man bound to the earth by the need to turn to it for his own sustenance, man as a temporary inhabitant on the earth who will in the end go back to the earth. The earth is capable of furnishing humans with all their needs (cf. the garden of Eden), but will only do so to the extent that humans act appropriately towards the earth and its products. The passage presents this as the basic order of human worldly existence. The God YHWH is portrayed as an actor in the story; he interacts with the humans and even with the animals; he also is responsible for the vegetation which plays a crucial role in the "ecosystem"; furthermore, he is the one who has created this order and lays down its rules.
2:6 ed
See my comments on this word here. It is not a common Hebrew word and is thought to have been borrowed from Akk. The meaning is not certain, and although it is translated as 'mist' in some English versions, others suggest 'flow' (Speiser) or 'surge' (EF), but all these seem to be conjectures. In the first draft of the Nawat translation I have used mishti 'mist' but it might have been more prudent to use the Nawat word at which covers just about every manifestation of water possible (including both 'rain' and 'stream') and is therefore conveniently vague.
2:7 wayyítzer
I have mentioned that a lexical characteristic of the first (creation) passage is the use of the unusual verb b-r-' 'to create'. In this second (Adam and Eve) passage, that verb is not used but another one is, y-tz-r, which means 'to mould clay, shape, fashion', and of course it associates itself with the noun ‛afar 'clay'. I wrote about this in my first blog post. This verb occurs twice more in Genesis: in the next verse which seems intent on repeating the point just in case we didn't get it the first time (God made Eden wayyásem sham et ha'adam asher yatzar 'and placed there the adam that he had y-tz-r'd'), and then in 2:19 the same verb is used to describe God's subsequent shaping out of the earth (adama) of all the animals and birds prior to bringing them to Adam to receive their names, in a very quaint imaginary scenario, as evocative as it is naive, which sweeps past our mind's eye all too quickly in the fast-moving succession of scenes that make up the narrative of this passage.
‛afar
I also discussed the meaning and translation of ‛afar (dust or clay?) in the first post. The word also occurs in two other places in the present passage, towards the end of the story: in 3:14 God punishes the snake, telling it ‛al g'xonkha telekh w'‛afar tokhal 'on your belly you will move and ‛afar you will eat'; and in 3:19, God's punishment to man also famously involves this word: ki ‛afar atta w'el ‛afar tashuv 'for you are ‛afar and to ‛afar you will return'.
wayyippax b'appaw nishmat xayyim
God fashioned the adam out of clay and breathed life into his nostrils. The detail of God setting life in motion by "breathing life into it" is both evocative and naive. This is often cited as an example of the anthropomorphism of the God portrayed in this passage; others are the way he walks about in his garden and the kind of conversations he engages in (even asking questions such as "Where are you?" and "What have you done?").
2:8 wayyiTTa‛
The God of this story creates man by shaping him from clay, and now he creates the garden of Eden by planting it.
gan b'‛éden
God plants a gan in ‛éden. Eden is treated as a proper name of a place described as miqqédem 'to the east'. A gan is a 'garden.' In addition to several occurrences of the word in this passage, it occurs in 13:10 where it is said that before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the valley in which they were situated was k'gan YHWH 'like God's garden'. On the possible origin of the name ‛éden, scholars say that it could have a Mesopotamian origin. Acc. to EAS, the Sum. word eden was "exeedingly common" whereas in Akk. the loanword edinu was rare, which suggests that, in Speiser's words, "the traditions involved must go back... to the oldest cultural stratum of Mesopotamia." On the other hand, the same consonant letters form a Hebrew word meaning 'pleasure, enjoyment', ‛edna, which occurs in another context in Gen. 18:12. Probably there is no real connection, but the resemblance would undoubtedly have appealed to the audience as yet another "hidden name game".
2:9 w'‛etz haxayyim b'tokh haggan
Nobody knows for sure what the Tree of Life (‛etz xayyim) was (or is?). We are told here that God made it grow in the middle of the Garden. This is mysterious because the wording makes it sound like we should know what the ‛etz xayyim is - but we don't! Luckily there is a clue later, in 3:22 where a still anthropomorphic God expresses concern lest the adam should stretch out his hand and also take [fruit] from the ‛etz xayyim, and eat it and live forever; to avoid that possibility, the humans are removed from the Garden. But that raises at least as many questions as it answers. Why should there be a tree the fruit of which, if eaten, would let people live forever if God doesn't want them to? And what was such a tree doing in the middle of the Garden??
w'‛etz hadá‛at Tov wara‛
The other tree whose fruit is forbidden , the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, is no less puzzling, and the same questions can be asked of it as of the Tree of Life. What was the point of putting it in the Garden? To find out if the humans would be tempted to disobey? (Didn't God already know??) Maybe the answer is that it must be an allegory, and allegories are not supposed to always "make sense". It is not a story about why Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, it is a story about you and me and life's choices. As for the tree in question, there are all sorts of theories about what the meaning of knowledge of good and evil is. The syntax of this phrase makes it very non-specific; was that deliberate? In Onk. it is paraphrased somewhat more specifically as ilan d'okhle peróhi xokhmin ben Tav l'vish which means 'the tree eaters of the fruit of which [gain] understanding between good and bad'. The knowledge or understanding part has to do with self-awareness (after they eat the fruit, the man and the woman notice their nakedness for the first time). Why it should be a particularly bad thing for humans to be aware of good and evil (as opposed to how to build atom bombs or carry out terrorist attacks or murder your younger brother, for example) is a very difficult question to answer, and perhaps we don't need to. It has been suggested that Tov wara' is one of those expressions that Hebrew is fond of which combine two terms signifying opposite poles, like hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz 'the heaven and the earth' (see my note on 1:1): they are ways of saying hakkol, 'everything'. There is another place in Genesis where the same phrase, Tov wara‛, comes up in a different context: in 31:24 God appears to Laban to warn him not to speak to Jacob "of good or evil"; possibly, again, this just means "don't get into an argument with him". Thus dá‛at Tov wara‛ might mean simply universal knowledge, maybe even, in modern terms, scientific knowledge! That is something which, of all living beings, only humans are capable of achieving (but the story seems to ask: at what price?). For a discussion of the meaning of the Tree of Knowledge, see also pages 16 ff. of Buber's On the Bible: eighteen studies.
2:10 w'nahar yotze me‛éden l'hashqot et haggan
This is obscure: how can a river go out of Eden to water the garden [of Eden]?
umissham yippared
Rivers rarely "divide", on the contrary, they tend to flow together (unless we're talking about a delta). Maybe if you're working in the other direction, going up-river, you could think of the river as dividing. One way or the other we're unlikely to find Eden, so maybe it doesn't matter!
2:11 pishon
This river cannot be identified.
sovev
The image of a river "encircling" (compasseth in KJV) the whole of the land of Havilah is odd to say the least, but Speiser points out that the same verb can mean 'wander', i.e. 'wind through' or 'meander' (EAS).
xawila
The land of Havilah has not been identified either.
2:12 habb'dólax w‛éven hasshóxam
It is not at all clear what b'dólax (KJV 'bdellium') is or whether shóxam is really 'onyx' as often translated (the LXX has anthrax and prasinos, the Vulg. bdellium and lapis onychinus).
2:13 gixon
Another unidentified river.
kush
The name kush 'Cush' is elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible understood to mean Ethiopia (and is so rendered here in the LXX, Vulg. etc.). Geographically the idea of a river adjacent to the Tigris and the Euphrates being in Ethiopia is somewhat preposterous, so some have suggested that this must be a different kush. The other possibility is that the authors didn't know as much about geography as we do.
2:14 xiddéqel
This river is more confidently identified with the Tigris (its Greek name); the Assyrian name for it (acc. to EAS) is Idiqlat (CB), while in Sumerian it was Digna or Idigna. In Aramaic EAS says it is Deqlat and so it appears in the Pesh. but in Onk. it is Diglat.
asshur
Although traditionally translated as 'Assyria', this might have meant its capital city, called Asshur, from which the empire derived its name.
p'rat
Everyone agrees that this is the Euphrates. This is the Mesopotamian river with which the patriarchal ancestors were familiar from their original homeland, and significantly it is the only one of the four about which the author obviously felt it unnecessary to provide details.
2:15 wayyiqqax YHWH elohim et ha'adam wayyannixéhu v'gan ‛éden
Following the "commercial break" (vv. 10-14), a key action previous to the excursus is repeated: 'then Our Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden', which recaps: wayyásem sham ha'adam asher yatzar 'and [God] put there [i.e. in the garden of Eden] the man whom he had formed' (2:8). And the action continues. This is the first time Adam and Eve's pleasure park is referred to precisely as gan ‛éden 'the garden of Eden'.
2:16 akhol tokhel
In this common BH emphatic constructions, the normal finite verb (here, tokhel 'you will (shall, can, may...) eat' is preceded by the plain infinitive of the same verb (akhol). We might want to translate this, here, as 'you may certainly eat' or something similar, employing the available resources of the target language somehow to convey the force of the Hebrew emphatic construction, but this strategy will not always yield the most natural English (or Nawat) prose. The alternative is not to reflect it in the translation.
2:17 b'yom akholkha mimmennu
Lit. 'on the day you eat (of) it', but b'yom in this construction may be taken merely as an introductory marker of a time clause, or, in fact, in some contexts, even as introducing a condition, hence as meaning 'when' or 'if'.
mot tamut
The same construction as akhol tokhel in 2:16, and often translated as 'you will surely die'. Lit. 'die you will die.' Regarding the place of this assertion in the narrative dimension, see my introductory comments.
2:18 ‛ézer k'negdo
The primary meaning of ‛ézer is 'help, assistance', from the verb ‛-z-r 'help, assist, aid'. Secondarily, it is used as here to mean a person who helps: 'helper, helpmate.' In Genesis, the word only occurs in this passage (here and in v. 20, both times in the collocation ‛ézer k'negdo). The sense of k'negdo is 'corresponding to him' (from néged 'in front of, opposite, against'). The phrase ‛ézer k'negdo is translated in the LXX as boêthon kat' auton in 2:18 but as boêthos homoios autôi 'a helper like him' in 2:20, the Vulgate goes further, with adiutorem similem sui in 2:18 and adiutor similis eius in 2:20. KJV has the archaic expression an help meet for him in both contexts; JPS uses 'a fitting helper for him', EF '...corresponding to him.'
2:19 wayyítzer
'Formed, shaped, fashioned', as in 2:7.
2:21 wayyappel
In Hebrew it says that God caused to fall a tardema upon Adam, using the causative of the verb 'to fall', but Onk. glosses it using the verb r-m-' (cognate of H r-m-h) which means 'to throw, cast'; and the Pesh. agrees; the LXX also says epebalen which corresponds to this.
tardema
'Deep sleep, slumber.' Thus, although the English translations have 'deep sleep', there are not two words in H and there isn't actually a word in the sentence meaning 'deep'.
2:22 wayyíven... et hattzéla‛... l'issha
Both the technique employed by God to make the woman, and the H vocabulary used to describe the process, are different from those depicted so far when describing the creation of humans, animals or anything else so far in Genesis. The verb here is b-n-h 'to build' (as e.g. a house). A note in EH points out that this is the only use of b-n-h in the Genesis creation narratives, yet this usage is common in other Near Eastern accounts of gods creating humans; thus, this scene might hark back to ancient mythical traditions. And speaking of ancient mythical traditions, EF mentions in a note the possibility that tzéla‛ should be considered to mean 'side' rather than 'rib' and that this scene might have originated in an ancient belief in an original androgynous being, both male and female, which was then split into two halves (or "sides"). This would imply that the original adam was both male and female but after (s)he is split in two, the male side continued to be called adam, and seems to be the spokesman for the original being in what immediately follows... which complicates things.
way'vi'éha el ha'adam
'He brought her to the man' just as God had brought the animals to him in v. 19: wayyave el ha'adam lir'ot ma yiqra lo 'and he brought [them] to the man to see what he would call [them]'. In the present case the text doesn't state the purpose for which God brought the woman to the man. In the event, the man does name her too, but his reaction upon seeing her will be much more animated!
2:23 zot happá‛am
This is the only place where this expression occurs, and it means 'this time', perhaps emphatically, i.e. 'at last!' Thus the author has managed to throw in a bit of drama into the story, humanizing it, thereby preparing the readers or listeners for more drama soon to come!
‛étzem me‛atzamay uvasar mibb'sari
The diction now becomes poetic as well as dramatic, when Adam recognises this new being to be bone from his bone and flesh from his flesh. I would imagine that the mi- 'from' in this phrase need not be understood in the spatial sense of 'coming from' but might be partitive in meaning: this bone is (made) of the same bone as my bone is, and this is flesh of the same flesh as my flesh; indeed, the KJV 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh' seems to assume so. Thus the emphasis is not on the derivation of the woman from the man but of their being of the same bone and flesh.
issha
The word for woman doesn't really come from ish, the word for man, nor do they both come from the same root. Actually the origin of ish is not known, but it is found in Moabite and Phoenician (without the yod) acc. to EK. Issha 'woman' (irreg. plur. nashim) is related to Aram. itt'ta, older ant'ta and cognates in other Sem. languages containing a t which in some words, as here, derives from the dental fricative protoconsonant th and corresponds to H sh.
me'ish luq'xa zot
Here, on the other hand, the sense of mi- (in me-ish 'from man') does seem to be directional: 'this [woman] has been taken from man.' Ah well.
2:24 ya‛azov ish et aviw w'et imo
The H says that a man will therefore leave his father and mother. Onk. paraphrases: yishboq gvar bet mishk've avúhi w‛imeh 'a man will leave the house of his father and mother.' And that is no doubt what is meant.
2:25 ‛arummim
Word-play alert! This verse says that Adam and Eve were ‛arummim 'naked', and the next sentence (3:1) states that the snake was, among God's creatures, the most ‛arum of all. Only, ‛arum is not really the singular of ‛arummim, it just looks and sounds very much like it; it is another word altogether and it means not 'naked' but 'clever'. (Compare the word for 'naked', 'arom, plur. ‛arummim, with that for 'clever', ‛arum, plural ‛arumim.)
3:1 ‛arum
I am going to defend the position here that the "received" wisdom about what this episode is saying is open to question. The serpent has been set up as the bad guy and Christians have decided this is none other than Satan in disguise (cf. the popular Christian representation of the devil in the form of a snake). Now if that were correct, you might have thought that on introducing this character of the story, the text might have given us a clue by telling us that the snake was the most evil creature God made (though why, in that case, God made it at all would be something to make one wonder). In the event, that's not what it says at all! What the text says is that the snake was the cleverest of God's creatures. Does being clever make you evil? No! At least, not in my religion it doesn't. I think we may have been programmed by millennia of brainwashing into misreading this line, so let us read the words again: the serpent was the cleverest of the animals that God made. And probably it is because the serpent was clever that it demonstrated a capacity to ask questions.
wayyómer el ha'issha
It strikes me as curious that, in a patriarchal culture, this part of the story should begin with the snake addressing the woman. Wasn't Adam consulted first?? But he evidently wasn't, and that seems to me to suggest that this story originates from a society with a different set of assumptions, which probably means it is very old indeed. The man's apparently secondary role is as remarkable as the first woman's protagonism in the first story where humans are portrayed freely interacting. The first move the woman is seen making is to engage in a discussion with the serpent, whereas the man's first entry onto the stage, which doesn't come until that conversation is over and done with, is a totally passive one: and she gave it to her husband too and he ate. It is amusing to watch a couple of millennia of commentators committed to assumptions of male domination and precedence tripping over their own feet while attempting to rationalise this scenario, and we probably need to be on our guard to avoid being confused by the prejudices they have endeavoured to generate. So let's stick to the facts. The snake chooses to speak to the woman and doesn't even bother to include the man in the conversation. She argues back and they get into a discussion (the first debate). She looks at the tree and thinks to herself, "Maybe the snake has a point," and daring to question what she has previously been told (presumably by the man, since she wasn't there when God told Adam what the drill was), she boldly undertakes single-handed what we might describe as the first scientific experiment: Let's see what happens if... This decision gave rise to a revolution ushering in a new relationship between humans and God (the end of innocence), humans and nature (the end of Eden), humans and humans (the inauguration of sex, reproduction and, ultimately, society), and humans and self (the beginning of awareness, choice, responsibility and moral consciousness). Adam? Well, he ate the fruit, worried about nudity, got scolded and was sent off to do something useful (which we call agriculture).
af ki amar...
The af ki which introduces the snake's words is a discourse marker which is found here and there in other stories both in and outside Genesis, but the translations bear witness to how uncertain we are about how, if at all, it ought to be rendered. Onk. translates this as b'qushTa are amar: 'Did God really say...??' (qushTa 'truth'). The af probably doesn't have anything to do with the H homonym which means 'nose'! It is said to mean 'also, even', and ki is just the regular complementizer. I would hazard a guess that in the present verse the force of af ki amar elohim... is close to what is meant, in colloquial Spanish, by: ¿A que sí que Dios dijo...? Which would mean that the Onkelos reading is the correct one, but that the JPS translation is not quite on the mark with: 'Did God really say...?' In colloquial English, I think it might be put across this way: "So, God said you shouldn't eat any fruit, huh?" To which Eve's reply is: "Oh, we can eat fruit..."
3:4 lo mot t'mutun
On the construction, see notes on 2:16 (akhol tokhel) and 2:17.
3:5 ki yodéa‛ elohim...
Now that we've agreed to stop demonizing the snake and treat it as one of the characters in the story, i.e. as one of God's creatures, perhaps we as readers may see it's words in a slightly different light. The God of this story is a God who is so mighty he can control the weather (2:5), make people (2:7) and animals (2:19) out of clay and bring them to life (2:7), and yet, as we shall soon see, sufficiently down-to-earth that he engages in ordinary conversations with those people and animals, asks them questions (3:9, 3:11, 3:13), hears them out, tells them off, in fact he even goes for walks in the garden (3:8) and bothers to make clothes for his unruly subjects (3:21). Nobody doubts that God knows what he is doing; but sometimes his subjects are bold enough to ask why he is doing it. Will not the patriarch Abraham question God's decision to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah to his face? The story line assures us that God had his reasons, and yet this questioning is not counted against Abraham. Did not he and his wife Sarah doubt God's word that they were going to have a son in their old age who would be Abraham's heir? For a God, YHWH is pretty approachable! So, Eve knows God doesn't want them to eat the forbidden fruit but the snake suggests that the reason why he told them they were going to die if they did was to stop them from finding out about something. And implicitly, through her action, Eve goes along with that questioning of God's motives and so does Adam, for that matter. Isn't it normal for children to act this way towards their parents, and don't they also have to get their knuckles rapped eventually? So, Eve says, "But God told us..." and the serpent responds: "Yeah, yeah, I know he said that, but..." I do not see any reason to go along with CB's view that "the serpent charges God with malicious falsehood". The serpent just doubts; to doubt is human. Even snakes do it.
w'nifq'xu ‛enekhem
'Your eyes will be opened' implies that your eyes are still closed. This is universally understood as a metaphor for childlike innocence. I wonder if the snake had already opened its eyes, or if it was just another of the children playing in the park, just as naive, but daring one of its friends to do something naughty.
kelohim
Onk. glosses as k'ravr'vin 'like the great ones'. This no doubt captures the essential idea, but also raises a very good question: In this instance is elohim singular, 'God', or plural, 'gods'? KJV and most translations opt for the former, others including EF and JPS for the latter, and I suspect they may be right about that.
Tov wara‛
See note to 2:9.
3:7 wayya‛asu lahem xagorot
EF (p. 21) writes: "Certainly a creature whose first act upon acquiring new 'knowledge' is to cover himself up poses no threat to the Creator." Actually it hardly possible to make any sense of this detail in the story unless we adopt the hypothesis that knowledge here referred to sexual self-awareness.
3:8 qol YHWH mithallekh
kol means either 'voice' or 'sound', but here it is clearly the latter; Adam and Eve hear his footsteps in the garden. Not, therefore, êkousan tên phonên kuriou tou theou peripatountos... (LXX), cum audissent vocem Domini Dei deambulantis (Vulg.) or they heard the voice of the LORD God walking (KJV). Similarly in 3:9 (in reply to ayyékka, see below), in the context Adam's reply et qol'kha shamá‛ti means 'I heard you' or 'I heard the sound of you', not 'I heard your voice'.
mithallekh baggan l'rúax hayyom
The image of God going for a walk in the garden has drawn the attention of modern commentators, who frequently cite this as a perfect example of the person-like or "anthropomorphic" notion of God it evokes. The phrase l'rúax hayyom literally means 'in the breeze of the day'; in other words, at the time of day when the heat decreases and a refreshing breeze is felt. As anybody living in a hot country knows very well, this happens in the late afternoon just before sunset. What makes the scene all the more anthropomorphic is that God not only goes for a walk, but chooses the most comfortable time to do it, when the day cools off but before nightfall. It is adequately (though less colourfully) translated in LXX simply as to deilinon 'in the late afternoon'.
3:9 ayyékka
H manages to pack all of 'Where are you?' into a one-word question, giving the conversation a terseness which contributes to both the dramatic impact and the startling simplicity of the conversation between God and human that follows. Adam's replies which follow (3:10 and 3:12) are relatively wordy; Eve's answer (3:13b) is briefer.
3:13 ma zot ‛asíta
'What have you done?!' is at the same time a rhetorical question and an effective exclamation. It can also be said, in the context, to have the force of an accusation.
3:14 arur
This word is generally translated as 'cursed'; it is the participle of a verb '-r-r glossed 'to curse'. Tellingly, this root only occurs in Akk. and H (EK). But in an expression such as the arur atta of this verse, EAS suggests that the real meaning is 'you are banished'. This makes a difference to the way we interpret the following preposition mi- 'from', which with the meaning 'banished' would mean 'you are banished from...' whereas if arur means cursed the sense of mi- is more likely to be 'than', as in the JPS translation 'More cursed shall you be than all the cattle and all the wild beasts'. In other contexts, though, it will still have to be understood to mean 'cursed', e.g. 3:17.
3:15 hu y'shufkha rosh w'atta t'shufénnu ‛aqev
To put this in literary perspective, see my introductory note about etiological myths above. The exact meaning of this phrase, however (KJV: 'it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel'), is uncertain. Onk. says something different here: hu y'he d'khir ma da‛vadt leh mill'qadmin w'att t'he naTar leh l'sofa which as far as I can tell means '[the son of woman] will remember what you did to him in the beginning, and you will keep an eye on him until the end.'
3:16 ‛ittz'vonekh w'heronekh
Hendiadys not really meaning 'your pain and your childbearing' but rather 'your childbirth pain'. In another words, God decrees that woman will henceforth go through the frequent (harba arbe 'I will multiply') pain of childbirth.
w'el ishekh t'shuqatekh
Generally translated like KJV 'thy desire shall be to thy husband' (JPS 'your urge shall be for...' etc.), but the word translated as 'desire, urge', t'shuqa 'urge, craving, impulse' is uncommon, with only three occurrences in the whole Hebrew Bible, of which two in Genesis: here and again in 4:7 (w'elekha t'shuqato w'atta timshol bo 'its urge is towards you, yet you can be its master', with reference to Cain) which is also an obscure passage and where the wording is stragely parallel to that in the verse under consideration (w'el ishekh t'shuqatekh w'hu yimshol bakh 'your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you' - JPS, but the two H passages are more closely parallel than that, in fact the parallellism is total!). I'm not sure what is going on there but something certainly is. In any case, the words clearly have to do with female lust, which is thus also presented as something that God has determined will happen ki ‛asít zot 'because you did this' - which the text doesn't actually have God say to the woman, though he did say ki ‛asíta zot to the snake, but I think it is understood in the context.
3:17 ba‛avurékha
This reads: 'the ground will be accursed on your account', i.e. because of what you have done, which does make it sound like a punishment, but it has been pointed out that this word might easily be an erratum for ba‛avodékha (H r (ר) and d (ד) are the two most easily confused letters in the alphabet and scribal errors are easy when either way it makes sense). That would make it mean: 'the ground will be accursed upon your working [it]', i.e. when you till it. That would also make sense and would remove any explicit punitive content: when you work the land, it will be cursedly hard. Note that God put Adam in the garden of Eden (2:15) 'to work and tend to it', using this very verb ‛-b-d. The translators of the LXX, in fact, must have been working from a copy of the H text which said that (all seventy of them...), because there the Greek says epikataratos hê gê en tois ergois sou 'cursed the land in its labours', and the Vulg. says maledicta terra in opere tuo '...in your labour', which is even closer to the reconstructed H. This also seems the more coherent of the two options when we think about it: why would the ground per se be cursed because of something Adam did? But it could be "cursed" (in a sense) when Adam tried to work it for food, as opposed to the presumable ease with which the soil in the garden gave of its own accord without anyone's interference. Thus, this becomes a lament over the pains of agriculture, which stands on the same level as the lament over the pains of reproduction where the woman is concerned.
b'‛ittzavon
And speaking of pains, here is another interesting parallelism: the same word ‛ittzavon is used now in Adam's curse (in connection with the tilling of the ground) as was employed in Eve's curse (in association with bearing children, 3:16) to say 'hardship, pain, distress'; there were other word choices and this one is hardly likely to have been coincidental when we consider that in the whole Bible the word ‛ittzavon is only found three times: we've just seen two of them, and the third and last is quite clearly an allusion to this, also in Genesis, when we are told of the naming (remember about name games) of nóax 'Noah', which seems to mean 'rest' and also contains the same first two consonants as the root n-x-m 'provide relief'. When he was born, his father Lemech or Lamech said that he was calling him that because (5:29, JPS) ze y'naxaménu mimma‛asénu ume‛ittz'von yadénu min ha'adama asher ar'rah YHWH 'This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands, out of the very soil which the Lord placed under a curse,' where the translation has unfortunately glossed ‛ittzavon this time as 'toil', making the reference a little less obvious than it is in the H version, but still the allusion is undeniable: when else had the Lord placed the soil "under a curse"? (Actually the H here just says 'the ground which the Lord cursed', the rest is stylistic adornment.) For a word that is so rare to be used twice on the same page cannot but draw an attentive listener's attention, so the message can only be: ‛itzavon for her, and ‛itzavon for him.
3:18 w'akhalta et ‛ésev hassade
It is not difficult to understand what is meant by the statement that the earth will produce "thorns and thistles" (or however we choose to translate qotz w'dardar), but what is meant by saying that he will eat "grass of the field"? The point of this might be that, whereas in the garden of Eden the humans fed (presumably) on fruit of the trees, which come of their own and simply need to be picked and eaten, now he will have to turn to agriculture, which is hard work (see my introduction above).
3:20 wayyiqra ha'adam shem ishto xawwa
This abrupt entrance into the story of xawwa or Eve, so named, raises all sorts of issues. Because of such difficulties, it has been proposed that perhaps this verse is an extraneous addition to the main narrative, originating from some other tradition. It is rather odd that the act of Adam naming his wife is placed at this late point in the story, such that we are in the position of having read practically the whole story, in which she is arguably the main character, or at least one of the chief protagonists, without knowing her name until now. That is without even bringing up something odder still: Since when do husbands get to decide on the name of their wives? Especially given the importance attached to names and naming generally in Genesis, this would imply a high degree of authority of Adam over his wife, and maybe that was indeed the idea, but there is not a great deal of precedent to be found for such a practice elsewhere in the text. Sarai's name is changed to Sarah, but by God, not Abraham! Now it is true that Adam, as the first human, has certain prerogatives: if we recall, God brought each of the animals to Adam and he gave them names; he even gave the woman that God brought to him a name: he named her issha ('woman'). That is not a proper name, but there is actually some doubt about whether adam is actually a proper name, since it does also mean 'man' generically (more so than ish) and the usage in the Genesis account is ambiguous, whence the appearance of Adam as a name in translations. So, yes, Adam gets to name animals, and also the woman created from his rib, but (1) this refers to determining generic names, not giving out proper names, (2) that was in the part of the story when everything was being created, not now, and (3) he already had his chance to name Eve once, and called her issha - not xawwa. These are some of the circumstances which might suggest that this annotation about Adam calling his wife xawwa looks rather out of place, in addition to the odd place in the story where this suddenly comes up, which also rouses suspicion. Next, here is another funny thing: the name xawwa, Eve, hardly ever appears: it occurs once here, where she is named, and just one other time, almost immediately after, in the beginning of the passage which follows, about Cain and Abel, where it is mentioned once at the very beginning (4:1): w'ha'adam yada‛ et xawwa ishto 'and the (sic) adam knew (or had intercourse with) xawwa his wife'. That's it: no more xawwa anywhere else at all! Based on that, it does seem doubtful that the xawwa (Eve) tradition was one and the same as that in which the story we have just been reading was embedded.
ki hi hay'ta em kol xay
The name xawwa is explained as meaning 'mother of all living things' on the basis of the resemblance between it and the verb root x-y-h 'live' (which may be from an earlier *x-w-h). This is a name game, pure and simple, and it seems it is no more likely to be a correct etymology than most such. That is: the explanation of the name is given because the authors of Genesis love explaining the meanings of names and weaving such explanations into their stories. Here they are explaining a name that is hardly in the story, in fact it's only there at all because they just said wayyiqra ha'adam shem ishto xawwa 'the man called his wife xawwa' which sounds a bit like cheating, to be honest. It has been suggested that most likely, this name xawwa really comes from somewhere else and, like many of the personal names in Genesis, quite likely was not actually Hebrew in origin; it came, then, from another tradition and has just been woven into the garden of Eden story, or rather footnoted to it, without much effort to incorporate it seriously. One other observation that some scholars have made is actually more unsettling: more than to the verb x-y-h, the name xawwa bears an uncanny resemblance to the Aramaic word xewya, which means 'snake'! Does this mean that perhaps that "other tradition" which has a female character called xawwa has its own version of the story in which Eve is the snake? This would mean that it is the snake who, in that tradition, was the mother of all living things. It seems that such an idea would not be alien to the kind of mythology found in the older polytheistic beliefs of Mesopotamia; has a muted reminiscence thereof found its way into our book in the disguise of this unexpected, disjointed statement about the naming of the "mother of all things"? I think that is a possibility, but it should not blind us to the fact that that is not the story told in Genesis, where the woman is not the snake.
3:24 wayyashken miqqédem l'gan ‛éden et hakk'ruvim
To start with, let's not translate the k'ruvim as cherubs, even if the English word cherub comes from this, because the image this suggests is ridiculously inappropriate. As to what the k'ruvim were to the authors, I'll tell you: I don't know. The name is said to come from Akk. and refer to some sort of guardian demon. They appear in the Hebrew Bible as bearers or guardians of the throne of God. The text says that God stationed the k'ruvim to the east of the garden of Eden, which is strange given that Eden was first described as being a place to the east, in which case it would seem that they are guarding the wrong side. That, however, is what most versions say, except that the LXX reads the text differently, and says that God banished Adam and Eve to apenanti tou paradeisou tês trouphês, something like 'opposite the garden of Eden' (reading miqqédem as 'in front of' rather than 'to the east of'), and placed the kheroubim there, whereas the MT says that he banished Adam and Eve and placed the k'ruvim either out front or on the east side, depending on our reading, but mostly it is read as 'east'.
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