The Future Past
He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” Genesis 3:10 NASB
Was afraid– The story is familiar, perhaps too familiar. As a result of its familiarity in translation we rarely see the incredibly profound nuances in this story. We are deprived of the depth and application. Some time ago we examined the opening statement through a reflection on Aviya Kushner’s insight into “heard the sound,”[1]noticing that this is not the sound of someone walking in the Garden. It is the sound that comes from all directions at once, making escape impossible. Yet Adam tries to hide.
We have also noticed that “was afraid” is not past tense, as it is translated here. We discovered that “I was naked” is a rendition supplied by the translator. The Hebrew does not say Adam was afraid because he was naked. It says that his fear is “naked-ly” felt.[2]
But there is even more. Avivah Zornberg examines the oddity of the Hebrew tense used in Adam’s reply to God.
“There is one particular feature of Adam’s speech that betrays this new ambiguity. He uses the peculiar Hebrew tense form known as the conversive vav: this standard mode of biblical narrative prefixes the vav—‘and’—to the future tense, thus converting it into the past tense. (va-yomer—‘And he said’—for instance, is written, ‘He will say,’ with a vav—‘and’—as a prefix.) Less standard, however, is the use of the first person in this mode. Adam inserts three verbs, of this converted, complexly tensed kind, into his speech to God: ‘And I [will be] was afraid . . . and I [will hide] hid . . . and I [will eat] ate’ (Gen. 3:10, 12).”[3]
Yes, it sounds academic, but pay attention. What is under the surface of the Hebrew text, completely lost in translation, is the interplay of past and future. It is as if Adam’s response is both a recitation of his present generated from his past and a proleptic announcement of his future. Adam’s entire psychological environment has shifted. His disobedience was not simply moral failure. He has changed—from the inside out. He already projects what he will continue to do—be afraid, hide, and eat from the Tree. The old Adam, the one created as God’s regent in the world, is gone. This is not simple narrative. This is not event newscast. This is a statement about a change in human constitution. The yetzer ha’ra has been born. Life will never be Edenic again.
Isn’t this what happens to us? That first act of conscious disobedience, that choice that moved us out of innocence into self-conscious awareness of the power of desire over obligation, changed us. There is no return. Now we must deal with “afraid, hide, eat.” Adam’s story continues and his response to life after Eden is supposed to be just as instructive. But I’m not sure we are listening. Or perhaps the translators have simply removed our ability to really hear this story.
Topical Index: vav-consecutive, was afraid, vav-conversive, Genesis 3:10
[1]Today’s Word, October 9, 2017.
[2]See Today’s Word, August 7, 2018.
[3]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. 20. This tense of reversal is usually referred to as “waw-consecutive” in modern scholarly articles.
THE POWER OF THE WORD
Yes, we all have spent our time
captured by the words “afraid, hide, eat.”
But to God’s glory, we are transformed
by the words “hope, come, abide.”
A lot of thoughts come to mind when I read today’s word. Was Eve the original victim? Was Adam a victim? If so, of whom? Was this the beginning of addictions? He tasted something outside of God ( like we do, by nature, when we are engaging in addictive behavior) outside of righteousness, that had a result and also an impact and according to what you’re teaching he would return to it . Is this the yetzer ha ra, the self will you are talking about? Self determination? Self separated from God? Is this the very self that would now come between Eve and Adam and cause difficulty in relationship? Sorry for a bunch of scrambled thoughts. Shalom
On the contrary .. putting God in the picture …. Evil desires, are overtaking by Godly desires,
Therefore my mind is set at peace.
This ties in with my learning of bitter root judgements & vows I make & how their foundations activate sin , temptations in both myself & others setting my future ……I need a reset in Christ ..
The almighty God, and Lord is the Hiigh Priest over the confession of our faith.
If Adam and Havvah are in the Garden, where does vulneralibty come into play? What do they have to be vulnerable about? Is it a story to teach us how to be vulnerable with one another?
Vulnerability doesn’t necessarily mean there is some wound we need to reveal. It is the openness to transparency. You and I might have things to hide so vulnerability is painful, but if Adam and Havvah have nothing to hide (yet), then there is no pain (yet). I don’t think the story teaches us HOW to be vulnerable. It is a story about the change that occurs when we transition from innocence to self-awareness and vulnerability is part of that transition.
I think many people are transparent about the good things in their lives. It is the failures or those things deemed weakness we are not transparent about. But that goes to my point. Adam and Havvah were “transparent” about what? What does innocence mean in their relationship to one another? I guess for me I’m not following the story maybe. I mean they knew right from wrong, yet they were innocent. And it still does not answer the question of why being in the Garden in relationship with God. Shalom. Why step away from that?
It still seems something is missing in this story?
I don’t think there’s anything missing from the story. Try reading Avivah Zornberg’s work on Genesis or Nahum Sarna. It’s all there. You just can’t see it all in English. I will be writing more about this. By the way we had a great discussion about this in this last weekend class at Louisiana Bible College. It was recorded. Maybe you could get some audio from them.
I sense some theme between yesterday’s and today’s… sound/listening but this seems like INNERstanding vs UNDERstanding (more with my heart and not the actual organ of the ear)… Adam is no longer by himself, he has a companion.
Here comes G-d in the garden… the SOUND of Yah, and He calls out but ADAM answers in the singular. If we are being specific about the verb exchanges, what about the pronouns?
If that is true that Adam responded as it was so beautifully written “And I [will be] was afraid . . . and I [will hide] hid . . . and I [will eat] ate’ “, does that change Havah’s role as Ezer-Kenegdo? We are afraid (and will be) and we hid (and will hide) and we ate (and will eat). (and if yes, how so)
I *may be* a little lost… sorry if this doesn’t make sense.
*read AM
Been gone all day. Re-reading the word plus all the comments now. Pretty confusing to me. Seems to be a lot of lack of connection with thoughts. I would like to understand . Maybe, “the more to come”, will be helpful!
“The yetzer hara has been born.” This translation has been truly instructive. Thank you , Skip, for sharing sources. I am going to have to get closer to some of these authors. This makes it much easier to ‘see’!
If eating of the Tree reduced us to learning from experience, then it must have also reduced our paradigms to also being built upon that experience. I think to the extent we attempt to ‘add’ knowledge or ‘change’ our paradigms through a subscription to cognitive beliefs that have not been personally tested by our own experience, we run into trouble. This would make Western religion rife with trouble to the extent it attempts to hand us belief systems that have not been personally experienced! How many times did I try to sit in church and manufacture ‘faith’, etc., as per ‘instructions’ (insinuations). I had no personally-experienced base for that faith, yet I had been told that cognitive subscription was all that was ‘required’. It was impossible!
The Garden paradigm had obviously radically shifted from being faith-based to being based in the experience of the past. Now we see Adam projecting that past into the future as a SUBSTITUTE for living faith. I think Ecclesiastes puts this to voice in Eccl. 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”.
I think existentialism, at its core, is the attempt to ‘find’ the future based upon “what is (already) done”. We are now tied to our own tails, or, our own past. Reduced to our five senses, which ALL feed us info that is already in the split-second past by the time we receive it (much less process it), we attempt to influence (control) the future by projecting prognostications onto it that are based upon our knowledge of that past; even that split-second past fed to us by those senses. The yetzer hara (“flesh”) is tied to those senses (“experience”, or as we read it in English, “knowledge”); therefore it is limited to the unchangeable past that is being portrayed by those senses. Y’all, choices do not ‘work’ in the past!
Only true faith can return us to true choices: choices made in a real, fluid present (that we now cannot ‘see’ in our flesh, of course (thanks, Tree!)) about a real future meant to be CREATED by faith instead of being tied, through our fleshly choices, to the death of the past. When Paul talks about “dead works” I think he is referring to not only actions (choices) that will kill us (sin) but also to choices that are reactions to the past being fed to us through our senses. Therefore, he concludes that “what is not of faith is sin” Rom. 14;23. That is a heavy statement!
Does this make everything done in the flesh sin (lack of faith)? Not necessarily. Faith is love-based; which is to say faith opens the door for love to order the world. The Bible says we have all been given a measure of faith (Rom. 12;3). Even sinners have the option of choosing to exercise the faith they have been given (through grace) in the interests of love. Even sinners can ‘hit the mark’ if they so choose! (Amazing grace!) To be settled in the truth, however, we have to be delivered from the “power of death” (or, the past slinging us around) before we can experience freedom to stay in faith where love works all the time.
I think senses (experience) have been accorded us to record choices made. Post-Tree, we are stuck in the past (“death”) of our sensory perceptions; stuck in the theater of our lives past, like poor Scrooge. They were never designed to hand us the fluid present where choices actually can determine the future (through the power of faith). Only love can open the future to us again, but we will never find it through the yetzer hara – the flesh – for love can only be found in the experience of the present. Adam and Eve were already in their pasts, hiding from their present (as well as His Presence) in the bushes of their senses. May we learn to step out of our pasts into our present where YHVH is: to “come boldly before the throne” in faith, to work again – as per our design – to order the future in the “faith that works by love”, is my prayer.