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Snake Wins: Humans Exposed and Shamed!

 

 

When the woman ate the forbidden fruit nothing happened. (3:6b)

 

It was when the man ate the man ate the forbidden fruit that things changed:

 

3:7a Then the eyes of both of them were opened,

and they knew that they were naked . . .

 

This story began with a wordplay – ARUM (sounds like “ah-room”). ARUM means subtle, shrewd, clever, crafty, and cunning.[i] After he ate the fruit they both knew something new -- they were EYROM (sounds like “ey-rome”) which means “naked.” Hadn’t they been naked since the day they were made? Wasn’t the snaked naked too? The point is, “they now knew they were naked,” which means they saw each other differently than before they ate the forbidden fruit. They saw what made them different and wanted to look the same again.

 

3:7b . . . and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.

 

And then, guess who shows up?

 

3:8 They heard the sound of Yahweh the god walking in the garden . . .

and the man and woman hid themselves . . . .

 

The Hebrew text indicates that the man immediately looked for a place to hide and left the woman standing there. She had to find her own place to hide. Why did the man suddenly want to hide from Yahweh? Did he think Yahweh was coming to kill him for eating the forbidden fruit?

 

3:9 And Yahweh the god called to the man . . . "Where are you?"

 

Didn’t Yahweh know everything? Keep in mind that monotheism didn’t exist at the time the ancient Hebrew text was written. However, when Yahweh called to the man, the man now had to make a decision to stay hidden or not.

 

3:10 And he said, "I heard your voice in the garden.

I was afraid because I was naked. I hid myself."

 

Yahweh heard that the man was afraid of him. He was afraid because he knew he was naked. Those words caught Yahweh’s attention.

 

3:11a And Yahweh said, "Who told you that you were naked?

 

The man didn’t respond.

 

3:11b From the tree that I commanded you not to eat from it,

have you eaten?"

 

Have you noticed that the roles of the man and woman have been reversed? Now she is the one standing silently by, listening to the conversation between Yahweh and the man.

 

3:12 And the man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me,

she gave to me from the tree, and I ate."

 

I bet that caught her attention! Put yourself in her shoes when suddenly Yahweh turned to her and said:

 

3:13 And Yahweh said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"

 

Yahweh asked her “what” she had done, but before she answers that question, she tells him “why” she did what she did.

 

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

 

When Yahweh heard that, he immediately turned to the snake.

 

3:14-15 And Yahweh said to the snake,

"Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle,

and more than every beast of the field. On your belly shall you crawl,

and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life. And I will put hatred

between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.

He shall crush your head, and you shall crave[ii] his heel."

 

Notice that Yahweh did not ask the serpent what it did or why? Yahweh deals with the animal in a different manner than he did with the humans. Be sure to note that Yahweh cursed the snake. But it must be noted that the snake shamed the humans. Shame plays a different role in Middle Eastern cultures than it does in the West.

 

● Shame must be understood in the context of group culture; it implies a failure to live up to internalized parental and larger societal goals.

 

● Shame is a powerful operative dynamic in Jewish tradition where individual personal and religious destiny can only be truly fulfilled through membership in the larger units of family, tribe, and nation.

 

● From the first chapters of Genesis on, we see humankind struggling to resolve interpersonal and intergroup conflict -- characters wrestling with powerful and sometimes contradictory impulses.[iii] 

 

Yahweh hasn’t finished with the man and woman yet. We will discuss that in the next email.

 

Shalom,

Jim Myers

 

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[i] A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerrushalmi, and Midrahic Literature: Volume I; complied by Marcus Jastrow; Printed in Israel; p. 1115a.

[ii] A Commentary on the Book of Genesis: Part One From Adam to Noah by Umberto Cassuto; p. 161.

[iii] “Shame and Illness: A Jewish Perspective” by Michelle E. Friedman, M.D.; The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine; Spirituality, Religious Wisdom and the Care of the Patient.  http://yjhm.yale.edu/archives/spirit2004/shame/mfriedman.htm

 

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