Double Double, Toil and Trouble
The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; Genesis 2:16 NASB
Freely eat – Hebrew has a funny way of expressing emphasis. If the sentence calls for an exclamation point (which doesn’t exist in Hebrew), the phrase often doubles the important word. So, in Hebrew it actually reads, “you may eat eat.” The same is true of the next sentence. “You will die die.” Isaiah’s phrase translated “perfect peace” is really shalom shalom. And so it goes. We find doubled words all over the Torah. Translators do their best to capture these doubles in English, but, of course, they do so by adding an English word like “freely,” or “really,” or “perfect.” We understand the meaning, but we miss the connection. Adam isn’t told to “freely” eat. He’s told to consume until he’s stuffed—fully satisfied—until he can’t take another bite.
Why should we care about this anomaly? It’s just a linguistic device, right? Frederick Buechner’s comments say something else:
“Literature, before it is saying anything else, is saying, Be mindful. Stop whatever else you’re doing and notice. Allow yourself to be seized by this, whether it’s the frog, or the king, or the black man on the raft.”[1]
“So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.”[2]
“ . . . as the writer is saying Stop, the painter is saying Look, . .”[3]
“ . . . the medium of music is basically time, whereas the medium of painting is space.”[4]
“Keep in touch with the sadness of your own time, with the joy of time, with the marvelousness of time, with the terror of time, with the emptiness of time, with the fullness of time.”[5]
“Keep in touch with time, not just as rush and tumble.”[6]
“ . . . to move yourself away from the tumble, the rush, the surface of time, chronological time, time as an everflowing stream, and look deep into time for whatever it is that lies at the heart of it, what quality it is, the mystery of time.”[7]
“I think in a sense that is what biblical faith is saying almost before it says anything else: Stop, and look, and listen.”[8]
How differently you would “read” Scripture if you viewed it as literature, art, and music? Not just words. All those intricate linguistic anomalies are ways the Bible paints, composes, frames. The Bible is an invitation to imagine.
Topical Index: double, imagine, Genesis 2:16
[1] Frederick Buechner The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Your Life (Zondervan, 2017), p. 22.
[2] Ibid., p. 23.
[3] Ibid., p. 24.
[4] Ibid., p. 26.
[5] Ibid., p. 27.
[6] Ibid..
[7] Ibid., p. 28.
[8]Ibid., p. 31.
