Author: Joseph D. Kirchner

Date: Working draft, September 2026

Preface

This book began with one word in one verse. The second chapter of Genesis, in the version I first read it in, opened its account of the making of man with "Now no shrub of the field had yet appeared," and I read that "now" against the six days of the first chapter and asked what it was doing there: whether the second chapter continued the first or went back over it. The question became a reading, the reading became a set of essays, and the essays, written in 2024 and 2025, made claims about the Hebrew and about the versions that I had no means of testing. Those essays were drafted with the assistance of early language-model tools, and they carried what such tools carried then: summaries of what the Septuagint or the Vulgate or the King James "reads," taken on trust, some of them right and some of them wrong. This book replaces them.

What changed in 2026 is the shelf. The versions the essays had talked about were acquired as images of their pages, the Leningrad Codex, Swete's Septuagint, the Roman Vulgate of 1592, Coverdale's Bible of 1535, the Great Bible of 1540, the Geneva of 1560, the Bishops' of 1568, the King James of 1611 in facsimile, and, late in the work, four later printings of the Bishops' Bible and the copy of 1602 that the King James translators marked as they revised it, and every claim the essays had made was taken to the page and either confirmed or corrected there. The book that follows is written against the page and cites the leaf for every reading, and where the page went against the essays the book says so and says what the essays had wrong.

I do not read Hebrew, Greek or Latin. The Hebrew in this book is the Leningrad Codex as I have read its letters and points from the image; the Greek is Swete's page; the Latin is the 1592's; and the early English is what the copies print. I have set the translations of each period beside the originals and beside one another, and I have stated as undecided every reading that remains so. The readings of the Hebrew, and of the secretary hand in the translators' copy of 1602, are mine and await the review of those who read the languages and the hand. Where the book says a version "reads" something, it means the copy cited, at the leaf cited, and nothing else. The reading of the leaves was carried out with the assistance of machine tools working under my direction at every step, and the responsibility for every reading is mine.

Two companion volumes stand beside this one, and the reader should know what has been sent to each. The reading of Genesis 1–3 set out here was first made in the service of a philosophical framework I have set out elsewhere, and the framework is not argued in this book; the reading stands on the text and does not need it. And the doctrine of original sin, which the reading bears on at every step, is not answered here either; a second volume takes it up against Augustine, and this book's Conclusion says in one paragraph where that argument has to begin. What this book argues is what the sentences of Genesis 1–3 say, in the order they say it, and what the versions did with them, and nothing beyond that.

The title says what the book does. It is a reading, of three chapters of one book, and not a history of their interpretation. It is restorative because it restores the text's own order against the versions that rearranged it, and its own words against the versions that dispersed them, and because it finds the text, so restored, to say something other than what has been read into it. And it is of the Hebrew and its versions because the versions are not, in this book, obstacles between the reader and the text; they are witnesses, each of them faithful somewhere and unfaithful somewhere else, and the reader who knows where is nearer the Hebrew than the reader who has only one of them.

Joseph D. Kirchner September 2026

Introduction

In 1568 the Bible of the Church of England, the Bishops' Bible, set at the head of the second chapter of Genesis a summary of its contents, and two of its eleven lines read: "4 A repeatyng of thynges foretolde in the first," and "7 He rehearseth agayne the fashionyng of man."¹ The lines stood in the folios the church printed in 1574 and 1578 and in the edition of 1575. By 1602 the Bishops' own printers had replaced them with a list of the chapter's contents that said nothing of the first chapter, and the King James translators, working from a copy of that printing, headed the chapter in 1611 "The maner of the creation."² No English Bible since has told its reader, at the head of Genesis 2, that the second chapter goes over the first again. This book argues that it does; that the Hebrew says so in the shape of its sentences; and that the versions of the text, from the Greek of the third century before Christ to the English of the present, can be read by where they kept that shape and where they let it go.

A. The Reading

The book's reading can be stated in two pages, and it is stated here once. The chapters that follow do not restate it; they take it verse by verse and set beside each verse what the witnesses did.

Genesis 1:1–2:3 tells the creation as six days and a rest. From its second verse to its end the Hebrew runs on the verb of sequence, "and God said … and there was … and God saw," and the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, leaves an open space at the end of each day. The first verse is a heading. The second, "and the earth was without form and void," is not an act but a state, and the Hebrew marks it as one by putting the noun and not the verb after its connective. The days that follow are told in one order, and the sixth ends with a man and a woman made in the image of God and the whole judged very good. The seventh is rest. Nothing in these verses says how the man and the woman were made, or what the image is, or what "very good" contained.

At 2:4 the codex leaves a gap across a line and a half, and the text begins again with a heading, "these are the generations of the heavens and of the earth." What follows is the second telling. It does not go on from the seventh day; it goes back to the sixth, and tells the making of the man and the woman in the detail the first telling left out. It opens, as the first telling did, on a state: no plant of the field yet, no rain yet, no man to till the ground, and a mist going up from the earth. Then, in a chain of verbs of sequence, the LORD God forms the man of dust from the ground and breathes into him; plants a garden; makes the trees grow; sets the man in the garden; and commands him, alone and in the singular, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The text turns aside for five verses to describe the rivers, in clauses that describe and do not narrate, and then continues: the LORD God judges that the man's being alone is not good, forms the beasts and the birds, and brings them to the man, who names them and finds among them no help. He builds the woman from the man's side and brings her to him; the man names her and speaks a law, that a man shall cleave to his wife; and the two are naked and not ashamed. Every act in this chain is told as following the one before. The garden is planted after the man is formed; the trees grow after; the animals are formed after; the woman is built after them all. The woman is not present when the commandment is given and is never said to hear it.

The third chapter opens without a break in the codex and with a scene-clause in the text: "now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field." The serpent speaks to the woman, in the plural, of a commandment she did not hear, and tells her what will happen if she eats: her eyes will be opened, and she will be as God, or as gods, knowing good and evil. The book reads the serpent's words as the first account of the knowledge of good and evil that either human being hears from anyone, and as true in every particular the text allows the reader to test. The woman sees, takes and eats, and gives to her husband with her, and he eats. Their eyes are opened; they know they are naked; they hide. God calls the man first and examines him on the commandment; the man blames the woman and, through her, God; God examines the woman on the act, and she blames the serpent. The serpent is not examined. The sentences fall in the order the examination set: the serpent, "because thou hast done this"; the woman, with no "because"; the man, "because thou hast hearkened." The serpent is cursed in his person and sentenced to eat dust; the woman is sentenced to pain and to a husband who will rule; the man's ground, not the man, is cursed, and he is sentenced to labour and to return to the dust he was made of. The man names the woman; God clothes them; and God says, of the man, "behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil," and sends him out to till the ground he was taken from, with the way to the tree of life guarded and not destroyed. The next verse of Genesis opens a new scene.

The reading is this. The first telling and the second are one narrative told twice, the second being the sixth day in detail, and the rest of 2:1–3 follows in time everything that 2:4–3:24 narrates. The order of the second telling is the order of the events: the man first, then the garden and its trees, then the animals, then the woman. The commandment was given to the man alone; the woman heard of it from the serpent, whose account was true; the man was present at the eating and ate with knowledge the woman never had. The image of God announced at 1:26 is the likeness God declares achieved at 3:22, and its content is the knowledge of good and evil; the sending out is not the undoing of the creation but the beginning of the life the creation was for, on the ground the man was made from. And the woman's subjection, which the tradition has read into 3:16, is not in the Hebrew of that verse; it was written into the text by the Latin, into the printed text in the translators' italic by the Geneva, and into the margin by the King James.

B. The Four Findings

Four findings at the page carry the reading, and each is the book's own, made in the copies the Method describes.

The first is the shape of the connective. Biblical Hebrew joins its clauses with one letter, and the letter does two things depending on the word it is attached to: before a verb it continues the sequence; before a noun it steps out of the sequence to set a scene or turn against what came before. Seven verses between 1:1 and 4:1 open in the second way, and the second telling's acts open in the first. The Septuagint marked the second shape with δέ at six of the seven; the Vulgate with autem, sed and vero at five; the English Bibles of 1535 to 1568 between them at all but two; the King James at two, and printed "And" at the other five, where its predecessors had marked them.³ The versions divide at exactly the places the rule marks, and the order of the second telling, which every act's verb of sequence states, is the thing the rule protects.

The second is the heading of 1568, with which this Introduction opened: a Bible of the English church stated in its own summary that the second chapter repeats the first and rehearses again the fashioning of man, and the statement disappeared from the English Bible not by the King James translators' decision but before them, in the Bishops' own printings, so that the translators of 1611 never saw it in the copy they revised.⁴

The third is a word in the Greek. At 2:9 and 2:19, where the trees grow and the animals are formed after the man, the Septuagint adds ἔτι, "further," which the Hebrew does not have: the oldest translation of Genesis read the order of the second telling as the order of the events and wrote a word to make sure its readers did too. The Vulgate, centuries later, moved the planting of the garden before the man with a pluperfect and the forming of the animals into the background with an ablative absolute, and every modern English version that reads "Now the LORD God had planted" stands with Jerome and against the Greek and the Hebrew.⁵

The fourth is a word in the Hebrew. The man is made of dust (2:7), the serpent is sentenced to eat dust (3:14), and the man is sentenced to return to dust (3:19), and the word is one word, עָפָר, at all three places. The Greek collapsed it into the word for earth; the Latin dissolved it into three words, mud, earth and dust; the first English Bible followed the Latin; and the Great Bible of 1540 was the first version in any language on this book's shelf to put one word at all three places, so that an English reader since 1540 has been able to see what a Greek or Latin reader could not, that the serpent is sentenced to eat what the man is made of.⁶

C. What the Book Does Not Argue

The book argues what the sentences of Genesis 1–3 say, in the order they say it, and what the versions did with them. It does not argue the philosophical system the author has set out elsewhere, though the reading was first made in its service; the system is not needed to make the reading and is not invoked here. It does not argue the doctrine of original sin or answer Augustine; a companion volume does, and the reader who wants to know what follows from this reading for the doctrine is sent there, with one paragraph in the Conclusion to say where the door is. It does not argue the age of the earth, the length of the days, or the relation of the narrative to natural history. It does not argue the authorship or date of the text, or the question of its sources, and it does not need to: the reading is of the text as the codex has it and as the versions received it, whoever wrote it and however it came together. And it does not decide the readings that the Hebrew leaves open, the number of the serpent's "as gods," the meaning of the woman's "desire," the sense of the serpent's "subtle"; where the witnesses divide and the Hebrew does not decide, the book records the division and reads on.

D. The Order of the Parts

The Method comes first, in three sections cited by letter, because everything after it depends on a rule about the Hebrew clause and on a discipline about the page, and both are stated once. Part 1 reads the first telling, 1:1–2:3, as the frame that supplies the second telling with its order and its words. Part 2 reads the second telling from its heading to the woman, 2:4–25, one chain of acts in one order, and shows the Method's rule working at the two verses where the versions divided. Part 3 reads the third chapter, 3:1–24, as the knowledge: the serpent's account of it, the eating, the examination, the sentences, and God's declaration that the likeness is achieved. Part 4 reads the versions as wholes, the Greek, the Latin, the English before 1611, and the King James and after, in the vocabulary the Method fixed, and it comes last because a version can be judged only after the text it carried has been read. The Conclusion states what a reader who follows the shape of each clause finds, and hands the doctrine to the companion volume. The Appendix is tables: the witnesses and their leaves, the connective at every clause the rule marks in every witness, the three words for the ground at their verses, the terms and their history, and where the material of the author's earlier essays now stands.

Every chapter that reads a span of verses closes with a lettered section on the witnesses at that span, and every claim about a version cites the leaf of the copy read. The reader who wishes to check the book against its sources will find the leaf in the note, and the Method states how far each witness was examined and what the author can and cannot read.

Method

A. The Page Before the Version

Every reading in this book was made at a page, and the book states here once what that means, so that the chapters may cite the page and not restate the rule.

The Hebrew text is the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, read at the image of its leaves; Genesis 1:1–4:12 stands on four of them.⁷ The book prints the Hebrew with the points the codex carries, and the reading of the consonants and the points is the author's from the image. No printed Hebrew Bible stands between the reader and the manuscript in this book: where a printed edition is mentioned it is mentioned as a printed edition, and the codex is the text.

Every version is read at the page of a copy, or at the image of that page, and is quoted as that copy prints it. The Septuagint is quoted from Swete's Cambridge edition, whose Genesis is the text of Codex Alexandrinus, and the book says so wherever it says "the Septuagint"; the Vulgate from the Roman edition of 1592, the first printing of the Clementine text; Coverdale's Bible from a copy of 1535, the Great Bible from a copy of 1540, the Geneva from a copy of 1560, the Bishops' from a copy of 1568, the King James from the Oxford facsimile of the first printing of 1611.⁸ The early English is given with its spelling, its abbreviations and its marks of supplement as they stand on the leaf, "vnto," "ȳ," "(he made)," "[shalbe]," because the marks are part of what the translators said; the long s alone is modernised. Where a letter or a word on the leaf could not be read with confidence the book says so at the place.

Translations are set beside their originals and never beside one another alone. A claim that "the Vulgate reads" or "the Geneva reads" is a claim about the leaf cited, and the leaf is cited by the unit the copy gives it: the codex by page, the Greek and Latin by printed page, Coverdale and the Great Bible by opening, the Geneva and the Bishops' by leaf, the 1611 by the facsimile's page, the Bodleian's annotated Bishops' Bible by canvas. Nothing in the book rests on a later edition's summary of what an earlier version says, and where the book's predecessor essays rested on such summaries, or on a modern version quoted as if it were the text, the book has gone to the page and reports what it found, including where the finding is against the essays.

The English text of record is the King James of 1611, quoted as printed, and the English Bibles before it are read beside it in the order of their age. The Septuagint and the Vulgate are the two ancient witnesses. The versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are witnesses to the modern reader's text and to nothing else; the book quotes none of them as its own text, and chapter 4.4 states how the thirteen it consulted were read.

B. The Connective and the Clause

Every claim this book makes about the order of events in Genesis 2 rests on one feature of Hebrew narrative, and the feature is stated here once so that the chapters may cite it rather than restate it.

Biblical Hebrew joins its clauses with a single letter, vav (וְ), prefixed to the first word of the clause. "And" is the ordinary English for it. The King James Version prints "and" more than two hundred times in Genesis 1–3 and opens sixty-three of the eighty verses with it.⁹ But the letter does not do one thing, and the reader is not left to guess which thing it is doing. What it does is decided by the word it is attached to.

When the vav is prefixed to a finite verb, the clause continues the narrative. Grammarians call the form the vav-consecutive, or wayyiqtol; it is the backbone of Hebrew storytelling, and each clause built on it reports the next event after the one before: "and God said … and there was light … and God saw … and God divided." The English that renders the form is "and" or "then." The two are interchangeable, and the choice between them is a matter of English rhythm, not of Hebrew grammar. In Genesis 1 every verse after the second opens this way. In Genesis 2 the acts of the second telling open this way: the LORD God formed the man (2:7, וַיִּצֶר), planted a garden (2:8, וַיִּטַּע), made the trees grow (2:9, וַיַּצְמַח), formed the beasts (2:19, וַיִּצֶר), caused a deep sleep to fall (2:21, וַיַּפֵּל), and built the woman (2:22, וַיִּבֶן). Each is told as following the one before it.

When the vav is prefixed to a noun or a pronoun instead, so that the verb is pushed back from the head of the clause, the clause does something else. It steps out of the sequence. It sets a scene, states a standing condition, or turns against what came before, and the English that renders it is "now" or "but," not "and." Genesis 1:2 is the first instance in the Bible, וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה, "now the earth was"; Genesis 3:1 is the best known, וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה, "now the serpent was." Seven verses between 1:1 and 4:1, the span this book reads, open this way with a verb following the noun: 1:2, 2:5, 2:6, 2:10, 3:1, 3:17 and 4:1. Four more clauses, in the description of the rivers, open with vav and a noun and have no verb at all: וּזֲהַב הָאָרֶץ (2:12), וְשֵׁם־הַנָּהָר (2:13), וְשֵׁם הַנָּהָר (2:14) and, closing the same verse, וְהַנָּהָר הָרְבִיעִי. They describe rather than narrate, and the book keeps them apart from the seven. The same shape occurs inside a verse, where it pairs or contrasts two clauses: "and the darkness he called night" (1:5), "and the gathering of the waters he called seas" (1:10), "but for Adam there was not found a help" (2:20).¹⁰ A third case completes the rule. A verse that opens with no vav at all is not continuing a clause but beginning a section, and Genesis 1–3 has three such openings: 1:1, 2:4 (אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת, "these are the generations") and 3:16 (אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה אָמַר, "unto the woman he said"). The Leningrad Codex leaves a visible gap in the column before the second and the third.¹¹

The rule is therefore a rule of syntax, not of vocabulary. The word does not change; its place in the clause does. A translator who reads the word alone must choose between "and" and "now" by taste. A translator who reads the clause has the choice made for him. The two ancient versions read the clause. The Septuagint renders the verb-first clauses with καί and the noun-first verse-openers with δέ, the Greek particle of a new scene, at six of the seven (2:5 is the exception), and it reserves δέ for that use: the in-verse pairs of 1:5 and 1:10 it renders with καί, and the contrast of 2:20 with τε.¹² The Vulgate answers the Greek with autem, sed and vero at five of the seven (2:5 and 2:10 are its exceptions) and at the mid-verse clause of 2:20, and varies its sequence clauses freely with -que, igitur, ergo and quoque.¹³ At the four verbless clauses of the rivers the two versions divided the marking between them: the Septuagint has δέ at the gold (2:12) and at the fourth river and καί at the second and third; the Vulgate has Et at the gold and the second river and vero and autem at the third and fourth.¹⁴ The first English Bibles kept the range. The King James of 1611 marked two of the seven, "But" at 2:6 and "Now" at 3:1, and printed "And" at the other five; at 2:20 it has "but for Adam," as the Geneva had before it.¹⁵ The chapters below record what each version did at each clause; this section records only the rule by which their choices can be judged.

Two consequences follow, and the book relies on both. First, a "now" placed at a verb-first clause is not a translation of the connective but an interpretation of the story, and where it is joined to a pluperfect, "Now the LORD God had planted" (2:8), "Now the LORD God had formed" (2:19), it lifts an event out of the sequence in which the Hebrew set it. Second, the absence of a connective is itself a datum. Where the Hebrew opens a sentence without vav, the text is beginning again, and a version that supplies "and" there has closed a seam the text left open.

Nothing in this rule is peculiar to this book; it is the grammar of the language as any grammar of it states. What is the book's own is the application: reading the two tellings of Genesis 1–3 clause by clause under it, and finding that the versions divide at exactly the places the rule marks.

C. Degree of Examination

Not every witness in this book was examined to the same depth, and the book states the depth at which each was read so that no claim carries more weight than its source will bear. Four degrees are distinguished.

The first is the image of a manuscript. Only the Hebrew was read so: the Leningrad Codex at its own leaves, with the scribe's gaps, his columns and his points before the reader.

The second is the image of a printed page of the version itself. The Vulgate of 1592, Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 were read so, leaf by leaf, for every verse of Genesis 1–3 the book cites, and the Bishops' Bibles of 1574, 1575, 1577 and 1578, on microfilm, at the argument to the second chapter only.¹⁶ The Bodleian's copy of the Bishops' Bible of 1602, annotated by the King James translators, was read at the image of its Genesis leaves; the printed text is of this second degree, and the manuscript annotations are of the first, read in a hand the author has not been trained in, and the book marks every reading of them as the author's own.

The third is the image of a modern edition standing for an ancient text. The Septuagint was read so, in Swete's edition of 1901, whose Genesis is the text of Codex Alexandrinus with the readings of two other early manuscripts in its apparatus; no codex image of the Greek Genesis 1–3 was available, and the book's Greek claims are claims about Swete's page.

The fourth is edition text without a page: the thirteen public-domain English versions of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, read as verse-keyed text files. They are cited as editions and as witnesses to the modern reader's text only; nothing in the book's reading rests on them.

Outside these four stand the versions the book names but did not read: the New International Version, the English Standard Version and the New American Standard Bible, which are in copyright and are cited only as the book's predecessor essays quoted them, and only to say what the essays quoted.

Two second copies were used to check readings and are not cited: a second Geneva of 1560 in a later facsimile, and a set of first-folio images of the 1611 assembled by the author.¹⁷ The 1881 Tournai printing of the Vulgate was on the shelf and was consulted for the Latin only where the 1592's letterpress was doubtful; it is not cited.

Part 1 — The First Telling: Genesis 1:1–2:3

1.1 The Six Days as the Frame (1:1–25)

The first telling is the frame within which the second is set, and the book reads it first for two reasons. It establishes the order of the works, the order the second telling will revisit; and it shows the Hebrew connective in its plainest use, so that the reader can hear the difference when the second telling begins to use it otherwise.

Genesis 1:1–5 (Leningrad Codex) 1 בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃ 2 וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃ 3 וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר׃ 4 וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאוֹר כִּי־טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ׃ 5 וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד׃

Genesis 1:1–5 (1611) 1 In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. 2 And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God diuided the light from the darkenesse. 5 And God called the light, Day, and the darknesse he called Night: and the euening and the morning were the first day.¹⁸

A. The Heading and the Scene (1:1–2)

The Bible opens without a connective. בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, "in the beginning God created," is a heading of the same kind as the אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת of 2:4, a sentence that begins a section rather than continuing one, and the book treats the two as the two headings of the two tellings.¹⁹ What the first heading announces is the whole: the heavens and the earth. What the second will announce is the same whole, in the other order, "the earth and the heavens," told again.

The second verse is the first scene-clause in the Bible, and the book has used it in the Method as the type of its kind. וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה, "and the earth was": the vav is prefixed to the noun, the verb follows, and the clause does not report an act but describes a state, the earth unformed and empty, dark, with the רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים, the Spirit or wind or breath of God, moving on the waters. The Septuagint marked it, ἡ δὲ γῆ ἦν ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, "now the earth was unseen and unfurnished"; the Vulgate marked it, Terra autem erat inanis & vacua; the Great Bible of 1540 marked it by dropping the connective altogether, "The earth was voyde and emptye," which is the English way of setting a scene when the language has no particle to do it.²⁰ Coverdale ran it on from the first verse with a small "and," "and ȳ earth was voyde and emptie"; the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 print "And the earth was," and the 1611's "And" is the first of the five places in Genesis 1–4 where the King James translators chose "And" at a noun-first clause their predecessors or their sources had marked.²¹ Every version but Coverdale's has "Spirit" for רוּחַ, and the book has shown at 3:8 what became of the same word when it stood in a phrase the translators could not make a Spirit of.²²

B. The Days as Sequence (1:3–25)

From the third verse to the end of the chapter the Hebrew is the vav of sequence without exception at the head of a verse. וַיֹּאמֶר, "and he said"; וַיַּרְא, "and he saw"; וַיַּבְדֵּל, "and he divided"; וַיִּקְרָא, "and he called"; וַיַּעַשׂ, "and he made"; וַיִּבְרָא, "and he created"; וַיְבָרֶךְ, "and he blessed." Each act is the next after the one before, and the day is closed by a formula that is itself two sequence verbs, וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר, "and there was evening and there was morning." Within a verse the Hebrew does turn: at 1:5 וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה, "and the darkness he called night," and at 1:10 וּלְמִקְוֵה הַמַּיִם קָרָא יַמִּים, "and the gathering of the waters he called seas," a noun is fronted to pair the second naming with the first, and the Septuagint, which reserves its δέ for a clause that opens a scene, keeps καί at both.²³ The first telling has one scene, at 1:2, and after it everything is event.

The Leningrad Codex marks the days as the text does not. At the end of each day's formula the scribe leaves the rest of the line empty and begins the next day on a fresh line: after 1:5, 1:8, 1:13, 1:19 and 1:23, five open spaces that divide the first six days from one another, and none within a day.²⁴ The printed Bibles found their own ways to show the divisions. The Geneva and the Bishops' number the days in the margin; the 1611 marks the opening of a day with a pilcrow at 1:6, 1:9, 1:14 and 1:24, though not at 1:20; the Vulgate of 1592 runs the chapter as one paragraph with the verse numbers in the margin.²⁵ The codex's gaps are the oldest of these devices and the only one in the text's own hand.

The versions did not level the chapter's connective as far as the English reader might suppose, and the differences among them are worth setting out once, because Part 4 will return to them. The Septuagint has καί at every verse but 1:2. The Vulgate varies the seven speeches of God with seven different openings, Dixitque (1:3), Dixit quoque (1:6, 1:24), Dixit vero (1:9), Et ait (1:11, 1:26), Dixit autem (1:14), Dixit etiam (1:20), and its other acts with the enclitic -que, Appellauitque, Vocauitque, Fecitque, Creauitque, Benedixitque, so that no two consecutive Latin verses begin alike.²⁶ Coverdale closes each day with "Then of the euenynge and mornynge was made the first daye" and opens the acts that follow a speech with "Then God made," "Then God deuyded"; the Great Bible closes each day with "The euenynge also and the mornyng."²⁷ The Geneva has the widest range in English, "Then God said" (1:3, 1:11), "Againe God said" (1:6), "God said againe" (1:9), "Then God made" (1:7), "God then made" (1:16), "Afterwarde God said" (1:20), "Moreouer God said" (1:24), "Furthermore God said" (1:26), and closes each day "So the euening and the morning were."²⁸ The Bishops' has "And" at every verse from 1:3 to 1:24 and drops the connective at 1:25 and 1:26, "God made," "God saide"; the 1611 has "And" at every verse from 1:3 to 1:26 without a break.²⁹

None of this is a fault in any version, and the book does not call it one. In the first telling the Hebrew's connective is the vav of sequence at every verse, and "And" renders it exactly; the Geneva's "Againe" and "Afterwarde" and the Vulgate's quoque and etiam are English and Latin variety laid over a Hebrew that has none. The King James's "And … and … and" in Genesis 1 is the Hebrew's "and … and … and," and the reader who has learned from this book that the 1611 levelled the connective should learn here where it did not need to. The levelling that matters is at the noun-first clauses, and the first telling has only one of them.

C. The Third Day, and the Second Telling's Starting Point (1:9–13)

Genesis 1:11–12 (1611) 11 And God said, Let the earth bring foorth grasse, the herbe yeelding seed, and the fruit tree, yeelding fruit after his kinde, whose seed is in it selfe, vpon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought foorth grasse, and herbe yeelding seed after his kinde, and the tree yeelding fruit, whose seed was in it selfe, after his kinde: and God saw that it was good.³⁰

The third day has two works. The first is the gathering of the waters and the appearing of the dry land (1:9–10); the second is the bringing forth of vegetation, grass, herb and fruit tree (1:11–12). Between them the day is not closed; the formula of evening and morning comes only at 1:13. The second telling's scene, at 2:5, is an earth with dry land and water and no shrub or herb, and the book has argued in chapter 2.1 that this places the second telling's opening between the two works of the third day. The man is formed on the dry land of 1:9–10, and the trees that grow around him at 2:8–9 are the vegetation of 1:11–12, told from where he stands. Nothing in the first telling contradicts this; the first telling reports that the earth brought forth vegetation on the third day and does not say at what hour of it, or whether anything else was on the earth when it did.

The word of the third day that the second telling will use is זֶרַע, seed. מַזְרִיעַ זֶרַע, "seeding seed," and אֲשֶׁר זַרְעוֹ־בוֹ, "whose seed is in it," name the power of the vegetation to reproduce itself, and the word will return at 3:15 as the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Every version kept it: σπέρμα, semen, "sede," "seed," with the 1611 confessing the Hebrew's doubling in its margin at 1:29, "Hebr. seeding seed."³¹ The first telling gives the plants the power to continue; the first telling's blessing on the living creatures at 1:22 and on the man and woman at 1:28 will give it to them in a verb, "be fruitful and multiply"; and the second telling will make the woman's seed the bearer of the enmity with the serpent.

D. The Fourth Day, and a Verb the Hebrew Does Not Have (1:14–19)

The lights of the fourth day are made to divide the day from the night and to be for signs and seasons, and the verse that reports their making has a phrase without a verb. וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־שְׁנֵי הַמְּאֹרֹת הַגְּדֹלִים … וְאֵת הַכּוֹכָבִים: "and God made the two great lights … and the stars." The stars hang at the end of the verse as a third object with no verb of their own, and the translators had to decide whether to leave them so or to supply one. The Septuagint left them, καὶ τοὺς ἀστέρας; the Vulgate, & stellas.³² The English supplied a verb, and three of the English Bibles told the reader they had done so: Coverdale and the Great Bible print "and (he made) starres also," the verb in parentheses, and the Bishops' "and [he made] starres also," the verb in the brackets the Bishops' used for its supplements; the Geneva has "he made also ȳ starres" and the 1611 "he made the starres also," both without a mark.³³ The book notes the verse because the predecessor essay made something of it, reading "the stars also" as a subordination of the stars; the Hebrew has no verb to subordinate with, and the versions that marked their supplement were the more faithful.

E. The Fifth and Sixth Days: Living Souls, and the Creeping Things (1:20–25)

Genesis 1:24–25 (Leningrad Codex) 24 וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים תּוֹצֵא הָאָרֶץ נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה לְמִינָהּ בְּהֵמָה וָרֶמֶשׂ וְחַיְתוֹ־אֶרֶץ לְמִינָהּ וַיְהִי־כֵן׃ 25 וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־חַיַּת הָאָרֶץ לְמִינָהּ וְאֶת־הַבְּהֵמָה לְמִינָהּ וְאֵת כָּל־רֶמֶשׂ הָאֲדָמָה לְמִינֵהוּ וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב׃

Genesis 1:24–25 (1611) 24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the liuing creature after his kinde, cattell, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kinde: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kinde, and cattell after their kinde, and euery thing that creepeth vpon the earth, after his kinde: and God saw that it was good.³⁴

Two words of the fifth and sixth days are words the second telling will use of the man and the serpent, and the book records them here so that the reader has them when they return.

The first is נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, "living soul." It is what the waters bring forth on the fifth day (1:20), what the earth brings forth on the sixth (1:24), what every creature that moves is at 1:30, what the man becomes at 2:7 and what every creature the man names is at 2:19. The phrase is one phrase in the Hebrew at all five places. The Septuagint has ψυχὴ ζῶσα at all five and the Vulgate anima viuens; Coverdale has "creatures that moue and haue life" at 1:20 but "lyuynge soules" at 1:24 and "a lyuynge soule" at 2:7.³⁵ The Great Bible of 1540 gave the animals "mouynge creature that hath lyfe" (1:20) and "lyuing creature" (1:24), and kept "a lyuing soule" for the man, and every English Bible after it has done the same, so that the reader of the King James meets "the liuing creature" here and "a liuing soule" at 2:7 and cannot see that they are the same words.³⁶ The Geneva put the Hebrew in its margin at 1:20, "Ebr. the soule of life"; the 1611 at 1:20, "Heb. soule," and at 1:30, "Hebr. a liuing soule."³⁷ Chapter 2.2 has drawn the consequence; here the book records only that the division between creature and soul, which the English reader takes from these verses, is English and dates to 1540.

The second word is רֶמֶשׂ, the creeping thing, with its verb רָמַשׂ, to creep or move about. It is one of the three classes the earth brings forth on the sixth day, בְּהֵמָה וָרֶמֶשׂ וְחַיְתוֹ־אֶרֶץ, "cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth," and at 1:26 and 1:28 the man is given dominion over it, הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ, "the creeping thing that creepeth." The serpent of chapter 3 is one of these, and the book has shown in chapter 3.3 that his sentence does not use the word: he is sentenced to go on his belly and eat dust, and the word that binds his sentence to the rest of the narrative is dust, not creeping. The versions render the class variously and none of them wrongly: the Septuagint ἑρπετά, the Vulgate reptilia and reptile terræ, Coverdale and the Great Bible "wormes," the Geneva "that which crepeth," the Bishops' "worme," the 1611 "creeping thing" and "euery thing that creepeth."³⁸ The 1611 adds two margins that show its translators watching the root: at 1:20, where the text has "mouing creature," the margin has "Or, creeping," and at 1:28, where the text has "euery liuing thing that mooueth," the margin has "Heb. creepeth."³⁹

F. What the Frame Establishes

Six days, told in one order, with one scene-clause at the head and a verb of sequence at every verse after it: light, the firmament, the dry land and then the vegetation, the lights, the creatures of the water and the air, the creatures of the land. The codex divides the days with open spaces and the versions with margins and pilcrows, and no version disturbs the order. The words the frame supplies to the second telling are three: seed, which the plants have and the woman will have; living soul, which the animals and the man are alike; and creeping thing, the class the serpent belongs to and the word his sentence does not use. The next chapter reads the sixth day's last work and the seventh day's rest, which are the first telling's account of what the second telling will spend twenty-three verses on.

1.2 The Image and the Mandate (1:26–31)

Genesis 1:26–28 (Leningrad Codex) 26 וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ וְיִרְדּוּ בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכָל־הָאָרֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל־הָאָרֶץ׃ 27 וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם׃ 28 וַיְבָרֶךְ אֹתָם אֱלֹהִים וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם אֱלֹהִים פְּרוּ וּרְבוּ וּמִלְאוּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁהָ וּרְדוּ בִּדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבְכָל־חַיָּה הָרֹמֶשֶׂת עַל־הָאָרֶץ׃

Genesis 1:26–28 (1611) 26 And God said, Let vs make man in our Image, after our likenesse: and let them haue dominion ouer the fish of the sea, and ouer the foule of the aire, and ouer the cattell, and ouer all the earth, and ouer euery creeping thing that creepeth vpon the earth. 27 So God created man in his owne Image, in the Image of God created hee him; male and female created hee them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said vnto them, Be fruitfull, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and haue dominion ouer the fish of the sea, and ouer the foule of the aire, and ouer euery liuing thing that mooueth vpon the earth.⁴⁰

A. "Let Us Make" (1:26)

The last work of the sixth day is announced in a way no other work was. Every other work was commanded, "let there be," "let the earth bring forth"; this one is deliberated, נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם, "let us make man," in the first person and in the plural. The plural is the plural of the word for God, אֱלֹהִים, which has governed a singular verb in every verse of the chapter until now; here, speaking of the making of man, God speaks as "us," and the pattern of the image is "our image, after our likeness," בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ. The book has met this "us" twice already, at 3:5, where the serpent promised the woman she would be כֵּאלֹהִים, and at 3:22, where God said the man had become כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ, "as one of us." The three verses are one sentence spoken three times, by God as intention, by the serpent as promise, and by God as fact.

The versions kept the plural, and the two that had a word for it added it elsewhere. The Septuagint has ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ᾿ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ᾿ ὁμοίωσιν, the Vulgate Faciamus hominem ad imaginem, & similitudinem nostram; both, as chapter 2.3 recorded, carried the same plural into 2:18, where the Hebrew has "I will make," so that in Greek and Latin the making of the man and the making of his help are announced in the same voice.⁴¹ The English Bibles have "let vs make" without exception.⁴² What the plural means the versions did not say in their texts, and the Reformation Bibles said in their margins, in two ways. The Geneva reads it as deliberation: God "cōmanded the water and the earth to bring forthe other creatures: but of man he saith, Let vs make: signifying ȳ God taketh counsel with his wisdome & vertue, purposing to make an excellent worke aboue all the rest of his creacion."⁴³ The Bishops' reads it as the Trinity: "One God, and three persons. Coloss. ii. b."⁴⁴ The book does not decide between them, as it did not decide the number of the serpent's כֵּאלֹהִים at 3:5. It observes only that the plural is in the text at 1:26, that God uses it again of himself at 3:22, and that whatever "us" means in the one place it means in the other.

The image is stated twice in the Hebrew of 1:27, בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים, "in his image, in the image of God," and once in the Greek, κατ᾿ εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν, which drops the first of the two.⁴⁵ The Vulgate restored the doubling, ad imaginem suam: ad imaginem Dei creauit illum, and the English from 1540 follows the Latin.⁴⁶ Coverdale has no "image" at all: "let vs make man in oure similitude after oure licknesse … And God created man after his licknesse: after ȳ licknesse of God created he him," two words for the Hebrew's two, צֶלֶם and דְּמוּת, but "likeness" for both.⁴⁷ The Geneva's note on the verse says what the image is, by way of Ephesians 4:24: "man was created after God in righteousnes & true holines, meaning by these two wordes all perfection, as wisdome, trueth, innocencie, power, &c."; the Bishops' says that man "by sinne he afterwarde corrupted" it, and that "We ought to labour to repayre this image so oft repeated."⁴⁸ The reading this book carries is a different one, and it is the text's: the image is announced here, and the text does not say here what it consists in; it says at 3:22, in God's own sentence, that the man has become like us to know good and evil. The Geneva's gloss puts the content of the image before the eating; the text puts it after.

B. Male and Female, and the Blessing (1:27–28)

זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם, "male and female created he them." The first telling states in three words what the second telling will spend from 2:7 to 2:22 narrating: the man formed, the woman built. It states it as one act on one day, and the reading this book has argued from the second telling is that the first telling's one act is the second telling's many, compressed. The first telling does not say that the male and the female were made at the same moment; it says that on the sixth day they were made. Where the second telling places the woman's making, the first telling's sixth day is reached.

Then the blessing, and it is spoken to them: וַיְבָרֶךְ אֹתָם אֱלֹהִים וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם, "and God blessed them, and God said unto them," the pronouns plural, the addressees two. פְּרוּ וּרְבוּ, "be fruitful and multiply," is the blessing the creatures of the water and air received at 1:22; here it is given to the man and the woman with three verbs added, וּמִלְאוּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁהָ וּרְדוּ, "and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion." The blessing cannot be spoken to one; it is spoken to the pair, and in the second telling's order the pair exists only from 2:22. Nothing in the second telling reports the blessing being spoken, and the book does not supply the moment; it observes that the first telling places it on the sixth day, after the making of male and female, which is where the second telling's narrative arrives at 2:25.

The two verbs of the mandate have been read as harshly as any two words in the chapter, and the versions show where the harshness came from. וְכִבְשֻׁהָ is "subdue it," from כָּבַשׁ, a verb of treading down; וּרְדוּ is "have dominion," from רָדָה, a verb of ruling. The Septuagint is the strong version: κατακυριεύσατε αὐτῆς καὶ ἄρχετε, "lord it over it and rule," where at 1:26 it had the milder ἀρχέτωσαν, "let them rule."⁴⁹ The Vulgate is milder than its reputation: at 1:26 præsit, "let him preside over," and at 1:28 subiicite eam, & dominamini.⁵⁰ The English "subdue it, and haue dominion" is not an inheritance from either. It is Coverdale's wording of 1535, "subdue it, & haue domynion," and the Great Bible, the Bishops' and the 1611 kept it; the Geneva has "subdue it, and rule ouer."⁵¹ Every edition since has "subdue." The English reader who hears in the mandate a licence to exploit hears Coverdale's English for a Hebrew whose second verb is the verb of a king's rule and whose first is the verb the Hebrew Bible uses for bringing land under cultivation; the book records the words and leaves the theology of them to the companion volume.

C. The Food, and "Very Good" (1:29–31)

Genesis 1:29–31 (1611) 29 And God said, Behold, I haue giuen you euery herbe bearing seede, which is vpon the face of all the earth, and euery tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yeelding seed, to you it shall be for meat: 30 And to euery beast of the earth, and to euery foule of the aire, and to euery thing that creepeth vpon the earth, wherein there is life, I haue giuen euery greene herbe for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw euery thing that hee had made: and behold, it was very good. And the euening and the morning were the sixth day.⁵²

The food of the man and the woman is the seed-bearing herb and the fruit of the tree, and the food of the animals is the green herb. Two things in these verses bear on the second telling. The first is that the man and woman are given every tree that bears fruit with seed, without exception, in the first telling; the second telling will except one, and the exception is the whole of its plot. The second is the phrase at 1:30 that the 1611 renders "wherein there is life" and glosses in its margin "Hebr. a liuing soule": it is נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה once more, of every beast and bird and creeping thing, and the 1611's margin is the last of its three confessions that the animals and the man are called by one name.⁵³

Then the judgement on the whole. וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־כָּל־אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וְהִנֵּה־טוֹב מְאֹד, "and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, very good." Six times the chapter has said "good"; here, of the whole and on the sixth day, it says "very good" and adds הִנֵּה, "behold." The word will return once more in these chapters, at 3:22, הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ, "behold, the man has become as one of us." The two "beholds" are God's two judgements on the work of the sixth day, the first on the whole as made and the second on the man as completed, and the reading this book carries is that they are one judgement. The versions kept the word: ἰδοὺ καλὰ λίαν, & erant valde bona, "lo, they were exceadinge good" (Coverdale), "beholde, it was exceading good" (the Great), "lo, it was very good" (the Geneva), "beholde, it was exceedyng good" (the Bishops'), "behold, it was very good" (the 1611).⁵⁴

D. The Sixth Day and the Second Telling

The first telling gives the sixth day six verses and the making of man three of them. It says that God deliberated, that he made man in his image, male and female, that he blessed them and gave them the earth and its food, and that he saw it all and it was very good. It does not say how the man was made, or the woman, or in what order, or what passed between their making and the evening; it does not mention a garden, or a tree, or a commandment, or a serpent. The second telling supplies all of that, and the reading this book has argued from the second telling's own clauses is that it supplies it as the content of the sixth day and of the days before it, told again from the ground. The first telling's "let us make man in our image" is the intention; its "male and female created he them" is the summary; its "very good" is the verdict. The second telling's "the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil" is the same verdict in the words of the intention, and it is spoken when the second telling has finished telling how the intention was carried out. The next chapter reads the rest that follows both.

1.3 The Seventh Day and the Seam (2:1–3)

Genesis 2:1–3 (Leningrad Codex) 1 וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָם׃ 2 וַיְכַל אֱלֹהִים בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה׃ 3 וַיְבָרֶךְ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־יוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֹתוֹ כִּי בוֹ שָׁבַת מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת׃

Genesis 2:1–3 (1611) 1 Thus the heauens and the earth were finished, and all the hoste of them. 2 And on the seuenth day God ended his worke, which hee had made: And he rested on the seuenth day from all his worke, which he had made. 3 And God blessed the seuenth day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his worke, which God created and made.⁵⁵

A. The Rest (2:1–3)

The first telling closes with three verbs of sequence and a seventh day that has no evening and morning. וַיְכֻלּוּ, "and they were finished"; וַיְכַל, "and he finished"; וַיִּשְׁבֹּת, "and he rested"; וַיְבָרֶךְ, "and he blessed"; וַיְקַדֵּשׁ, "and he sanctified." The day is named three times, בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי, and the work is named four times, מְלַאכְתּוֹ, "his work," each time as the work already made, אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה. The chapter division of the printed Bibles falls between 1:31 and 2:1, but the text does not divide there: the seventh day is the last of the seven, and the codex, which leaves an open space after each of the first six days, leaves one after the sixth at 1:31 and a larger one after the seventh at 2:3.⁵⁶

The Hebrew of 2:2 says that God finished his work on the seventh day, וַיְכַל אֱלֹהִים בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי, and rested on the seventh day. The oldest version would not have it so. The Septuagint reads καὶ συνετέλεσεν ὁ θεὸς ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἕκτῃ τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ, "and God finished his works on the sixth day," and rested on the seventh; the translators, or the text before them, moved the finishing back a day so that nothing should be done on the day of rest.⁵⁷ The Vulgate has the Hebrew's day, Compleuitque Deus die septimo opus suum, and every English Bible "in the seuenth daye God ended his worke."⁵⁸ The book records the Greek reading as the first harmonisation in these chapters, older than any in the second telling, and of the same kind: a difficulty in the order of the text smoothed by changing a word. The Hebrew's difficulty is only apparent. To finish a work on a day is to have it complete when the day begins; the seventh day is the day on which the work stands finished, and the rest is the finishing.

The last words of the verse the 1611 renders "which God created and made," and its margin gives the Hebrew, "Heb. created to make," אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת, an infinitive the translators could not carry into English and did not pretend to.⁵⁹ The Great Bible and the Bishops' have "which God ordeyned to make," Coverdale and the Geneva "created and made," the Septuagint ὧν ἤρξατο ὁ θεὸς ποιῆσαι, "which God began to make," and the Vulgate quod creauit Deus vt faceret, "which God created that he might make."⁶⁰ The Greek's "began" is the odd one; the Hebrew says the work was created to be made, and the Latin is closest.

The versions differ at the openings of the three verses in the ways Part 1 has taught the reader to expect. The Septuagint has καί at each. The Vulgate opens Igitur perfecti sunt, "therefore were finished," and continues Compleuitque, Et benedixit. Coverdale has "Thus was heauē and earth fynished … and thus in the seuenth daye God ended his worke"; the Great Bible "The heauēs also and the erth were fynished … And in the seuenth daye … In the seuenth daye also, he rested"; the Geneva "Thus the heauens … For in the seuenth day God ended … So God blessed"; the Bishops' "The heauens also & the earth were finisshed … And in the seuenth day … And the seuēth day he rested … And God blessed"; the 1611 "Thus the heauens … And on the seuenth day … And he rested … And God blessed."⁶¹ The 1611's "Thus" is the Geneva's and Coverdale's; the Great Bible's "also" and the Vulgate's igitur are the same summarising turn in another word. None of them alters the order, and none needed to.

The Reformation notes read the rest as the tradition had. The Geneva: God "had now finished his creacion, but his prouidence stil watcheth ouer his creatures, and gouerneth thē," and the day is "Appointed … to be kept holy, that man might therein consider ȳ excellencie of his workes & Gods goodnes towards him."⁶² The Bishops': "The seuenth daye consecrated to the seruice of God, for man in his perfect state."⁶³ The reading this book carries is compatible with both and adds one thing. The seventh day is the rest after the work, and the work, as the first telling has just said, ended with a man and a woman made in the image of God and judged very good. The second telling, on this book's reading, tells the making of that man and woman down to the moment God declared the image achieved. The rest of 2:1–3 therefore follows, in the order of the events, the whole of what 2:4–3:24 narrates; the second telling does not come after the seventh day but within the six, and the text's placing of the rest before the second telling is the placing of a summary before its detail.

B. The Seam (2:3–4)

Between the last word of 2:3 and the first word of 2:4 the codex leaves its widest open space in these chapters, and the second telling begins without a connective: אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת, "these are the generations."⁶⁴ Chapter 2.1 has read the heading; this chapter records what the English Bibles printed above it.

Three of the English Bibles supplied each chapter with a summary of its contents, and at the second chapter of Genesis the three summaries are the tradition's own statement of how the two tellings relate. The Great Bible of 1540 summarised the chapter as "The halowynge of the Sabbath daye. The foure floudes of Paradise. The settyng in of man in Paradise. The tre of knowledge is forbidden him; how Adam named all creatures. The creacyon of Eua. The institucyon of maryage," a list of contents that says nothing about the relation of the chapter to the one before.⁶⁵ The Geneva of 1560 summarised it "God resteth the seuenth day, and sanctifieth it. 15 He setteth man in the garden. 22 He createth the womā. 29 Mariage is ordeined," also a list.⁶⁶ The Bishops' of 1568 wrote: "2 The day of rest is blessed. 4 A repeatyng of thynges foretolde in the first. 6 The cloude from the earth as a well to water it. 7 He rehearseth agayne the fashionyng of man. 8 Man in the paradise of pleasure. 10 The wood of lyfe, the wood of knowledge. 11. 13. 14 The ryuers names. 16 God forbyddeth man the tree of knowledge of good and euyll. 19 Adam geueth names vnto all lyuyng thynges. 22 Woman is created. 23 The institution of holy mariage."⁶⁷ Two of its eleven lines say what the other summaries do not: that verse 4 begins a repeating of things foretold in the first chapter, and that verse 7 rehearses again the fashioning of man.

The heading did not survive the Bishops' Bible's own printings. The folios of 1574 and 1578 and the edition of 1575 keep it word for word; the edition of 1577 replaced it with the Great Bible's list, "The halowyng of the Sabboth day … Adam nameth all creatures … Heua is created … And marriage is ordeyned"; and the folio of 1602, the copy the King James translators were given to revise, prints that list and not the heading.⁶⁸ The King James translators kept the form of the summaries and wrote their own. The 1611 reads: "1 The first Sabbath. 4 The maner of the creation. 8 The planting of the garden of Eden, 10 and the riuer thereof. 17 The tree of knowledge onely forbidden. 19. 20 The naming of the creatures. 21 The making of woman, and institution of Mariage."⁶⁹ The Bishops' "A repeatyng of thynges foretolde in the first" had become, in the Bishops' own later printings, a bare list of contents, and became in the 1611 "The maner of the creation"; the Bishops' "He rehearseth agayne the fashionyng of man" has no counterpart in either. What was dropped was not a translation but a reading, and the reading dropped was that Genesis 2 repeats Genesis 1. The Elizabethan church's lectern Bible printed that reading at the head of the chapter in its folios from 1568 to at least 1578; by 1602 its own printers had let it go, the King James translators never saw it in the text they revised, and the English reader has not seen it since.

The book does not claim that the Bishops' translators held the reading this book argues, or that "repeatyng" meant to them what "one narrative told twice" means here. It claims what the leaf shows: that a Bible of the English church stated in its own heading that the second chapter goes back over the first, that the heading was let go by the Bishops' own printers before 1602 and not restored by the revisers of 1611, and that the dropping and the 1611's "maner of the creation" were each a choice about how the reader should approach the seam. The Hebrew of the seam is a gap and a heading. The Bishops' told the reader what kind of heading it was. The 1611 told the reader it was "the maner of the creation," which is true and says nothing.

C. What Part 1 Establishes

The first telling is a frame of six days and a rest, told as sequence from its second verse, closed by the codex with an open space at each day, and ended with a man and a woman made in the image of God and judged very good. It supplies the second telling with its order and with three words, seed, living soul and creeping thing, and it leaves to the second telling everything about how the last work was done. The seam between the two is a gap in the manuscript and a heading in the text, and the one English Bible that told its readers what the heading meant let the telling go in its own later printings, so that the King James never had it to keep. Parts 2 and 3 have read what follows the seam. Part 4 now reads the versions as wholes.

Part 2 — The Second Telling: Genesis 2:4–25

2.1 The Heading and the Scene (2:4–6)

The second telling does not begin with "and." In the Leningrad Codex the seventh day closes at 2:3, the scribe leaves the rest of the line empty and an open space below it, the widest break in these three chapters, and the text resumes with two words that have no connective before them: אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת, "these are the generations."⁷⁰ The gap and the opening are of a piece. What follows is not the next event after the seventh day; it is a new beginning, headed as such.

Genesis 2:4–6 (Leningrad Codex) 4 אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶרֶץ וְשָׁמָיִם׃ 5 וְכֹל שִׂיחַ הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ וְכָל־עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִצְמָח כִּי לֹא הִמְטִיר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים עַל־הָאָרֶץ וְאָדָם אַיִן לַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה׃ 6 וְאֵד יַעֲלֶה מִן־הָאָרֶץ וְהִשְׁקָה אֶת־כָּל־פְּנֵי־הָאֲדָמָה׃

Genesis 2:4–6 (1611) 4 These are the generations of the heauens, & of the earth, when they were created; in the day that the LORD God made the earth, and the heauens, 5 And euery plant of the field, before it was in the earth, and euery herbe of the field, before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to raine vpon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6 But there went vp a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.⁷¹

A. The Heading

"These are the generations of" is a formula, and Genesis uses it as a heading. It stands at the head of the line of Adam (5:1), of Noah (6:9), of the sons of Noah (10:1), of Shem (11:10), of Terah (11:27), of Ishmael (25:12), of Isaac (25:19), of Esau (36:1, 36:9) and of Jacob (37:2), eleven times in the book, and 2:4 is the first.⁷² At every other occurrence the reader understands that a section has ended and another begun, and that the new section will go back over ground the old one has touched: the line of Adam in chapter 5 repeats his creation from chapter 1, the generations of Noah in 6:9 repeat his introduction from 5:32 and 6:8. The formula at 2:4 asks to be read the same way. It announces a second account of the heavens and the earth, and the account that follows goes back over the ground of the first.

The Bishops' Bible of 1568 read it so, and said so in the chapter's own heading: "4 A repeatyng of thynges foretolde in the first," and, three lines on, "7 He rehearseth agayne the fashionyng of man."⁷³ The Bishops' own printings had dropped both lines by 1602, and the King James translators, revising the folio of 1602, wrote "4 The maner of the creation," which asserts nothing about the relation of the chapters. Chapter 1.3 has told that story; here it is enough to note that the heading the Bishops' printed is what the Hebrew formula says.

The ancient versions did not disturb the heading. The Septuagint has Αὕτη ἡ βίβλος γενέσεως οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, "this is the book of the generation of heaven and earth," a rendering that supplies the word "book" and by doing so makes the heading more of a heading, not less.⁷⁴ The Vulgate has Istæ sunt generationes cæli & terræ, and every English Bible from Coverdale to the 1611 "These are the generations."⁷⁵ No version adds a connective. On this verse the whole tradition agrees with the codex: 2:4 begins.

What the Latin and the early English printings did not reproduce is the gap. The 1592 Vulgate runs 2:3 into 2:4 in one paragraph, and so do Coverdale and the Great Bible; the Geneva and the Bishops' number the verse and let it stand; the 1611 marks it with a pilcrow.⁷⁶ The seam the scribe of the codex left open across a line and a half became, in print, a verse number. The reader of a printed Bible has to be told there is a seam here. The reader of the manuscript can see it.

B. The Scene

The first clause of the second telling is not an event. It is a condition. וְכֹל שִׂיחַ הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ: the vav is prefixed to a noun, "and every shrub of the field," and the verb is displaced to the middle of the clause. By the rule of the Method (§ B) this is a clause that steps out of any sequence to set a scene, and the scene it sets is a bare earth. No shrub of the field was yet in the earth; no herb of the field had yet sprung up; the LORD God had not yet caused rain; and there was no man to work the ground. Four negatives, and the last of them, וְאָדָם אַיִן, "and man there was none," is the one the second telling exists to reverse. The next verb of the narrative, at 2:7, forms him.

The reading this book carries from the first telling to the second depends on taking 2:5 at its word. If the earth has no shrub and no herb when the second telling opens, the second telling opens before the third day's second work, the bringing forth of grass, herb and fruit tree (1:11–12). It does not open after the sixth day. The man who is formed in the next verse is formed on an earth that has dry land and water and nothing growing, and the trees he will see planted and sprouting (2:8–9) are the vegetation the first telling assigned to the third day, now told from the ground where he stands. Chapter 2.2 takes up the sequence; this chapter establishes only where the sequence starts, and 2:5 says where.

The versions did not mark the turn here, and that has to be recorded against the pattern they otherwise keep. The Septuagint, which reserves δέ for a noun-first clause that opens a scene and uses it at six of the seven such verses between 1:1 and 4:1, has καὶ πᾶν χλωρὸν ἀγροῦ at 2:5, a plain "and."⁷⁷ The Vulgate has Et omne virgultum agri.⁷⁸ Coverdale and the Great Bible run the verse into the heading without a break: "in the tyme whan the LORDE God made heauen and earth: before there was eny twygg vpon earth," and "in the daye, when the Lorde God made ȳ earth and the heauēs and euery plant of the felde, before it was in the earth."⁷⁹ The Geneva was the first to begin the verse with "And euerie plant," and the Bishops' and the 1611 followed it.⁸⁰ Not one witness before the twentieth century opened 2:5 with a word that tells the reader a scene is being set. The modern versions' "Now no shrub had yet appeared" is, at this one verse, the first translation to render the shape of the clause, and the book says so because the book elsewhere faults the moderns for supplying "now" where the Hebrew has a verb. Here the Hebrew has a noun, and "now" is right.

The second scene-clause, one verse on, every version marked. וְאֵד יַעֲלֶה מִן־הָאָרֶץ: "and a mist went up from the earth," again a noun after the vav, again a standing condition rather than an event, and this time the sense forces the contrast, because the verse before has just said it had not rained. The Septuagint has πηγὴ δὲ ἀνέβαινεν, "but a spring went up," the Vulgate Sed fons ascendebat, Coverdale "But there arose a myst," the Geneva "But a myst went vp," the Bishops' and the 1611 "But there went vp a mist"; only the Great Bible has "And."⁸¹ The 1611 adds in its margin "Or, a mist which went vp from &c.," an alternative that would fold the clause back into 2:5 as a relative, and did not adopt it.⁸² The two verses together show the translators' habit exactly. Where the sense of the passage demanded a "but," they read the clause and wrote one. Where the sense did not force the issue, at 2:5, they wrote "and" and let the scene-setting go unmarked. The Hebrew marks both alike.

The word the mist is made of, אֵד, occurs once more in the Bible, and its sense is uncertain; the Greek translators took it for a spring, the Latin for a fountain, the English for a mist, and the 1611's margin shows the translators aware that the clause could be construed two ways.⁸³ Nothing in this book turns on it. What turns on 2:6 is only its shape: a second condition laid over the first, water without rain, before the first act.

C. What the Three Verses Establish

A heading, and two conditions. The heading says a new account begins and that it concerns the heavens and the earth already made. The first condition says the earth of this account has nothing growing on it and no man. The second says it is watered from below. Then, at 2:7, the first verb: וַיִּיצֶר, "and the LORD God formed." Everything the second telling narrates is narrated as following that verb, and everything the versions did to rearrange the order of the second telling they did to the verbs after it, not to the scene before it. The scene they left alone, and the scene is where the man is placed: on the third day's earth, before the third day's plants.

2.2 The Man Formed, Then the Garden Planted (2:7–17)

The scene set, the narrative begins, and it begins with the man.

Genesis 2:7–9 (Leningrad Codex) 7 וַיִּיצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים וַיְהִי הָאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה׃ 8 וַיִּטַּע יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים גַּן־בְּעֵדֶן מִקֶּדֶם וַיָּשֶׂם שָׁם אֶת־הָאָדָם אֲשֶׁר יָצָר׃ 9 וַיַּצְמַח יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִן־הָאֲדָמָה כָּל־עֵץ נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל וְעֵץ הַחַיִּים בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן וְעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע׃

Genesis 2:7–9 (1611) 7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, & breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a liuing soule. 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 euery 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 euill.⁸⁴

Three verses, three verbs, each in the form the Method describes: וַיִּיצֶר, "and he formed"; וַיִּטַּע, "and he planted"; וַיַּצְמַח, "and he made to grow." Each is prefixed with the vav of sequence, and each reports the next act after the one before. The man is formed; then a garden is planted and he is put in it; then the trees grow out of the ground. Read as the Hebrew has it, the man is on the earth before there is a tree on it, which is what 2:5 had said of the earth he was formed on. The three chapters of this Part turn on that order, and on what the versions did with it.

A. The Man Formed (2:7)

The man is made of two things, and the verse names both in words that the rest of the narrative will use again. He is עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה, "dust of the ground," and he becomes נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, "a living soul," by the breath of God in his nostrils.

The dust is the word to watch. עָפָר occurs three times in Genesis 1–3, here, in the serpent's sentence (3:14, "dust shalt thou eat"), and in the man's (3:19, "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"), and the three occurrences are a single thread that binds the making to the two sentences. Chapter 3.3 follows it. What matters here is that the ancient versions did not keep the thread whole. The Septuagint has χοῦν ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς, "dust from the earth," at 2:7, but at 3:14 and 3:19 it has γῆ, "earth," the same word it uses for the ground the dust is taken from, so that the man, the serpent's food and the man's end are all "earth" in Greek and the dust disappears into the ground.⁸⁵ The Vulgate goes the other way: de limo terræ, "of the mud of the earth," at 2:7, terram at 3:14, puluis at 3:19, three Latin words for one Hebrew one.⁸⁶ The English recovered the thread. Coverdale has "of the moulde of the earth" here and "earth" at 3:14 and 3:19, following the Latin and Luther; but the Great Bible of 1540 has "euen dust from of the grounde," and "dust" at both sentences, and the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 keep it, the 1611 adding in its margin "Heb. dust of the ground" to show the phrase is the Hebrew's own.⁸⁷ An English reader since 1540 has been able to see what a Greek or Latin reader could not: that the serpent is sentenced to eat what the man is made of.

The soul is the word to be careful with. נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, "a living soul," is not a phrase reserved for the man. It is the phrase the first telling used for the creatures of the sea (1:20), the land animals (1:24) and every living thing (1:30), and the second telling will use it again for every creature the man names (2:19). The Hebrew gives the animals and the man one name for what they are. So does the Greek, ψυχὴ ζῶσα at every place, and the Latin, anima viuens, and so does Coverdale, "lyuynge soules" for the beasts and "a lyuynge soule" for the man.⁸⁸ The Great Bible of 1540 divided the phrase: "lyuing creature" for the animals at 1:24, "a lyuing soule" for the man here, and every English Bible after it has kept the division in the text and put the Hebrew in the margin. The Geneva has "the soule of life" at 1:20 in its margin, the 1611 "Heb. soule" at 1:20 and "Heb. a liuing soule" at 1:30.⁸⁹ The distinction between a creature and a soul, which the English reader takes from this verse, was made in English in 1540 and is not in the verse.

The versions agree on the verb. The Septuagint has καὶ ἔπλασεν, the Vulgate Formauit igitur, and the English "shope" (Coverdale, the Great, the Bishops'), "made" (the Geneva) or "formed" (the 1611), every one of them a past act in sequence.⁹⁰ The Geneva and the Great Bible mark the verse as a fresh start with "also" ("The Lord God also made the mā," "The Lorde God also shope man"), which is English for a Latin igitur and does not change the order.⁹¹ No witness places the forming of the man anywhere but here, after the scene of 2:5–6 and before the planting of 2:8.

B. The Garden Planted and the Trees Grown (2:8–9)

Here the versions divide, and the division is the subject of this Part.

The Hebrew is sequence: וַיִּטַּע, "and he planted," וַיַּצְמַח, "and he made to grow." The Septuagint is sequence, and more than sequence. At 2:8 it has Καὶ ἐφύτευσεν Κύριος ὁ θεὸς παράδεισον, "and the Lord God planted a paradise," and at 2:9 καὶ ἐξανέτειλεν ὁ θεὸς ἔτι ἐκ τῆς γῆς πᾶν ξύλον, "and God made to spring up further out of the earth every tree."⁹² The Hebrew has no "further." The Greek translators added it, and an addition is a reading: they understood the trees to be grown after the man was formed, as a further act, and they said so in a word the Hebrew did not need because its verb-form had already said it. The oldest translation of Genesis, made in Alexandria in the third century before Christ for readers whose language was Greek, took the order of these verses to be the order of the events.

The Vulgate did not. At 2:8 Jerome wrote Plantauerat autem Dominus Deus Paradisum voluptatis a principio, "but the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning."⁹³ Two things are done in that clause that the Hebrew does not do. The verb is put into the pluperfect, plantauerat, "had planted," which places the planting before the forming of the man in the verse above; and a principio, "from the beginning," is written for the Hebrew מִקֶּדֶם, which is a direction, "eastward," and not a time.⁹⁴ The garden is thereby moved back to the beginning of things and the man is set down in a garden that was there before him. This is the first harmonisation of the second telling to the first in any version, and it was made by the translator who, at the connective, is otherwise the Hebrew's most careful reader in these chapters. It stood in the Bible of the Western Church for eleven hundred years, and it is the ancestor of every modern "Now the LORD God had planted."

The English did not follow Jerome here. Coverdale has "The LORDE God also planted a gardē of pleasure in Eden, towarde ȳ east," the Great Bible "And ȳ Lorde God planted a garden eastwarde from Edē," the Bishops' "And the Lord God planted a garden eastwarde in Eden," the 1611 "And the LORD God planted a garden Eastward in Eden."⁹⁵ All four are simple past, in sequence, and all four have "eastward" for מִקֶּדֶם where the Latin had "from the beginning." The Geneva has the same at 2:8, "And the Lord God plāted a garden Eastwarde in Eden," but at 2:9 it does something of its own: it prints the verse in parentheses, "(For out of the grounde made the Lord God to growe euerie tre pleasant to the sight, and good for meat …)."⁹⁶ A parenthesis with "For" turns a narrated act into an explanation of the one before it; the trees are no longer the next thing that happened but the reason the garden was a garden. It is a gentler harmonisation than Jerome's, and the 1611 did not keep it: "And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow euery tree," in sequence, as the Hebrew has it.

So at 2:8–9 the witnesses stand thus. The Hebrew, the Septuagint, Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Bishops' and the 1611 tell the planting and the growing as acts after the forming of the man. The Vulgate moves the planting to before him, and the Geneva makes the growing a parenthesis. The New International Version, which this book's predecessor quoted as its text for this passage, reads "Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden," and stands with Jerome.⁹⁷ The Septuagint stands with the Hebrew, and adds a word to make sure the reader knows it.

C. The Rivers (2:10–14)

Between the trees and the commandment the narrative pauses to describe the garden's water, and it marks the pause in the way the Method describes: וְנָהָר יֹצֵא מֵעֵדֶן, "and a river went out of Eden," a noun after the vav, a standing description rather than an event.⁹⁸ The Septuagint marks it, ποταμὸς δὲ ἐκπορεύεται, "now a river goes out"; the Vulgate does not, Et fluuius egrediebatur; and every English Bible has "And."⁹⁹ The five verses that follow name the four heads of the river and the lands they compass, and they are the one passage in the second telling where the narrator speaks from outside the story, in a present tense, about a geography his readers might know. They are not part of the sequence and no version treats them as if they were. The sequence resumes at 2:15.

D. The Man Placed and Commanded (2:15–17)

Genesis 2:15–17 (Leningrad Codex) 15 וַיִּקַּח יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ בְגַן־עֵדֶן לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ׃ 16 וַיְצַו יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים עַל־הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר מִכֹּל עֵץ־הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל׃ 17 וּמֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְךָ מִמֶּנּוּ מוֹת תָּמוּת׃

Genesis 2:15–17 (1611) 15 And the LORD God tooke the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dresse it, and to keepe it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of euery tree of the garden thou mayest freely eate. 17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and euill, thou shalt not eate of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.¹⁰⁰

Two more verbs of sequence, וַיִּקַּח and וַיְצַו, "and he took," "and he commanded," and the commandment is given. It is given to the man. The woman has not been made; she will not be made until 2:22; and the pronouns of 2:16–17 are singular throughout, "thou mayest eat," "thou shalt not eat," "thou shalt die." When the serpent puts the commandment to the woman in 3:1–5 he will put it in the plural, "ye shall not eat," and she will answer in the plural, and the book returns to that in chapter 3.1. Here it records only what the Hebrew says: the commandment was spoken to one person, on a day when there was one. The Septuagint did not keep that. Its 2:16 is singular, βρώσει φάγῃ, "thou shalt eat"; its 2:17 turns plural, οὐ φάγεσθε … ᾗ δ᾿ ἂν ἡμέρᾳ φάγησθε … θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε, "ye shall not eat … in the day ye eat … ye shall die," so that the prohibition is spoken, in Greek, to more than the one man who is there to hear it.¹⁰¹ The Vulgate and every English Bible keep the Hebrew's singular. The Greek translator has let the serpent's plural of 3:1 reach back into the commandment; the Hebrew keeps the two apart, and the difference is the ground of chapter 3.1.

The clause that carries the prohibition is the fourth noun-first clause of the chapter, and every version marked it. וּמֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת, "and of the tree of knowledge," sets the forbidden tree against all the others, and the Septuagint has ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ ξύλου, the Vulgate De ligno autem, and every English Bible from Coverdale to the 1611 "But."¹⁰² Where the contrast is in the sense, the translators read the shape.

The Hebrew of the permission and the penalty doubles its verbs, and the doubling has a history. אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל, "eating thou shalt eat," and מוֹת תָּמוּת, "dying thou shalt die," are the idiom by which Hebrew makes a verb emphatic, and from the Greek of the third century before Christ to the English of 1568 the versions carried the idiom across. The Septuagint has βρώσει φάγῃ and θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε; the Vulgate comede for the first but morte morieris, "by death thou shalt die," for the second; and every English Bible from 1535 to 1568 has "thou shalt dye the death."¹⁰³ The King James of 1611 was the first to move the idiom out of the text. It reads "thou mayest freely eate" and "thou shalt surely die," and confesses the Hebrew in two marginal notes, "Hebr. eating thou shalt eate" and "Hebr. dying thou shalt die."¹⁰⁴ The translators knew what the Hebrew said and chose the smoother English; the margin is their record of the choice.

The tree's name was read two ways in antiquity. The Hebrew is עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע, "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," and the Vulgate and every English Bible render it so. The Septuagint at 2:9 has τὸ ξύλον τοῦ εἰδέναι γνωστὸν καλοῦ καὶ πονηροῦ, "the tree of knowing what is knowable of good and evil," a doubled rendering that strains after something more than "knowledge," and at 2:17 τοῦ ξύλου τοῦ γινώσκειν καλὸν καὶ πονηρόν, "the tree of knowing good and evil," with the verb rather than the noun.¹⁰⁵ The Geneva's notes read the knowledge as experience: at 2:9, "That is, of miserable experience, which came by disobeying God," and at 2:17, on the death threatened, "By this death he meaneth the separacion of man frō God, who is our life and chief felicitie."¹⁰⁶ The reading this book gives the tree in Part 3 is that the knowledge of good and evil is what the first telling's image of God requires and the second telling's man does not yet have; the Geneva's "miserable experience" is a sixteenth-century statement that the knowledge is gained by doing, not by being told, and the book takes it as a witness.

E. The Order So Far

From 2:7 to 2:17 the Hebrew is a chain of sequence verbs with two descriptive pauses (2:10–14 and the tree's name in 2:9), and every link in the chain is the next event: the man formed, the garden planted, the trees grown, the river described, the man placed, the man commanded. The chain is broken in one ancient version at one link, the Vulgate's plantauerat at 2:8, and bent in one early English version at another, the Geneva's parenthesis at 2:9. The Septuagint not only keeps the chain but adds ἔτι at 2:9 to say that the trees came after. The King James keeps it whole. The modern versions that print "Now the LORD God had planted" have chosen Jerome's link over the Hebrew's, and the reader who follows them is placed in a garden that the text says was planted around a man already there.

2.3 The Animals Formed, Then Named (2:18–20)

Genesis 2:18–20 (Leningrad Codex) 18 וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ אֶעֱשֶׂה־לּוֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ׃ 19 וַיִּצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִן־הָאֲדָמָה כָּל־חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה וְאֵת כָּל־עוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וַיָּבֵא אֶל־הָאָדָם לִרְאוֹת מַה־יִּקְרָא־לוֹ וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יִקְרָא־לוֹ הָאָדָם נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה הוּא שְׁמוֹ׃ 20 וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁמוֹת לְכָל־הַבְּהֵמָה וּלְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּלְכֹל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה וּלְאָדָם לֹא־מָצָא עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ׃

Genesis 2:18–20 (1611) 18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him an helpe meet for him. 19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed euery beast of the field, and euery foule of the aire, and brought them vnto Adam, to see what he would call them: and whatsoeuer Adam called euery liuing creature, that was the name thereof. 20 And Adam gaue names to all cattell, and to the foule of the aire, and to euery beast of the fielde: but for Adam there was not found an helpe meet for him.¹⁰⁷

A. The Judgement and the Intention (2:18)

The commandment given, the narrative moves at once to the man's condition: וַיֹּאמֶר, "and he said," a verb of sequence, and the first thing God says about the man he has made is that his state is not good. לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ, "not good is the being of the man by himself." The first telling had pronounced every stage of its work good and the whole of it very good; the second telling, having formed one man, says of him alone what the first never said of anything. The judgement is not on the man but on his solitude, and the remedy is announced in the same breath: אֶעֱשֶׂה־לּוֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ, "I will make for him a help as over against him."

The phrase is two words and the tradition has made a great deal of the second. עֵזֶר is "help" or "helper," a word the Hebrew Bible uses of God more often than of anyone else; כְּנֶגְדּוֹ is a preposition and a pronoun, "like what is in front of him," "corresponding to him," "his counterpart." Nothing in either word ranks the help below the helped. The versions did not rank it either. The Septuagint has βοηθὸν κατ᾿ αὐτόν, "a helper according to him," and at 2:20 βοηθὸς ὅμοιος αὐτῷ, "a helper like him"; the Vulgate adiutorium simile sibi, "a help like himself," and adiutor similis eius; Coverdale "an helpe, to beare him cōpany"; the Great Bible "an helpe, which maye be present wt him"; the Bishops' "an helpe lyke vnto hym."¹⁰⁸ Five renderings across three languages and a thousand years, and every one of them reads the phrase as likeness or company.

"Help meet" is the Geneva's, coined in 1560: "I wil make him an helpe mete for him," with the margin "Ebr. before him."¹⁰⁹ "Meet" is the adjective, "suitable," and the phrase says a help suitable for him, which is the Hebrew. The 1611 took it over, "an helpe meet for him," with its own margin "Hebr. as before him," and from the 1611 it passed into English speech, where the adjective was heard as part of a noun and "helpmeet," and then "helpmate," came to mean a wife, and a subordinate one.¹¹⁰ The subordination is in the later English word, not in the Geneva's phrase and not in any version of the verse. No witness before the twentieth century, and no witness in it, renders 2:18 so as to place the woman under the man. Where the tradition did write her subjection into the text it was at 3:16, and chapter 3.3 shows how. Here, at the verse the argument is usually hung on, there is nothing to hang it on.

Two of the versions hear a plural in God's intention. The Hebrew is singular, אֶעֱשֶׂה, "I will make." The Septuagint has ποιήσωμεν, "let us make," and the Vulgate faciamus, the same plural both had used at 1:26 for "let us make man in our image."¹¹¹ The translators have carried the first telling's plural into the second telling's promise, and in doing so have made 2:18 echo 1:26 in a way the Hebrew does not. Every English Bible has "I will make." The book records the variant and draws nothing from it except this: that the ancient translators heard the two tellings as one account and let the one shape the other, here as at 2:8.

B. The Animals Formed, After the Man (2:19)

The verse begins with the verb the whole Part has been watching: וַיִּצֶר, "and he formed," the same verb, in the same form, that formed the man at 2:7. The Hebrew tells the forming of the beasts and birds as the next act after God's word of 2:18, and the purpose clause that follows says why: they are brought to the man "to see what he would call them." The animals are formed and brought so that the man may name them, and the naming is the search for the help; the verse after says the search failed. Read in sequence, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air are formed on the day the man is told he is alone, after him, for his sake.

That is the order the Septuagint read, and once more it said so with a word of its own: καὶ ἔπλασεν ὁ θεὸς ἔτι ἐκ τῆς γῆς πάντα τὰ θηρία τοῦ ἀγροῦ, "and God formed further out of the earth all the beasts of the field."¹¹² The ἔτι is the same adverb the Greek added at 2:9 for the trees. Twice in the second telling the oldest translation inserts "further" where the Hebrew has only the verb of sequence, and both times at the verse where the order of the second telling differs from the order of the first. The translators saw the difference and, rather than smooth it, underlined it.

The Vulgate smoothed it. Formatis igitur, Dominus Deus, de humo cunctis animantibus terræ, & vniuersis volatilibus cæli, adduxit ea ad Adam: "the Lord God, therefore, all the living things of the earth and all the birds of heaven having been formed of the soil, brought them to Adam."¹¹³ The construction is an ablative absolute, and its effect is the effect of the pluperfect at 2:8: the forming is made a completed background to the bringing, an event already over when the verse's main verb begins. Jerome does not say when the animals were formed, but he removes their forming from the sequence of the second telling and leaves the reader free to place it on the sixth day of the first. It is the second of his two harmonisations in this chapter, and it made the same journey as the first.

The English divided along the line of their sources. Coverdale, working from the Latin and from Luther, has the pluperfect: "And whan God the LORDE had made of the earth all maner beastes of the felde, & all maner foules vnder the heauē, he brought them vnto man."¹¹⁴ The Great Bible of 1540 restored the sequence: "And so out of the grounde shope the Lorde God euery beast of the felde, and euery foule of the ayre, and brought it vnto man."¹¹⁵ The Geneva kept it: "So the Lord God formed of the earth euerie beast of the field, and euerie foule of the heauen, & broght them vnto the mā."¹¹⁶ The Bishops' of 1568 went back to Coverdale's tense, "And so out of the grounde the Lorde God had shapen euery beast of the field," and this was the text the King James translators were instructed to revise.¹¹⁷ They revised it. The 1611 reads "And out of ȳ ground the LORD God formed euery beast of the field, and euery foule of the aire, and brought them vnto Adam," a simple past, in sequence, with the Bishops' "had" removed.¹¹⁸ The New International Version, three and a half centuries later, put it back: "Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals."

The order of the witnesses at 2:19 is therefore this. With the Hebrew: the Septuagint (with ἔτι), the Great Bible, the Geneva, the 1611. Against it, by pluperfect or its equivalent: the Vulgate, Coverdale, the Bishops', and the modern versions that follow the NIV. The King James translators, at this verse, chose the Hebrew over their base text, and the choice is visible in the one word they struck.

C. The Naming, and the Help Not Found (2:19b–20)

The man names what is brought to him, and the Hebrew says the naming was final: וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יִקְרָא־לוֹ הָאָדָם נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה הוּא שְׁמוֹ, "and whatever the man called it, a living soul, that was its name." The phrase נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, "living soul," is here applied to every creature the man names; it is the phrase the man himself was called at 2:7, and chapter 2.2 has shown what the English did with it. The 1611 has "euery liuing creature" here and "a liuing soule" there, and the reader of the English cannot see that the man named the animals by the name he bore.¹¹⁹

It is the man's first act. He has been formed, placed, commanded; now he speaks, and what he speaks becomes the names of things. The verb is וַיִּקְרָא, "and he called," the verb the first telling used of God naming the day and the night, the heaven, the earth and the seas (1:5, 1:8, 1:10).¹²⁰ What God did in the first telling the man does in the second, and the text does not qualify it: "that was its name." The book returns to the man's speech at 2:23–24, where he speaks a second time and what he says becomes a law.

Then the clause the search was for. וּלְאָדָם לֹא־מָצָא עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ: "but for the man he found not a help as over against him." The vav is prefixed to a noun, the clause turns against the sequence, and every version but one marked the turn: the Septuagint τῷ τε Ἀδάμ, the Vulgate Adæ vero, Coverdale "But vnto man," the Geneva "but for Adám," the Bishops' "but for man," the 1611 "but for Adam"; the Great Bible alone has "And for man."¹²¹ The naming ends where it began, with the man alone. The versions differ on who did not find. The Hebrew verb is third person, "he found not," and the subject is left to the reader, God or the man; the Septuagint made it passive, οὐχ εὑρέθη, "there was not found"; the Vulgate non inueniebatur, "was not being found"; the Geneva and the Bishops' "founde he not"; the 1611 "there was not found."¹²² Nothing turns on it. What the verse says in every version is that the animals were tried and were not the help, and that the woman, when she is made in the next verse, is made because they were not.

D. Where the Man Is Named

A last matter of the versions belongs here, because it begins in this passage. The Hebrew of Genesis 2 calls the man הָאָדָם, "the man," with the definite article, throughout; it is a description, not yet a name. The versions begin to write "Adam" at different points. The Septuagint has τῷ Ἀδάμ from 2:16 and Ἀδάμ at 2:19, 2:20 and after; the Vulgate Adam from 2:19; Coverdale keeps "man" through the chapter; the Great Bible has "Adam" at 2:18 and 2:21 and "man" between; the Geneva keeps "the man" but has "Adám" at 2:20 in the clause "but for Adám"; the Bishops' "man" to 2:20 and "Adam" at 2:21; the 1611 "the man" at 2:15–18, "Adam" at 2:19–21 and 2:23, and "the man" again at 2:22 and 2:25, with the margin at 2:15 "Or, Adam" and at 2:19 "Or, the man," which is the translators telling the reader that the Hebrew is the same word in both places and that the choice between "the man" and "Adam" is theirs.¹²³ The book follows the 1611's margin rather than its text, and calls him the man until the text names him.

2.4 The Woman Made, and the Man Speaks (2:21–25)

Genesis 2:21–25 (Leningrad Codex) 21 וַיַּפֵּל יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים תַּרְדֵּמָה עַל־הָאָדָם וַיִּישָׁן וַיִּקַּח אַחַת מִצַּלְעֹתָיו וַיִּסְגֹּר בָּשָׂר תַּחְתֶּנָּה׃ 22 וַיִּבֶן יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הַצֵּלָע אֲשֶׁר־לָקַח מִן־הָאָדָם לְאִשָּׁה וַיְבִאֶהָ אֶל־הָאָדָם׃ 23 וַיֹּאמֶר הָאָדָם זֹאת הַפַּעַם עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי לְזֹאת יִקָּרֵא אִשָּׁה כִּי מֵאִישׁ לֻקֳחָה־זֹּאת׃ 24 עַל־כֵּן יַעֲזָב־אִישׁ אֶת־אָבִיו וְאֶת־אִמּוֹ וְדָבַק בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד׃ 25 וַיִּהְיוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם עֲרוּמִּים הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ וְלֹא יִתְבֹּשָׁשׁוּ׃

Genesis 2:21–25 (1611) 21 And the LORD God caused a deepe sleepe to fall vpon Adam, and hee slept; and he tooke one of his ribs, and closed vp the flesh in stead thereof. 22 And the rib which the LORD God had taken from man, made hee a woman, & brought her vnto the man. 23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shalbe called Woman, because shee was taken out of man. 24 Therefore shall a man leaue his father and his mother, and shall cleaue vnto his wife: and they shalbe one flesh. 25 And they were both naked, the man & his wife, and were not ashamed.¹²⁴

A. The Woman Made (2:21–22)

Six verbs of sequence carry the making of the woman, and there is no scene-clause among them: וַיַּפֵּל, "and he caused to fall"; וַיִּישָׁן, "and he slept"; וַיִּקַּח, "and he took"; וַיִּסְגֹּר, "and he closed"; וַיִּבֶן, "and he built"; וַיְבִאֶהָ, "and he brought her." The passage is the most continuous stretch of narrative in the second telling, one act after another with nothing set aside as background, and no version treats it otherwise. The Septuagint has καί at each, the Vulgate its variety of sequence particles, Immisit ergo … cumque … tulit … repleuit … Et ædificauit … adduxit, and the English "And … and … and."¹²⁵ The Geneva opens the passage with "Therefore," which reads the sleep as the consequence of the help not found, and the Great Bible with "also," but neither disturbs the order.¹²⁶

The verb of the woman's making is not the verb of the man's. He was formed, יָצַר, the potter's word; she is built, בָּנָה, the word for a house. The versions kept the difference and the English margins record it: the Septuagint ᾠκοδόμησεν, the Vulgate ædificauit, and in English "made" in the text of every Bible from Coverdale to the 1611 with "Hebre. buylded" in the Bishops' margin and "Hebr. builded" in the 1611's.¹²⁷ The book notes the word and makes no more of it than the text does. She is built from a part of the man, brought to him, and nothing is said of breath: the man received the breath of life at 2:7 and became a living soul; the woman is taken from a living soul and is not said to receive anything, because she is made of what already lives.

This is the making of the second human being, and the reading this book carries places it on the sixth day. The ground of the placing is not in these verses, which name no day; it is in the first telling, which says that on the sixth day God made mankind male and female (1:27) and blessed them and told them to multiply (1:28). Before 2:22 there is no female, and the blessing of 1:28 cannot have been spoken. After it there is, and the second telling has arrived at the point the first telling reached at the close of its sixth day. Everything between 2:7 and 2:22, the garden, the trees, the commandment, the animals and their naming, lies within the days the first telling passed over in the single verb "made." Part 3 will show that the day does not end with 2:25.

B. The Man Speaks (2:23)

The man's second speech is the first human sentence in the Bible addressed to no one. At 2:19–20 he named the animals; the text reports the naming but not the words. Here the words are given, and they are a recognition and a naming in one: זֹאת הַפַּעַם, "this one, this time," or "this at last," after the animals that were not the help; עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי, "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh"; and then the name, לְזֹאת יִקָּרֵא אִשָּׁה כִּי מֵאִישׁ לֻקֳחָה־זֹּאת, "this shall be called woman, because from man was this taken."

The name is a play on words, אִשָּׁה from אִישׁ, and the versions divide on whether to carry it. The Septuagint could not: Γυνή, "woman," and ἀνήρ, "man," share no letters in Greek, and the Greek reader is given the explanation without the thing it explains, αὕτη κληθήσεται Γυνή, ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς αὐτῆς ἐλήμφθη αὕτη.¹²⁸ Jerome carried it. Hæc vocabitur Virago, quoniam de viro sumpta est: he chose for "woman" a Latin word, virago, formed on vir, "man," so that the Latin reader hears in the name the word it is taken from, as the Hebrew reader does.¹²⁹ It is the one place in these chapters where the Vulgate does something the Hebrew does and the Greek could not, and it shows a translator who heard the Hebrew as sound and not only as sense. The English, by an accident of the language, half-carries it: "woman" contains "man," and every English Bible has "she shalbe called woman, because she was taken out of man," so that the English reader hears part of what the Hebrew reader hears without any translator's contrivance.¹³⁰ The Geneva alone points it out, in a margin that offers an alternative and explains the Hebrew: "Or, Mannes, because she cōmeth of man: for in Ebr. Ish is man, and Ishah the woman."¹³¹

C. The Man's Law (2:24)

The next verse is a law, and the question the book must answer is who speaks it.

עַל־כֵּן יַעֲזָב־אִישׁ אֶת־אָבִיו וְאֶת־אִמּוֹ וְדָבַק בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד: "therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh." The verse opens with עַל־כֵּן, "therefore," drawing a consequence from what has just been said, and it is the only sentence in Genesis 1–3 cast as a general rule about people who do not yet exist: there is no father or mother in the world, and the man who speaks has neither. The text gives no new speaker. The verb of speech at 2:23 is וַיֹּאמֶר הָאָדָם, "and the man said," and nothing between 2:23 and 2:24 closes his speech or opens another. The tradition has nonetheless read 2:24 as the narrator's comment, and two of the Gospels and one of the Epistles quote it as a word of God about marriage.¹³² The 1611 marks the verse with an asterisk and lists the New Testament places in its margin, and the Bishops' has the same references.¹³³

This book reads 2:24 as the text presents it, as the continuation of the man's speech. Nothing in the Hebrew separates the two verses; the "therefore" answers the man's own "because"; and the sentence is a rule that a man who has just recognised his wife might draw, not a rule that a narrator standing outside the story needs to state here rather than anywhere else. Read so, the man's second speech has two parts, a recognition of the woman as his own flesh and a law about what a man owes his wife, and the law is his, spoken by him, before God has said anything to either of them about the other. The consequence of that reading comes at 3:12, where the same man, asked what he has done, speaks of "the woman whom thou gauest to be with me" and does not hold fast to her. The chapter on that verse (3.2) sets the two speeches side by side. Here it is enough to have shown that the text allows, and by its silence about any change of speaker invites, the reading that the man made the law he would break.

The versions leave the question where the Hebrew leaves it. None supplies a speaker. The Septuagint has ἕνεκεν τούτου, the Vulgate Quamobrem, Coverdale, the Great and the Bishops' "For this cause," the Geneva and the 1611 "Therefore," all of them the man's "therefore" or the narrator's, as the reader decides.¹³⁴

Two words of the verse have histories of their own, and the book records them. The verb וְדָבַק, "and he shall cleave," is the verb of adhering, sticking to, and the Vulgate has adhærebit, the Septuagint προσκολληθήσεται, both exact. The English divided: Coverdale, the Geneva and the 1611 "cleue / cleaue," the Great Bible and the Bishops' "shalbe ioyned with his wyfe"; the modern versions have "be united to."¹³⁵ "Cleave" and "adhere" keep the Hebrew's picture of one thing holding fast to another; "joined" and "united" state the result and lose the holding. The second word is one the Hebrew does not have. וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד is "and they shall be one flesh"; the Septuagint has καὶ ἔσονται οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν, "and the two shall be one flesh," and the Vulgate erunt duo in carne una.¹³⁶ "The two" is the Greek's, and it is the form in which the Gospels and Paul quote the verse. Coverdale has "they two shalbe one flesh," from the Latin; the Great Bible dropped the number, "they shall become one flesh," and the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 follow the Hebrew's "they."¹³⁷ The English reader who knows the verse from the New Testament knows it in the Greek form; the English reader who knows it from Genesis knows it in the Hebrew.

D. Naked, and Not Ashamed (2:25)

The second telling closes on the state of the two before the serpent. וַיִּהְיוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם עֲרוּמִּים, "and they were both naked," הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ, "the man and his wife," וְלֹא יִתְבֹּשָׁשׁוּ, "and they were not ashamed."

The word for naked is the word to hold in mind across the chapter division. עֲרוּמִּים at 2:25 and עָרוּם, the serpent's "subtle," at 3:1 are written with the same letters in the codex, ע־ר־ו־ם, and the two verses stand next to each other with no break between them; the codex has no gap here, though it has one before 2:4, 3:16, 3:17 and 3:22.¹³⁸ The last word of the second telling and the first description of the serpent are a pun, and the pun is the seam between the man and woman's innocence and the serpent's cunning. Chapter 3.1 reads the second half of it; this chapter notes only that the first half is placed here, at the end of the sixth day's making, as the condition in which the two are found when the serpent speaks. No version carries the pun, because no other language has one word for naked and for shrewd; the Septuagint has γυμνοί here and φρονιμώτατος there, the Vulgate nudus and callidior, the English "naked" and "sotyller / subtil / suttiller / subtill."¹³⁹

The versions do one small thing to the verse. The Septuagint adds "the two" once more, καὶ ἦσαν οἱ δύο γυμνοί, where the Hebrew has שְׁנֵיהֶם, "the two of them," so that for once the Greek's addition is the Hebrew's own word.¹⁴⁰ The Reformation Bibles read the verse through the Fall that follows it. The Geneva's note says "For before sinne entred, all things were honest and comely," and the Bishops' "The shame of nakednes is a token of our nature corrupted."¹⁴¹ Both notes are true to the story's sequence: the shame is not yet, and the reader is told so before it comes.

E. The Second Telling Closed

From 2:4 to 2:25 the second telling has run in one order: a heading; a scene, the earth bare and unmanned; the man formed; the garden planted and the trees grown; the river; the man placed and commanded; the animals formed and named; the woman built and brought; the man's recognition and his law; the two naked and unashamed. Every act is a verb of sequence and the Hebrew marks no act as prior to the one before it. The Septuagint reads the order so and twice adds a word to say so. The Vulgate moves the garden before the man and the animals into the background. Coverdale and the Bishops' follow the Latin at 2:19; the Great Bible, the Geneva and the 1611 follow the Hebrew at every verb. The man has been alone with God, has been commanded, has named the creation, and has spoken a law; the woman has been made and named and has heard none of it. That is the state of things when the third chapter opens without a break, and it is the state Part 3 reads the Fall against.

Part 3 — The Knowledge: Genesis 3:1–24

3.1 The Serpent (3:1–5)

Genesis 3:1–5 (Leningrad Codex) 1 וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה אַף כִּי־אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן׃ 2 וַתֹּאמֶר הָאִשָּׁה אֶל־הַנָּחָשׁ מִפְּרִי עֵץ־הַגָּן נֹאכֵל׃ 3 וּמִפְּרִי הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִמֶּנּוּ וְלֹא תִגְּעוּ בּוֹ פֶּן־תְּמֻתוּן׃ 4 וַיֹּאמֶר הַנָּחָשׁ אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה לֹא־מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן׃ 5 כִּי יֹדֵעַ אֱלֹהִים כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְכֶם מִמֶּנּוּ וְנִפְקְחוּ עֵינֵיכֶם וִהְיִיתֶם כֵּאלֹהִים יֹדְעֵי טוֹב וָרָע׃

Genesis 3:1–5 (1611) 1 Now the serpent was more subtill then any beast of the field, which the LORD God had made, and he said vnto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eate of euery tree of the garden? 2 And the woman said vnto the serpent, We may eate of the fruite of the trees of the garden: 3 But of the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eate of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 4 And the Serpent said vnto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5 For God doeth know, that in the day ye eate thereof, then your eyes shalbee opened: and yee shall bee as Gods, knowing good and euill.¹⁴²

A. The Scene, and the Pun (3:1a)

The third chapter opens as the second did not, with a scene-clause, and as the second did, without a break. וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה עָרוּם: the vav is prefixed to the noun, "and the serpent was subtle," the verb stands second, and by the Method's rule the clause steps out of the sequence to introduce a character and his quality before he acts. The codex runs straight on from 2:25 with no open space, so that the eye passes from עֲרוּמִּים, the two naked, to עָרוּם, the serpent subtle, in consecutive lines, and the letters of the two words are the same.¹⁴³ The last state of the man and woman and the first quality of the serpent are one word in two senses. What the pun says the story will show: the one who is ערום in the sense of shrewd will bring the two who are ערום in the sense of bare to know it.

Every version marked the scene-clause, and the marking is the clearest case in the three chapters of the versions agreeing with the Hebrew's shape. The Septuagint has Ὁ δὲ ὄφις ἦν φρονιμώτατος, the Vulgate Sed & serpens erat callidior, Coverdale "But the serpent was sotyller," the Great Bible "But the serpent was sotyller," the Bishops' "And the serpent was suttiller," the Geneva "Now the serpent was more subtil," and the 1611 "Now the serpent was more subtill."¹⁴⁴ Six of seven mark the turn, and the 1611's "Now" is the Geneva's, the first "Now the serpent" in English. The King James translators, who levelled the scene-clauses of 1:2 and 4:1 to "And," kept this one, because their predecessor had made it the most familiar opening in the book after "In the beginning."

The pun no version could carry, because no other language has one word for naked and for shrewd; what the versions did with the second sense is the matter of record. The Septuagint's serpent is φρονιμώτατος πάντων τῶν θηρίων, "the most prudent of all the beasts," and φρόνιμος is a word of praise in Greek, the word for the wise steward and the prudent virgins of the Gospels.¹⁴⁵ The Greek serpent is not cunning; he is wise. The Vulgate's is callidior, "cleverer," a word that can be praise or blame; the Reformation English is "sotyller," "suttiller," "more subtil," "more subtill," a word that in the sixteenth century meant fine, penetrating, skilful before it meant sly.¹⁴⁶ "Crafty," which is what the modern reader expects, is the choice of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The older versions left the serpent's quality open, as the Hebrew does: עָרוּם is the word Proverbs uses for the prudent man who foresees evil and hides himself, and it is the word here for the creature who foresees what the fruit will do.¹⁴⁷ The book keeps the Hebrew's ambivalence and the Geneva's and the King James's "subtle." The serpent is not yet judged in the verse that introduces him.

The clause ends by placing the serpent inside the creation: אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים, "which the LORD God had made." He is one of the beasts of the field, formed at 2:19 and named by the man, and he is the most ערום of them. The versions all keep the relative clause. The Reformation Bibles supplied in their margins what the text does not say, that the serpent was an instrument: the Geneva, "God suffered Satan to make the serpent his instrument and to speake in him," and again, "As Satan cā change him selfe into an Angel of light, so did he abuse the wisdome of the serpēt to deceaue man"; the Bishops', in a note whose first words are cut in the copy read, that the devil first would make the woman doubt God's word.¹⁴⁸ The text says a beast spoke. The notes say who spoke through him. The book reads the text and records the notes.

B. The Question Put in the Plural (3:1b–3)

The serpent speaks to the woman, and the first thing to observe is the number of his verb. לֹא תֹאכְלוּ, "ye shall not eat": the commandment of 2:16–17, which was given to the man in the singular on a day when the woman did not exist, is quoted back to the woman in the plural, as a commandment to both. The woman answers in the same number, נֹאכֵל, "we may eat," and לֹא תֹאכְלוּ … וְלֹא תִגְּעוּ … פֶּן־תְּמֻתוּן, "ye shall not eat, neither shall ye touch, lest ye die." The Hebrew of 2:17 and the Hebrew of 3:3 are not the same commandment. One was spoken to a man alone; the other is a commandment to two, reported by one of them, with a clause the original did not have, "neither shall ye touch it," and without the original's doubled verb, מוֹת תָּמוּת, in place of which she has פֶּן־תְּמֻתוּן, "lest ye die."

Whether the woman heard the commandment from God, or from the man, or in a form the text does not report, the text does not say. What it says is that she was not there when it was given, that she quotes it in a form that differs from the form given, and that the serpent's first move was to put it to her in the plural she uses. Chapter 2.2 noted that the Septuagint had already made 2:17 plural, so that in Greek the commandment and its quotation agree; the Hebrew keeps them apart, and the difference is what lets the reader see that the woman is repeating a report.¹⁴⁹ The English versions keep the Hebrew's numbers exactly, "thou" at 2:16–17 and "ye" from 3:1, and the reader of the 1611 can see the shift as plainly as the reader of the codex.¹⁵⁰

The serpent's opening words are hard, and the versions show it. אַף כִּי־אָמַר אֱלֹהִים is two particles and a verb, "indeed that God said," or "even though God said," or, as a question, "is it so that God said?" The Septuagint has Τί ὅτι εἶπεν ὁ θεός, "why is it that God said"; the Vulgate Cur præcepit vobis Deus, "why has God commanded you"; Coverdale "Yee, hath God sayde in dede"; the Great Bible "yee, hath the Lorde God sayde"; the Geneva "Yea, hathe God in dede said"; the Bishops' "yea, hath God saide"; the 1611 "Yea, hath God said," with the margin "Heb. Yea, because, &c."¹⁵¹ The Greek and Latin heard a question about God's reason; the English heard a question about the fact, tinged with incredulity, and the 1611's margin admits that the Hebrew is neither and is barely a sentence. The serpent's first utterance is a half-question that leaves the woman to finish it, and every translator has had to finish it for her.

C. The Denial and the Promise (3:4–5)

The serpent's second speech has two parts. The first denies the penalty: לֹא־מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן, "not dying shall ye die," the doubled idiom of 2:17 returned with a negative in front of it, and again in the plural.¹⁵² The versions carried the idiom here as they did there: the Septuagint Οὐ θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε, the Vulgate Nequaquam morte moriemini, the English "Tush, ye shall not dye the death" (Coverdale), "ye shall not dye the death" (the Great, the Geneva, the Bishops'), and the 1611 "Ye shall not surely die," which is the 1611's "surely die" of 2:17 negated.¹⁵³ Coverdale's "Tush" is his own; no other witness gives the serpent an interjection.

The second part is the promise, and it contains the verse of Genesis 1–3 on which every version had to decide what the Hebrew word for God means. כִּי יֹדֵעַ אֱלֹהִים כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְכֶם מִמֶּנּוּ וְנִפְקְחוּ עֵינֵיכֶם וִהְיִיתֶם כֵּאלֹהִים יֹדְעֵי טוֹב וָרָע: "for God knows that in the day ye eat of it your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as elohim, knowing good and evil." The word אֱלֹהִים is the word the first telling used for God from its first verse, a plural noun with a singular verb; here it stands after a preposition with no verb to fix its number, and the participle that follows, יֹדְעֵי, "knowing," is plural. The serpent's sentence can be read "as God, who knows good and evil," or "as gods, knowing good and evil," and the Hebrew does not choose.

The versions did, and they did not agree. The Septuagint has ἔσεσθε ὡς θεοί, "ye shall be as gods," plural; the Vulgate eritis sicut dij, plural.¹⁵⁴ Coverdale has "ye shall be as God," singular.¹⁵⁵ The Great Bible has "ye shalbe euē as goddes," the Geneva "ye shalbe as gods," the Bishops' "ye shalbe euē as gods," and the 1611 "yee shall bee as Gods," with a capital, all plural.¹⁵⁶ The literal and revised versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have "as God" or "like God," singular again. The word that the whole tradition renders as one God at 1:1 was rendered as many gods at 3:5 by the Greek, the Latin and the English from 1540 to 1611, and by no one since. The Geneva's note reads the plural as the serpent's slander of God's motive: "As thogh he shulde say, God doeth not forbid you to eat of the frute, saue that he knoweth that if you shulde eat thereof, you shulde be like to him."¹⁵⁷ The book does not decide the number. It observes that the word is the same word, that the versions could not agree what it meant when the serpent used it, and that the serpent's promise, whichever way it is read, is the promise of 1:26 in another mouth: to be like God, or like the gods, knowing good and evil. The book returns to that at 3:22, where God says the promise came true.

D. What the Serpent Knew

The serpent's promise is accurate in every particular. The eyes will be opened (3:7); the two will know good and evil (3:22, in God's own words); and they will not die on the day they eat. The tradition has called him a liar, and the Geneva's note on 3:4 calls the denial "Satans chiefest subtiltie, to cause vs not to feare Gods threatenings"; but the text gives him one falsehood at most, the denial of death, and even that the sequel does not straightforwardly refute, since the man lives nine hundred and thirty years (5:5). What the serpent does is tell the woman what the man was told and she was not, in the plural she uses, and add to it what God will confirm. The reading this book carries is that the serpent's speech is the first account of the knowledge of good and evil that either human being hears from anyone, that it is given to the one who was not present when the commandment was given, and that it is true. Chapter 3.2 reads the eating in that light.

3.2 The Eating and the Opening of the Eyes (3:6–13)

Genesis 3:6–8 (Leningrad Codex) 6 וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה־הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל׃ 7 וַתִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי שְׁנֵיהֶם וַיֵּדְעוּ כִּי עֵירֻמִּם הֵם וַיִּתְפְּרוּ עֲלֵה תְאֵנָה וַיַּעֲשׂוּ לָהֶם חֲגֹרֹת׃ 8 וַיִּשְׁמְעוּ אֶת־קוֹל יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם וַיִּתְחַבֵּא הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ מִפְּנֵי יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים בְּתוֹךְ עֵץ הַגָּן׃

Genesis 3:6–8 (1611) 6 And when the woman saw, that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she tooke of the fruit thereof, and did eate, and gaue also vnto her husband with her, and hee did eate. 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, & they knew that they were naked, and they sewed figge leaues together, and made themselues aprons. 8 And they heard the voyce of the LORD God, walking in the garden in the coole of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselues from the presence of the LORD God, amongst the trees of the garden.¹⁵⁸

A. The Eating (3:6)

The verse is five verbs of sequence, all in the feminine until the last: she saw, she took, she ate, she gave, and he ate. וַתֵּרֶא … וַתִּקַּח … וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן … וַיֹּאכַל. The woman acts through four verbs and the man through one, and the one is the same verb as hers. The text does not say that the man was persuaded, or that he hesitated, or that he asked; it says that she gave to him and he ate. What it does say about him is where he was: גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ, "also to her husband with her." The man who received the commandment, and who alone had heard it from God, is beside the woman at the tree when she is told what the fruit will do, and the text records his presence in a single word.

That word has a history in the versions, and the history matters because the reading of this book rests on it. The Septuagint keeps it: καὶ ἔδωκεν καὶ τῷ ἀνδρὶ αὐτῆς μετ᾿ αὐτῆς, καὶ ἔφαγον, "and she gave also to her husband with her, and they ate."¹⁵⁹ The Vulgate drops it: deditque viro suo, qui comedit, "and she gave to her husband, who ate."¹⁶⁰ The Latin reader is told that the woman ate and then gave, and may suppose the man elsewhere; for eleven centuries the Bible of the West had the man absent from the tree, or at least unplaced. Coverdale, working from Luther and the Latin, drops it too: "and gaue vnto hir husbande also therof, and he ate."¹⁶¹ The Great Bible of 1540 is the first English Bible to put the man back beside the woman, and it does so with emphasis: "and gaue vnto her husband beynge with her, which dyd eate also."¹⁶² The Bishops' keeps "beyng with her," the Geneva and the 1611 "with her."¹⁶³ The man's presence at the eating is in the Hebrew and the Greek, was lost in the Latin and in the first English Bible, and has stood in every English Bible since 1540.

The versions also divide on how the verse opens. The Hebrew וַתֵּרֶא is a sequence verb, "and she saw"; the Septuagint has καὶ ἴδεν ἡ γυνή, the Vulgate Vidit igitur mulier, Coverdale "And the woman sawe," the Great and the Bishops' "And so the woman," the Geneva "So the woman."¹⁶⁴ The 1611 alone has "And when the woman saw … she tooke," making the seeing a subordinate clause and the taking the main event; it is a smoothing of the English and does not change the order.¹⁶⁵ Two glosses of the sixteenth century read the man's motive, which the text does not give. The Geneva's note on the verse says he ate "Not so muche to please his wife, as moued by ambicion at her persuasion," and the 1611 records in its margin that the tree "pleasant to the eyes" is in the Hebrew "a desire" to them.¹⁶⁶ The book records the glosses and returns to the text, which says only that he was with her and that he ate.

B. The Eyes Opened (3:7)

What the serpent promised happens in the serpent's words. He had said וְנִפְקְחוּ עֵינֵיכֶם, "and your eyes shall be opened" (3:5); the narrator says וַתִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי שְׁנֵיהֶם, "and the eyes of them both were opened." He had said they would know; they know, וַיֵּדְעוּ. What they know is that they are naked, and the codex writes the word differently from the way it wrote it at 2:25. There the two were עֲרוּמִּים; here they are עֵירֻמִּם, with a yod after the first letter and the vav gone, and the same spelling holds at 3:10 and 3:11, עֵירֹם.¹⁶⁷ The consonants have changed with the knowledge. Before the eating the word for their nakedness was the word that made the pun with the serpent's subtlety; after it the pun is over and the word is written as it will be written for the rest of the Bible. Whether the scribe of the codex meant the change as more than orthography the book cannot say; that he made it, and made it at the verse where the two first know they are bare, is on the page.

The versions have no way to show the change of spelling, and none of them tries. What they do with the verse is otherwise uniform: the Septuagint καὶ διηνοίχθησαν οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ τῶν δύο, καὶ ἔγνωσαν ὅτι γυμνοὶ ἦσαν, the Vulgate Et aperti sunt oculi amborum: cumque cognouissent se esse nudos, and the English "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knewe that they were naked," with "Then" in Coverdale, the Geneva and the Bishops' and "And" in the Great and the 1611.¹⁶⁸ The garments they make, חֲגֹרֹת, are girdles, things bound about the loins; the Greek has περιζώματα and the Latin perizomata, the Greek word borrowed; the English divided between "apurns / aperns / apernes / aprons" (Coverdale, the Great, the Bishops', the 1611) and the Geneva's "breeches," which the Geneva's margin explains as "Ebr. things to girde about thē to hide their priuities," and the 1611's margin as "Or, things to gird about."¹⁶⁹

C. The Voice and the Wind (3:8)

They hear a voice, or a sound: קוֹל is both, and it is the voice of the LORD God מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם, "walking in the garden in the ruach of the day." The word רוּחַ is the word of 1:2, where it was the רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים, the Spirit or wind or breath of God, moving on the face of the waters, and every version rendered it there as Spirit. Here the same word stands in a phrase that no version has rendered literally, because "the wind of the day" is not English, or Greek, or Latin, and the translators had to decide what the phrase meant before they could write it.

The Septuagint decided it meant a time: τὸ δειλινόν, "in the afternoon," a reading in which the wind has become the hour when the wind blows.¹⁷⁰ The Vulgate kept the wind and added the hour: ad auram post meridiem, "at the breeze after midday."¹⁷¹ The English, from Coverdale to the 1611 without exception, has "in the coole of the day," a paraphrase in which neither wind nor spirit survives.¹⁷² Two of the English Bibles confess in the margin what they would not put in the text. The Geneva prints "coole" and notes "Or, winde"; the 1611 prints "coole" and notes "Heb. wind."¹⁷³ The reader of the King James text meets the Spirit of God at 1:2 and the cool of the day at 3:8 and has no way of knowing that they are one Hebrew word; the reader of the King James margin is told, at 3:8, that the word is wind. The book records the three readings, spirit, wind and afternoon, as the tradition's own account of the range of רוּחַ, and returns to the range in Part 4.

The two hide, וַיִּתְחַבֵּא, "and the man and his wife hid themselves," מִפְּנֵי, "from the face of," the LORD God. The versions keep it: ἀπὸ προσώπου, a facie, "from the presence" in every English Bible. The Geneva's marginal reading of the hiding is that "They began to fele their miserie, but they soght not to God for remedie."¹⁷⁴ The 1611's chapter argument had summarised the chapter's second half in one word: "9 God arraigneth them."¹⁷⁵

D. The Examination (3:9–13)

Genesis 3:9–13 (Leningrad Codex) 9 וַיִּקְרָא יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶל־הָאָדָם וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ אַיֶּכָּה׃ 10 וַיֹּאמֶר אֶת־קֹלְךָ שָׁמַעְתִּי בַּגָּן וָאִירָא כִּי־עֵירֹם אָנֹכִי וָאֵחָבֵא׃ 11 וַיֹּאמֶר מִי הִגִּיד לְךָ כִּי עֵירֹם אָתָּה הֲמִן־הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִיךָ לְבִלְתִּי אֲכָל־מִמֶּנּוּ אָכָלְתָּ׃ 12 וַיֹּאמֶר הָאָדָם הָאִשָּׁה אֲשֶׁר נָתַתָּה עִמָּדִי הִוא נָתְנָה־לִּי מִן־הָעֵץ וָאֹכֵל׃ 13 וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לָאִשָּׁה מַה־זֹּאת עָשִׂית וַתֹּאמֶר הָאִשָּׁה הַנָּחָשׁ הִשִּׁיאַנִי וָאֹכֵל׃

Genesis 3:9–13 (1611) 9 And the LORD God called vnto Adam, and said vnto him, Where art thou? 10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden: and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid my selfe. 11 And he said, Who told thee, that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee, that thou shouldest not eate? 12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gauest to be with mee, shee gaue me of the tree, and I did eate. 13 And the LORD God said vnto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The Serpent beguiled me, and I did eate.¹⁷⁶

God calls the man. Not the two: וַיִּקְרָא … אֶל־הָאָדָם, "he called to the man," and the question is singular, אַיֶּכָּה, "where art thou?" The examination that follows is addressed to the man through three verses, and only at 3:13 does God turn to the woman. The order is the order of the commandment. The one who was commanded is the one who is asked; the one who was not present when the commandment was given is asked second, and asked a different question. To the man: "Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee?" The commandment is quoted back to him in the singular in which it was given, צִוִּיתִיךָ, "I commanded thee." To the woman: מַה־זֹּאת עָשִׂית, "what is this thou hast done?" The man is asked about a commandment; the woman is asked about an act. The Septuagint, which had made the commandment plural at 2:17, keeps God's question to the man singular here, ἐνετειλάμην σοι, and adds the man's name to the call, Ἀδάμ, ποῦ εἶ; "Adam, where art thou?"¹⁷⁷

The man's answer is the verse this chapter has been reading toward. הָאִשָּׁה אֲשֶׁר נָתַתָּה עִמָּדִי הִוא נָתְנָה־לִּי מִן־הָעֵץ וָאֹכֵל: "the woman whom thou gavest with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate." Set it beside the man's two earlier speeches. At 2:23 he said זֹאת הַפַּעַם עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי, "this at last is bone of my bones"; at 2:24, on the reading this book has argued, he said that a man shall cleave to his wife and the two shall be one flesh. At 3:12 he says "the woman," not "my wife" and not "bone of my bones"; he says "whom thou gavest," placing her origin in God's act and not in his own recognition; and he says הִוא, "she," with the emphatic pronoun the Hebrew does not need, "she gave me." The word עִמָּדִי, "with me," is the word of 3:6, עִמָּהּ, "with her," turned round: there she gave to her husband with her; here he speaks of the woman given to be with him. The man who spoke the law of cleaving does not cleave. He does not hold fast to her; he holds her out. The versions keep every element of the sentence, and two of them make the "with me" a description of what the woman was for: the Vulgate Mulier, quam dedisti mihi sociam, "the woman whom thou gavest me as a companion," and Coverdale, following it, "The woman which thou gauest me (to beare me company) gaue me of the tre, and I ate."¹⁷⁸ The Great Bible, the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 have "The woman which thou gauest to be with me, she gaue me of the tre," which is the Hebrew, pronoun and all.¹⁷⁹ The Geneva's note reads the speech as the book does: "His wickednes and lacke of true repentance appeareth in this that he burdeneth God with his faute, because he had geuen him a wife."¹⁸⁰

One word of the 1611 deserves notice here. At 3:9 it has "the LORD God called vnto Adam," at 3:12 "And the man said." The Hebrew is הָאָדָם at both. The translators, who had been writing "Adam" since 2:19 and would write it again at 3:17, 3:20 and 3:21, wrote "the man" for the speaker of this one sentence; whether by design or by the accident of two hands, the effect is that in the English the excuse is spoken not by a named person but by the man.¹⁸¹

The woman's answer is shorter and blames what deceived her: הַנָּחָשׁ הִשִּׁיאַנִי וָאֹכֵל, "the serpent deceived me, and I ate." The verb is נָשָׁא, to lead astray; the Septuagint ἠπάτησέν με, the Vulgate decepit me, the English "disceaued me so, that I ate" (Coverdale), "begyled me, and I dyd eate" (the Great, the Bishops'), "beguiled me, and I did eat" (the Geneva, the 1611).¹⁸² She does not say the man was with her. Neither does he. The serpent is not asked anything. He is the one party to the eating who is neither called nor questioned, and the sentences that follow begin with him.

E. What the Examination Establishes

Three things, and each is a matter of the text's own order. The man was present at the eating, and every witness that reads the Hebrew says so; the two that do not, the Vulgate and Coverdale, are the two that lost the word. The man was examined first and on the commandment, the woman second and on the act, in the order in which the commandment had reached them. And the man's speech at 3:12 is the reverse of his speeches at 2:23–24: the one who named the woman his own flesh and spoke the law of cleaving now names her the woman God gave and lets the fault pass through her to God. The sentences of 3:14–19, which the next chapter reads, fall in the order the examination has set, and the word "because" falls where the examination has put the responsibility.

3.3 The Sentences (3:14–19)

Three sentences are passed, and the text marks each in a different way. The serpent's is introduced by a verb of sequence and grounded with a "because." The woman's is introduced by nothing, after an open space in the codex, and has no "because." The man's is introduced by a noun-first clause, after a second open space, and grounded with a "because." The differences are the Hebrew's, they are on the page of the codex, and every version has kept them. This chapter reads the three sentences in order and then asks what the differences mean.

A. The Serpent (3:14–15)

Genesis 3:14–15 (Leningrad Codex) 14 וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶל־הַנָּחָשׁ כִּי עָשִׂיתָ זֹּאת אָרוּר אַתָּה מִכָּל־הַבְּהֵמָה וּמִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה עַל־גְּחֹנְךָ תֵלֵךְ וְעָפָר תֹּאכַל כָּל־יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ׃ 15 וְאֵיבָה אָשִׁית בֵּינְךָ וּבֵין הָאִשָּׁה וּבֵין זַרְעֲךָ וּבֵין זַרְעָהּ הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ וְאַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב׃

Genesis 3:14–15 (1611) 14 And the LORD God said vnto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed aboue all cattell, and aboue euery beast of the field: vpon thy belly shalt thou goe, and dust shalt thou eate all the dayes of thy life. 15 And I will put enmitie betweene thee and the woman, and betweene thy seed and her seed: it shal bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heele.¹⁸³

The serpent, who was not questioned, is sentenced first, and the sentence opens with its ground: כִּי עָשִׂיתָ זֹּאת, "because thou hast done this." The Septuagint has Ὅτι ἐποίησας τοῦτο, the Vulgate Quia fecisti hoc, and every English Bible "Because thou hast done this."¹⁸⁴ What follows is a curse on the creature himself, אָרוּר אַתָּה, "cursed art thou," set above or apart from all the cattle and beasts of the field among which 3:1 had placed him as the most subtle. The most subtle of the beasts is made the most cursed of them.

The two clauses of the sentence say what the serpent will do and what he will eat. עַל־גְּחֹנְךָ תֵלֵךְ, "upon thy belly shalt thou go": the verb is הָלַךְ, the ordinary Hebrew word for going or walking, and the versions rendered it as such, πορεύσῃ, gradieris, "shalt thou go" in every English Bible.¹⁸⁵ The Septuagint doubled the noun, ἐπὶ τῷ στήθει σου καὶ τῇ κοιλίᾳ, "upon thy breast and belly," and the Vulgate kept the breast alone, super pectus tuum; the English have "belly." No version, and no Hebrew, makes the serpent creep here; the word for creeping things, רֶמֶשׂ, which the first telling used at 1:24–26 for the class the serpent belongs to, is not in the verse. The connection between the serpent's curse and the creeping things over which the man was given dominion is real, but it is not carried by this verb.

It is carried by the next word. וְעָפָר תֹּאכַל, "and dust shalt thou eat": עָפָר is the dust of 2:7, of which the man was made, and it will be the dust of 3:19, to which he will return. The serpent is sentenced to eat the substance of the man. The three verses are one thread in the Hebrew, and chapter 2.2 has shown what became of the thread in the versions: the Septuagint has γῆν, "earth," here and at 3:19, and χοῦν only at 2:7; the Vulgate terram here, limo at 2:7, puluis at 3:19; Coverdale "earth" here and at 3:19, "moulde" at 2:7.¹⁸⁶ The Great Bible of 1540 is the first version in any language on this shelf to have one word at all three places, "dust," and the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 kept it.¹⁸⁷ The English reader since 1540 can see that the serpent eats what the man is; the Greek and Latin reader could not.

The second verse of the sentence is the one the tradition has read most, and its variants are doctrinal in every direction. וְאֵיבָה אָשִׁית, "and enmity will I put," between the serpent and the woman and between his seed and hers; then הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ וְאַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב, "he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." The pronoun הוּא is masculine and agrees with זֶרַע, the seed; the verb שׁוּף is used twice, once of each party, so that what the seed does to the serpent's head and what the serpent does to the seed's heel are the same act. The versions kept neither feature whole. The Septuagint has the masculine, αὐτός σου τηρήσει κεφαλήν, but its verb is τηρέω, "watch" or "lie in wait for," at both places.¹⁸⁸ The Vulgate has ipsa conteret caput tuum, "she shall crush thy head," a feminine that agrees with the woman and not the seed and has no warrant in the Hebrew or the Greek, and then a second verb for the serpent's part, tu insidiaberis calcaneo eius, "thou shalt lie in wait for her heel," so that the two acts are no longer one.¹⁸⁹ From ipsa descends the reading of the verse as a promise about the woman, and from the woman as Mary; it is the Latin's, and the Latin's alone. Coverdale and the Great Bible have the neuter, "The same shal treade downe thy head, and thou shalt treade vpon his hele," with one English verb for the two Hebrew ones; the Geneva has the masculine, "He shal breake thine head, & thou shalt bruise his heele," with two verbs; the Bishops' and the 1611 have the neuter again, "it shall treade downe thy head, and thou shalt treade vpon his heele" and "it shal bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heele."¹⁹⁰ The 1611 is the one English version to render the Hebrew's single verb with a single verb, "bruise … bruise," and with the neuter "it" it declines to decide the sex of the seed, as the Hebrew, whose pronoun agrees with a grammatically masculine noun, also declines to make it a person. The Geneva's notes make the seed Christ and the serpent Satan; the Bishops' note reads "Victorie promised by Christe, to mans comfort."¹⁹¹ The book records the notes and reads the verse as the sentence on the serpent that it is: the enmity is put between him and the woman he deceived, and it is her seed, not the man's, that is named.

B. The Woman (3:16)

Genesis 3:16 (Leningrad Codex) 16 אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה אָמַר הַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה עִצְּבוֹנֵךְ וְהֵרֹנֵךְ בְּעֶצֶב תֵּלְדִי בָנִים וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ תְּשׁוּקָתֵךְ וְהוּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּךְ׃

Genesis 3:16 (1611) 16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiplie thy sorowe and thy conception. In sorow thou shalt bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and hee shall rule ouer thee.¹⁹²

In the codex the woman's sentence stands after an open space, and it begins with no connective and no "because": אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה אָמַר, "unto the woman he said," the object first and the verb bare.¹⁹³ It is the one sentence of the three that is not tied to what precedes it and the one that is not given a ground. The serpent is sentenced because he did this; the man will be sentenced because he hearkened; the woman is told what will be. Chapter 3.2 showed that the examination had asked her not about a commandment but about an act; the sentence answers in kind. It states consequences and names no cause.

The versions kept the absence of a "because" without exception, and the book has found no version that supplies one. What they did with the absent connective varies. The Septuagint supplies καί, "and to the woman he said"; the Vulgate Mulieri quoque dixit, "to the woman also he said"; Coverdale "And vnto the woman he sayde"; the Great Bible and the Bishops' "But vnto the woman he sayde"; the Geneva and the 1611 nothing, "Vnto the woman he said," "Unto the woman he said," which is the Hebrew's shape exactly.¹⁹⁴ The King James, which levelled the scene-clauses of 1:2 and 4:1 to "And," here printed a sentence with no connective because the Hebrew had none, and the Geneva had done so before it.

The sentence has three clauses. The first, הַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה עִצְּבוֹנֵךְ וְהֵרֹנֵךְ, doubles its verb in the idiom the versions carried at 2:17, "multiplying I will multiply thy pain and thy conception," and the second, בְּעֶצֶב תֵּלְדִי בָנִים, "in pain shalt thou bear children," names the pain again. The noun is עִצָּבוֹן, and it will be the man's noun too: at 3:17 he is told בְּעִצָּבוֹן תֹּאכְלֶנָּה, "in pain shalt thou eat of it." The woman's childbearing and the man's labour are one word in the Hebrew, and the Septuagint kept it, ἐν λύπαις at both, and so did the English, "in sorowe" at both from the Great Bible to the 1611; the Vulgate divided it, in dolore for her and in laboribus for him.¹⁹⁵ The two sentences are parallel in their pain, and the reader of the Latin cannot see it.

The third clause is the one the tradition has built on, and its history is the history of a single word. וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ תְּשׁוּקָתֵךְ וְהוּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּךְ: "and to thy husband thy תְּשׁוּקָה, and he shall rule over thee." The noun תְּשׁוּקָה occurs three times in the Bible, here, at 4:7 of sin's relation to Cain, and in the Song of Songs of the lover's to the beloved, and the versions have heard it three ways.¹⁹⁶ The Septuagint heard a turning: πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα σου ἡ ἀποστροφή σου, "toward thy husband thy turning" or "thy recourse."¹⁹⁷ The Vulgate heard power, and wrote the clause as a sentence of subjection: sub viri potestate eris, "thou shalt be under thy husband's power."¹⁹⁸ With that rendering the woman's subordination entered the text of Western Christendom, in the place where the Hebrew has a noun whose sense is open. The English heard desire, and then hedged. Coverdale: "thy lust shal pertayne vnto ȳ hußbande, & he shal rule the," with the margin "Some reade: Thou shalt bowe downe thy self before thy husbande."¹⁹⁹ The Great Bible: "thy lust shall pertayne to thy husbande, and he shall haue the rule of the."²⁰⁰ The Geneva: "thy desire shal be subiect to thine housband, and he shal rule ouer thee," the two words "shal be subiect" printed in the italic the Geneva used for what the translators supplied, and the margin sending the reader to 1 Corinthians 14:34, "let your women keep silence in the churches."²⁰¹ The Bishops': "thy desire [shalbe] to thy husbande, and he shall haue the rule of thee," the supplied verb in the Bishops' brackets.²⁰² The 1611: "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and hee shall rule ouer thee," with the margin "Or, subiect to thy husband."²⁰³ The Douay, from the Latin, keeps "thou shalt be under thy husband's power."

The record is plain. The Hebrew says the woman's תְּשׁוּקָה is toward her husband and that he will rule her; it does not say she is subject to him, and the word it uses for what she has toward him is the word the Song of Songs uses for love. The Greek read it as turning. The Latin wrote subjection into the clause. The English read desire and then, in the Geneva, supplied subjection in italics as the translators' own words; the 1611 moved the subjection to the margin. The tradition's teaching that the woman was placed under the man by this verse rests on Jerome's sub potestate, on the Geneva's italics, and on the King James's margin, and not on the Hebrew of the verse or on any version's rendering of the Hebrew noun. What the Hebrew does say, וְהוּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּךְ, "and he shall rule over thee," is said as a consequence and not as a commandment; it stands in a sentence that has no "because," and the man is not told to rule. The same idiom recurs at 4:7, where sin's תְּשׁוּקָה is toward Cain and Cain is told he shall rule over it; the Geneva supplied "shalbe subiect" there too, and Coverdale's margin offered "Let it be subdued vnto the, & rule thou it."²⁰⁴ The translators' treatment of the woman's clause was their treatment of the idiom wherever it occurred.

C. The Man (3:17–19)

Genesis 3:17–19 (Leningrad Codex) 17 וּלְאָדָם אָמַר כִּי־שָׁמַעְתָּ לְקוֹל אִשְׁתֶּךָ וַתֹּאכַל מִן־הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִיךָ לֵאמֹר לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ בְּעִצָּבוֹן תֹּאכְלֶנָּה כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ׃ 18 וְקוֹץ וְדַרְדַּר תַּצְמִיחַ לָךְ וְאָכַלְתָּ אֶת־עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה׃ 19 בְּזֵעַת אַפֶּיךָ תֹּאכַל לֶחֶם עַד שׁוּבְךָ אֶל־הָאֲדָמָה כִּי מִמֶּנָּה לֻקָּחְתָּ כִּי־עָפָר אַתָּה וְאֶל־עָפָר תָּשׁוּב׃

Genesis 3:17–19 (1611) 17 And vnto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened vnto the voyce of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eate of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eate of it all the dayes of thy life. 18 Thornes also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee: and thou shalt eate the herbe of the field. 19 In the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate bread, till thou returne vnto the ground: for out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou art, and vnto dust shalt thou returne.²⁰⁵

After a second open space the man's sentence begins, and it begins with a noun-first clause: וּלְאָדָם אָמַר, "and to the man he said," the object fronted with the vav, a turn against the sentence before.²⁰⁶ The Septuagint marks it, τῷ δὲ Ἀδάμ; the Vulgate, Adæ vero; the Great Bible and the Bishops' drop the connective, "Unto Adam he sayde"; the Geneva has "Also to Adám"; Coverdale and the 1611 "And vnto Adam."²⁰⁷ Then the ground: כִּי־שָׁמַעְתָּ לְקוֹל אִשְׁתֶּךָ, "because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife." The man's fault is named as the act of listening, and the commandment is quoted a third time, in the singular a third time, אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִיךָ, "which I commanded thee." The versions all have the "because": Ὅτι ἤκουσας, Quia audisti, "Because thou hast herkened / hearkened / obeied," and Coverdale's "For so moch as thou hast herkened," which is "because" in another dress.²⁰⁸

What is cursed is not the man. אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה, "cursed is the ground": the same participle that fell on the serpent, אָרוּר אַתָּה, falls here on the אֲדָמָה from which the אָדָם was taken, and it falls בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ, "for thy sake," "on thy account." The serpent was cursed in his person; the man's ground is cursed because of him; the woman was not cursed at all, and neither was anything on her account. The versions kept the distinction of object, though two of them altered the reason: the Septuagint has ἐπικατάρατος ἡ γῆ ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις σου, "cursed is the earth in thy works," and the Vulgate maledicta terra in opere tuo, so that the Greek and Latin reader is told the ground is cursed in what the man does to it rather than on his account; every English Bible has "for thy sake."²⁰⁹

The rest of the sentence is labour and death. The man will eat the ground's produce בְּעִצָּבוֹן, in the woman's word for pain; it will bring forth thorns and thistles; he will eat bread in the sweat of his face; and then the sentence closes the thread that 2:7 opened. עַד שׁוּבְךָ אֶל־הָאֲדָמָה כִּי מִמֶּנָּה לֻקָּחְתָּ, "until thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken," and כִּי־עָפָר אַתָּה וְאֶל־עָפָר תָּשׁוּב, "for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." The ground and the dust are named together as they were at 2:7, עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה, and the man is sent back to both. This is the third occurrence of עָפָר, and the versions did with it what they did with the first two: the Septuagint γῆ εἶ καὶ εἰς γῆν ἀπελεύσῃ, earth to earth, the same word as the ground; the Vulgate puluis es, & in puluerem reuerteris, a third Latin word; Coverdale "earth thou art, and vnto earth shalt thou be turned agayne"; and from the Great Bible on, "dust": "thou art dust, & into dust shalt thou be turned agayne," "thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou returne," "dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou be turned agayne," "dust thou art, and vnto dust shalt thou returne."²¹⁰ In the Hebrew and in the English since 1540 the man is made of dust, the serpent eats dust, and the man returns to dust, in one word. In the Greek the three are earth; in the Latin they are mud, earth and dust; in Coverdale mould, earth and earth.

D. Where the Blame Falls

The three sentences differ in three ways, and the ways agree. The serpent's and the man's have a "because"; the woman's has none. The serpent's and the man's are curses, on the serpent himself and on the man's ground; the woman's curses nothing. The serpent's follows the examination by a verb of sequence and the man's by a turn; the woman's stands apart, after a gap, without a connective, as a sentence that begins again.

The reading this book draws from these differences is the reading Part 2 prepared. The serpent knew what the fruit would do and said so; he is sentenced because he did this. The man had received the commandment from God, alone, in the singular, and had heard the serpent's account of the fruit standing beside the woman; he is sentenced because he hearkened. The woman had received no commandment, was not present when it was given, quoted it in a form that was not its form, and was deceived; she is told what her life will be and is not told that it is because of anything. The Hebrew assigns the ground of the sentences to the two who had the knowledge, the serpent by his subtlety and the man by the commandment, and withholds it from the one who had neither. The versions, which disagreed about so much else in these three chapters, agree about this without exception: no version gives the woman a "because," and no version takes one from the serpent or the man.

The subordination the tradition has read into the story is real, but it is not where the tradition has placed it. It is not at 2:18, where every version has a help like him or fit for him and none has a subordinate. It is not at 2:23–24, where the man names his wife his own flesh and speaks a law of cleaving. It is at 3:16, in the third clause of the woman's sentence, and it entered the text of the Bible as sub viri potestate eris in the fourth century, as "shal be subiect" in italics in 1560, and as "Or, subiect to thy husband" in the margin of 1611. The Hebrew says the man will rule; it does not say the woman was made to be ruled, and it says the man will rule in a sentence that gives no reason, to a woman who was given no commandment, after a man who was given one had broken it with her beside him. That is what the text says. The versions that read the Hebrew say it too.

3.4 Like One of Us (3:20–24)

Genesis 3:20–24 (Leningrad Codex) 20 וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁם אִשְׁתּוֹ חַוָּה כִּי הִוא הָיְתָה אֵם כָּל־חָי׃ 21 וַיַּעַשׂ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לְאָדָם וּלְאִשְׁתּוֹ כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם׃ 22 וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע וְעַתָּה פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם׃ 23 וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִגַּן־עֵדֶן לַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח מִשָּׁם׃ 24 וַיְגָרֶשׁ אֶת־הָאָדָם וַיַּשְׁכֵּן מִקֶּדֶם לְגַן־עֵדֶן אֶת־הַכְּרֻבִים וְאֵת לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת לִשְׁמֹר אֶת־דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים׃

Genesis 3:20–24 (1611) 20 And Adam called his wiues name Eue, because she was the mother of all liuing. 21 Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the LORD God make coates of skinnes, and cloathed them. 22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of vs, to know good & euill. And now lest hee put foorth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eate and liue for euer: 23 Therefore the LORD God sent him foorth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground, from whence he was taken. 24 So he droue out the man: and he placed at the East of the garden of Eden, Cherubims, and a flaming sword, which turned euery way, to keepe the way of the tree of life.²¹¹

A. The Name (3:20)

The sentences passed, the man speaks for the last time in these chapters, and what he does is what he did at 2:19 and 2:23: he names. וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁם אִשְׁתּוֹ חַוָּה, "and the man called his wife's name Chavah," כִּי הִוא הָיְתָה אֵם כָּל־חָי, "because she was the mother of all living." The name is made from the verb to live, חָיָה, and the sentence that gives it says so; a Hebrew reader hears in חַוָּה the חָי that closes the verse. It is the third act of naming in the second telling and the first that is a proper name. The animals were named by their kinds; the woman was named אִשָּׁה, a common noun that is the feminine of the man's; now she is given a name that is hers, and the ground of it is not what she was taken from but what will come from her. The man who at 3:12 called her "the woman whom thou gavest" here calls her the mother of every living thing, on the day he has been told he will die.

The versions treated the name as they treated the pun of 2:23, and the results are instructive in the same way. The Septuagint translated it: Καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Ἀδὰμ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Ζωή, "and Adam called his wife's name Life," ὅτι αὕτη μήτηρ πάντων τῶν ζώντων, "because she is the mother of all the living."²¹² The Greek reader hears in Ζωή the ζώντων that follows, as the Hebrew reader hears חָי in חַוָּה; the translator chose to carry the meaning of the name rather than its sound, and at 4:1, where the name recurs without its explanation, the same translator wrote Εὕαν, the sound.²¹³ The Vulgate has Heua, and after it Coverdale, the Great Bible and the Bishops' "Heua," the Geneva "Heuáh," and the 1611 "Eue," which supplies in its margin what its text cannot: "Heb. Chauah."²¹⁴ The 1611's margin does for the reader of English what the Septuagint did for the reader of Greek, in the only way English could do it.

The Geneva printed the verse in parentheses, "(And the man called his wiues name Heuáh, because she was the mother of all liuing)," as it had printed 2:9, treating the naming as an aside between the sentences and the clothing; the other English Bibles run it in sequence, "And Adam called."²¹⁵ The Hebrew is a verb of sequence, וַיִּקְרָא, and the naming is the next thing that happened.

B. The Coats (3:21)

The next verb is God's, and it is an act of care. וַיַּעַשׂ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לְאָדָם וּלְאִשְׁתּוֹ כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם: "and the LORD God made for the man and for his wife coats of skin, and clothed them." The girdles of fig leaves they had made for themselves at 3:7 are replaced by garments God makes, and the verb of making, עָשָׂה, is the verb of the first telling's works. The two who knew they were naked are covered by the one who asked them who had told them so.

The Hebrew opens the verse with its verb, as it opens every act in these chapters. The English Bibles from 1540 did not. The Great Bible has "Unto the same Adam also & to hys wyfe dyd the Lorde God make lethren garmentes," the Geneva "Vnto Adám also and to his wife did the Lord God make coates of skinnes," the Bishops' "Unto Adam also and to his wyfe dyd the Lorde God make garmentes of skynnes," and the 1611 "Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the LORD God make coates of skinnes."²¹⁶ The object is fronted and the verb inverted, with an "also" the Hebrew does not have; it is the English of 1540 laying an emphasis on the recipients, and the King James kept it. Coverdale, alone among the English, has the Hebrew's order: "And the LORDE God made Adam & his wyfe garmentes of skynnes."²¹⁷ The Septuagint has καὶ ἐποίησεν, the Vulgate Fecit quoque, both in sequence.²¹⁸ The garments are χιτῶνας δερματίνους in Greek, tunicas pelliceas in Latin, "garmentes of skynnes" in Coverdale and the Bishops', "lethren garmentes" in the Great Bible, "coates of skinnes" in the Geneva and the 1611.²¹⁹

After this verse the codex leaves an open space.²²⁰ It is the fourth such gap in the two tellings, after those before 2:4, 3:16 and 3:17, and it separates the clothing from the declaration that follows.

C. The Declaration (3:22)

22 וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע

After the gap, a verb of sequence and a word of attention: וַיֹּאמֶר … הֵן, "and the LORD God said, Behold." What God says is the sentence the two tellings have been moving toward, and it is worth setting down word by word. הָאָדָם, the man; הָיָה, has become; כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ, as one of us; לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע, to know good and evil.

Three earlier sentences are in it. The first is 1:26, נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ, "let us make man in our image, after our likeness": the plural of that verse, "us," "our," returns here in מִמֶּנּוּ, "of us," and the man who was to be made in the likeness of "us" is declared to have become "as one of us." The second is 2:17, where the tree was named עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע, "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," and the man was told not to eat of it. The third is 3:5, the serpent's promise, וִהְיִיתֶם כֵּאלֹהִים יֹדְעֵי טוֹב וָרָע, "ye shall be as elohim, knowing good and evil." God's sentence at 3:22 takes the serpent's words and makes them his own, with one change: where the serpent said כֵּאלֹהִים, "as God" or "as gods," God says כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ, "as one of us," and the ambiguity of the serpent's word is resolved in the direction of the first telling's plural. What the serpent promised, God confirms; and what God confirms is what God intended at 1:26.

This is the sentence on which the reading of this book rests, and the book states the reading here once, plainly. The first telling said that on the sixth day God made man in his image and likeness, male and female, and that on the seventh he rested. The second telling has told how: the man formed, the woman built, the two brought to the knowledge of good and evil, and God's word that the man has now become like the ones who made him. The image announced at 1:26 is completed at 3:22, and it is completed by the knowledge. The eating of the fruit is not an event after the creation of humanity; it is the event by which the creation of humanity, as the first telling describes it, was finished. The first telling's "very good" at 1:31 and the second telling's "behold, the man has become as one of us" at 3:22 are the same judgement on the same day, and the rest of the seventh day follows both.

The versions kept the sentence, and nearly all of them kept its perfect tense. The Septuagint has Ἰδοὺ Ἀδὰμ γέγονεν ὡς εἷς ἐξ ἡμῶν, τοῦ γινώσκειν καλὸν καὶ πονηρόν, "behold, Adam has become as one of us, to know good and evil"; the Vulgate Ecce Adam quasi vnus ex nobis factus est, sciens bonum & malum; Coverdale "lo, Adam is become as it were one of vs, & knoweth good & euell"; the Geneva "Beholde, the man is become as one of vs, to knowe good and euil"; the Bishops' "Beholde, the man is become as one of vs, in knowyng good and euyll"; the 1611 "Behold, the man is become as one of vs, to know good & euill."²²¹ The Great Bible alone reads otherwise, and reads strangely: "Beholde, yonder man hath bene euen as one of vs, that he myght knowe good and euell," a past tense and a purpose clause that make the likeness a state the man once had rather than one he has reached, and turn the knowledge into the reason for the likeness rather than its content.²²² No other witness has it, the Bishops' revisers corrected it, and the book records it as the one version that did not hear the sentence as a declaration of what the man had become.

The second half of the verse is a sentence that does not finish. וְעַתָּה פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם: "and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever" — and there the speech ends, with the consequence the "lest" was to guard against unstated. The reader supplies it from the next verse. The versions kept the broken sentence: the Septuagint καὶ νῦν μή ποτε ἐκτείνῃ τὴν χεῖρα, the Vulgate nunc ergo ne forte mittat manum suam, the English "And now lest he put forth his hand."²²³ The Bishops' Bible alone told the reader what was missing, in a note that shows its translators reading the Hebrew as a Hebrew sentence: "You may supplie the sentence with these wordes: let vs cast hym foorth."²²⁴ Coverdale gave the clause its own connective, "But now lest he stretch his hande," which is the sense.²²⁵ The tree of life is named for the second time, and the man is not said to have eaten of it; the first telling's "good" and "very good" contained no eternal life for the creatures, and the second telling's man had access to it and did not take it. The "lest" of 3:22 keeps him from taking it now.

D. The Sending (3:23–24)

Two verbs of sequence close the narrative. וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ, "and he sent him forth," and וַיְגָרֶשׁ, "and he drove out." Both objects are singular and both are the man: the LORD God sent him forth from the garden, and drove out the man. The woman is not named in either verse. She goes, and the text does not say so; what it says is that the man was sent to do what 3:19 had sentenced him to do, לַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח מִשָּׁם, "to till the ground from which he was taken." The ground of 2:7 receives him back as a labourer before it receives him back as dust. The Great Bible alone has the plural, "the Lorde God sent them furth," and no other witness follows it; the Septuagint, the Vulgate and every other English Bible have the singular the Hebrew has.²²⁶

The versions' connectives at the close are the last instance in these chapters of the pattern this book has traced. The Hebrew has two sequence verbs; the Septuagint καί and καί; the Vulgate Et emisit and Eiecitque; Coverdale "Then the LORDE God put him out" and "And he cast Adam out." From the Geneva on, the English reads the two verses as consequence and result: the Geneva "Therefore ȳ Lord God sent him forthe" and "Thus he cast out man"; the Bishops' "Therfore" and "And so he droue out man"; the 1611 "Therefore the LORD God sent him foorth" and "So he droue out the man."²²⁷ The King James translators, who printed "And" at the scene-clauses of 1:2 and 4:1 where the Hebrew turns, here printed "Therefore" and "So" where the Hebrew merely continues, and they took both from the Geneva. The close of the third chapter in the English Bible is not the flat "And … and" its first chapter is; it is a chain of consequence the translators supplied, and the reader who has been told the King James levels every connective should be told this too.

The last verse sets the guard. הַכְּרֻבִים, the cherubim, and לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת, "the flame of the sword that turns itself," are placed east of the garden לִשְׁמֹר אֶת־דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים, "to guard the way of the tree of life." The way is guarded; it is not destroyed. The Septuagint added a clause the Hebrew lacks, καὶ κατῴκισεν αὐτὸν ἀπέναντι τοῦ παραδείσου τῆς τρυφῆς, "and he made him dwell over against the paradise of delight," so that in Greek the man is settled within sight of the garden; the Vulgate has collocauit ante paradisum voluptatis Cherubim, placing the cherubim before the garden and saying nothing of where the man dwelt; the English follow the Hebrew.²²⁸ The sword is flammeum gladium, atque versatilem in the Latin, "a naked fyrie swerde" in Coverdale, "a fyery two-edged sworde" in the Great and the Bishops', "the blade of a sworde shaken" in the Geneva, "a flaming sword, which turned euery way" in the 1611, whose rendering of הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת is the closest.²²⁹ With that the second telling ends, and the next verse of Genesis, וְהָאָדָם יָדַע, "now the man knew his wife," opens after a gap in the codex with a scene-clause of its own, on the other side of the garden.²³⁰

E. The Two Tellings Closed

The first telling ended with God resting on the seventh day from all the work he had made. The second telling ends with God declaring that the man has become as one of us, and sending him out to the ground. The reading this book has carried through nine chapters is that these are one ending. The image announced on the sixth day is the likeness God declares at 3:22; the knowledge that the serpent promised, that the woman took, that the man took beside her, and that God confirmed, is the content of that likeness; and the sending out is not the undoing of the creation but the beginning of the life the creation was for, on the ground the man was made from, with the way to the tree of life guarded and not closed. Every step of the reading has been taken from the shape of the Hebrew clauses, and at every step the book has set down what the versions did. Part 4 now reads the versions as wholes, to see what each of them made of the narrative they were carrying.

Part 4 — What the Versions Did with the Narrative

4.1 The Greek: The Turns Marked, the Order Kept, the Words Collapsed

The Septuagint is the oldest translation of Genesis and the only one this book reads that was made while Hebrew was still spoken as a mother tongue. Parts 1 to 3 have cited it verse by verse. This chapter reads it as a whole, for what its translators did with the narrative they were carrying, and it finds three things: that they marked the shape of the Hebrew clause more faithfully than any English version before the twentieth century; that they kept the order of the second telling and twice added a word to insist on it; and that they collapsed the Hebrew's vocabulary at the points where this book's reading depends on a word being one word.

A word first on what is being read. The Septuagint of Genesis 1–3 is quoted in this book from Swete's edition of 1901, which prints the text of Codex Alexandrinus, a manuscript of the fifth century, because Codex Vaticanus, Swete's usual base, has lost its first forty-six chapters of Genesis; Swete's apparatus records the readings of two other early witnesses, and the book has noted them where they differ.²³¹ What the book calls "the Septuagint" is therefore an edition of one fifth-century manuscript of a translation made in the third century before Christ, and its claims are claims about that text. The author does not read Greek; the readings are the author's from the printed page, checked against the Hebrew and the later versions, and await professional review.

A. The Turns Marked

The Method stated the rule and Part 2 showed it working: where the Hebrew puts a noun after the vav and so opens a scene, the Septuagint puts δέ, the Greek particle of a new scene, and where the Hebrew puts a verb, καί. At six of the seven noun-first verse-openers between 1:1 and 4:1 the Greek has δέ: ἡ δὲ γῆ (1:2), πηγὴ δέ (2:6), ποταμὸς δέ (2:10), ὁ δὲ ὄφις (3:1), τῷ δὲ Ἀδάμ (3:17), Ἀδὰμ δέ (4:1); at the mid-verse contrast of 2:20 it has τε; and at the in-verse pairs of 1:5 and 1:10, where the noun is fronted to match a second naming to a first, it keeps καί, so that δέ is reserved for the clause that begins something.²³² The one noun-first verse-opener it did not mark is 2:5, καὶ πᾶν χλωρὸν ἀγροῦ, and the book has recorded that every other version failed there too.²³³

The discipline is the more striking because Greek did not need it. Greek narrative can run on καί as Hebrew runs on vav, and the Septuagint's Genesis does so at every sequence verb; the translators had a resource the Hebrew lacked, a particle that says "here the story turns," and they spent it exactly where the Hebrew turns. The modern English versions mark these turns too, and chapter 4.4 will say so; the point here is that the Greek of the third century before Christ marked them first, and that what the moderns returned to was the Greek's practice.

B. The Order Kept, and Underlined

At the two verses where the order of the second telling differs from the order of the first, the Septuagint added a word. καὶ ἐξανέτειλεν ὁ θεὸς ἔτι ἐκ τῆς γῆς πᾶν ξύλον (2:9), "and God made to spring up further every tree"; καὶ ἔπλασεν ὁ θεὸς ἔτι ἐκ τῆς γῆς πάντα τὰ θηρία (2:19), "and God formed further all the beasts."²³⁴ The Hebrew has וַיַּצְמַח and וַיִּצֶר, sequence verbs, and nothing more. The Greek's ἔτι is an interpretation, and it is the interpretation this book carries: that the trees grew and the beasts were formed after the man was formed, as further acts. The translators saw that a reader might take the second telling's trees and beasts for the first telling's, already made on the third and sixth days, and they wrote a word to prevent it. It is the oldest witness to the reading, and the only ancient one.

Elsewhere the Greek's additions run the other way, toward harmony. At 2:2 it has God finish his works on the sixth day, ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἕκτῃ, where the Hebrew has the seventh; the finishing is moved off the day of rest.²³⁵ At 2:17 the commandment given to one man turns plural in the Greek, οὐ φάγεσθε … φάγησθε … ἀποθανεῖσθε, so that the serpent's plural at 3:1 has something to answer.²³⁶ At 2:18 God's "I will make" becomes ποιήσωμεν, "let us make," the plural of 1:26 carried forward.²³⁷ At 3:16 the Greek supplies a καί where the Hebrew begins the woman's sentence with nothing.²³⁸ At 3:24 it adds a clause, καὶ κατῴκισεν αὐτὸν ἀπέναντι τοῦ παραδείσου, settling the man within sight of the garden.²³⁹ None of these is large, and none changes the order of events; together they show a translator who smoothed the surface of the second telling toward the first while leaving its sequence, and marking its sequence, intact. The Greek is not a harmoniser of the order. It is a harmoniser of the details around the order.

C. The Words Collapsed

The Septuagint's losses are losses of vocabulary, and they fall where this book's reading needs a single Hebrew word to be visible as single. Three matter.

The first is the ground. The Hebrew has three words, אֶרֶץ for the earth, אֲדָמָה for the ground, עָפָר for the dust, and the second telling's thread runs on the third: the man is dust from the ground (2:7), the serpent eats dust (3:14), the man returns to dust (3:19). The Greek has γῆ for the first two everywhere and for the third at 3:14 and 3:19, with χοῦς only at 2:7; by 3:19 the three Hebrew words are one Greek word, and the dust the serpent eats is not the dust the man is made of but "earth."²⁴⁰ The Latin dissolved the same thread into three words; the Greek collapsed it into one; the English from 1540 kept it.

The second is the image. At 1:27 the Hebrew has the word twice, בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים, and the Greek once, κατ᾿ εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν.²⁴¹ The emphasis of the Hebrew, which repeats the image as if to make sure, is not in the Greek, and the Vulgate restored it from the Hebrew.

The third is the pun. Twice the Hebrew makes a word do two things, אִישׁ and אִשָּׁה at 2:23, עֲרוּמִּים and עָרוּם at 2:25 and 3:1, and the Greek, which has no such pairs, gives Γυνή and ἀνήρ, γυμνοί and φρονιμώτατος, and the play is gone.²⁴² Jerome recovered the first with virago; no one recovered the second. The Greek also made a choice at the second that the book has noted: its serpent is φρονιμώτατος, "most prudent," a word of praise, and the ambivalence of the Hebrew עָרוּם is resolved toward wisdom.²⁴³

Against these the Greek has one recovery of its own kind, at 3:20. Where every later version transliterated the woman's name, the Greek translated it, Ζωή, "Life," so that the etymology the verse gives, "because she was the mother of all living," is an etymology in Greek as it is in Hebrew.²⁴⁴ The translators who could not carry אִישׁ and אִשָּׁה carried חַוָּה and חָי, by giving up the sound for the sense.

D. The Readings That Are the Greek's Own

Several renderings in the Septuagint are neither marks of the clause nor collapses of the vocabulary but readings of the story, and the book lists them because Part 2 and Part 3 have used them. τὸ δειλινόν at 3:8, "in the afternoon," for the Hebrew's "wind of the day," turns the רוּחַ into a time.²⁴⁵ ἡ ἀποστροφή σου at 3:16, "thy turning," gives תְּשׁוּקָה the sense of recourse rather than desire or subjection.²⁴⁶ τηρήσει and τηρήσεις at 3:15, "shall watch for," give the seed and the serpent a single verb, as the Hebrew does, but a verb of lying in wait rather than of bruising.²⁴⁷ τοῦ εἰδέναι γνωστὸν καλοῦ καὶ πονηροῦ at 2:9, "of knowing what is knowable of good and evil," strains after more than "knowledge" in naming the tree.²⁴⁸ ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις σου at 3:17, "in thy works," for the Hebrew's "for thy sake," makes the ground's curse a curse in the man's labour rather than on his account.²⁴⁹ Τί ὅτι εἶπεν ὁ θεός at 3:1 makes the serpent's half-question a question about God's reason.²⁵⁰ And ὡς θεοί at 3:5, "as gods," decides the number of the serpent's כֵּאלֹהִים toward the plural, a decision the Latin and the English of 1540 to 1611 followed and the English since has reversed.²⁵¹

E. What the Greek Is to the Reading

The Septuagint is this book's oldest ally on the one point where the book most needs one, the order of the second telling, and its first opponent on the point where the book's reading of the sentences depends on a word, the dust. It marked the Hebrew's turns better than any English Bible before the twentieth century, and it smoothed the Hebrew's seams, at 2:2 and 2:17 and 3:16, in ways no English Bible did. It is a translation made by men who understood the Hebrew clause and did not always trust the Hebrew text; the book takes from it what it understood and records what it did not trust.

4.2 The Latin: The Turns Kept, the Order Harmonised, the Pun Carried

The Vulgate is the second of the two ancient versions and the one the West read longest. Jerome made his Latin Genesis from the Hebrew at the close of the fourth century, with the Greek open beside him, and his text was the Bible of the Latin Church for eleven hundred years before any of the English Bibles in this book was printed.²⁵² The text read here is the edition of 1592, printed at Rome by the Vatican press as the Church's text, in which Genesis 1–3 stands on three printed pages; the readings are those pages' readings, and the author, who does not read Latin, has taken them from the printed line, checked them against the Hebrew and the Greek, and holds them for professional review.²⁵³

Parts 1 to 3 cited the Latin at every verse. Read as a whole it shows three things. It kept the Hebrew's turns as the Greek had, and dressed the Hebrew's sequence in a Latin variety the Hebrew does not have. It moved the order of the second telling at two verses, the first version to do so, while keeping the details the Greek had smoothed. And it carried into Latin the one pun the Greek could not carry, and wrote into two verses of the sentences two readings that no earlier text contains and that the tradition built on more than on anything in the Hebrew.

A. The Turns Kept, and the Sequence Varied

At the noun-first clauses Jerome read the Hebrew as the Greek had read it. Terra autem erat inanis (1:2); Sed fons ascendebat (2:6); Sed & serpens erat callidior (3:1); Adæ vero dixit (3:17); Adam vero cognouit (4:1): five of the seven verse-openers carry a Latin particle of turning, autem, sed or vero, and the mid-verse contrast of 2:20 has Adæ vero as well.²⁵⁴ Where the contrast lies in the sense he marked it too, De ligno autem scientiæ at 2:17, and in the verbless clauses of the rivers he set vero and autem at the third and fourth.²⁵⁵ The two openers he left unmarked are 2:5, Et omne virgultum agri, which no version marked, and 2:10, Et fluuius egrediebatur, which the Greek had.²⁵⁶

At the sequence clauses he did what the Hebrew does not do. Where the Hebrew has one vav before one verb, the Latin has an enclitic -que (Dixitque, Fecitque, Creauitque, Benedixitque, Produxitque, Eiecitque), or igitur, "therefore" (Igitur perfecti sunt, 2:1; Formauit igitur, 2:7; Formatis igitur, 2:19; Vidit igitur mulier, 3:6), or ergo (Immisit ergo, 2:21; nunc ergo, 3:22), or quoque and etiam, "also" (Dixit quoque, Dixit etiam, Mulieri quoque dixit, 3:16; Fecit quoque, 3:21), so that the speeches of God in the first chapter scarcely open twice alike and no two consecutive Latin verses begin alike.²⁵⁷ This is Latin style laid over a Hebrew that has none, and the book has said so in Part 1. It is worth separating from the marking of the turns, because the two look alike on the page and are not alike in kind. At the noun-first clauses the Latin answers the Hebrew's syntax. At the sequence clauses it answers its own ear, and where the word chosen is igitur it imports a reasoning the Hebrew leaves unstated: the man is formed "therefore," because the earth had no tiller (2:7); the woman sees "therefore," because the serpent has spoken (3:6). The English Bibles of 1540 and 1560 heard these and answered them, "The Lorde God also shope man," "And so the woman," "So the woman," and the reader of English who meets an "also" or a "so" at these verses is reading the Latin's connective, not the Hebrew's.²⁵⁸

The Latin reader, then, was given the Hebrew's turns and something more, and nothing was levelled. Whatever the English reader has been given at the connective since 1611, it was not the practice of either ancient version.

B. The Order Harmonised

The Vulgate is the first text in any language to move an event of the second telling out of its place. At 2:8 it reads Plantauerat autem Dominus Deus Paradisum voluptatis a principio: in quo posuit hominem quem formauerat, "but the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning, in which he set the man whom he had formed."²⁵⁹ The Hebrew has וַיִּטַּע, a sequence verb, "and he planted," and מִקֶּדֶם, "eastward," a direction. The Latin has a pluperfect, "had planted," and a principio, "from the beginning," a time. In one clause the garden is moved before the man and back to the start of creation, and the man of 2:7 is set down in a place that was waiting for him. The verse that follows keeps the sequence, Produxitque Dominus Deus de humo omne lignum, "and the Lord God brought forth from the soil every tree," but it brings the trees forth in a garden that, in Latin, already existed; there is no etiam here to answer the Greek's ἔτι, and the Greek's insistence that the trees came after the man has no Latin echo.²⁶⁰

At 2:19 the same thing is done by a different construction. Formatis igitur, Dominus Deus, de humo cunctis animantibus terræ, & vniuersis volatilibus cæli, adduxit ea ad Adam: "the Lord God, therefore, all the living things of the earth and all the birds of heaven having been formed of the soil, brought them to Adam."²⁶¹ The ablative absolute makes the forming a finished background to the bringing. Jerome does not say when the animals were formed; he removes their forming from the chain of the second telling and leaves the reader free to set it on the sixth day of the first. The two harmonisations are of one kind, and they are the two verses at which every modern English version that reads "had planted" and "had formed" departs from the Hebrew's order. The reading is Jerome's before it is anyone's.

What is striking is what the Latin did not do. The Greek had moved the finishing of the work to the sixth day at 2:2; the Latin has the Hebrew's day, Compleuitque Deus die septimo opus suum. The Greek had put the commandment of 2:17 in the plural; the Latin has the singular, ne comedas … morte morieris. The Greek had added a clause at 3:24 settling the man opposite the garden; the Latin has none.²⁶² Where the Latin did smooth a detail, it smoothed it as the Greek had: faciamus for "I will make" at 2:18; eritis sicut dij at 3:5; maledicta terra in opere tuo at 3:17; and at 3:6 it dropped the word that places the man at the tree, deditque viro suo, qui comedit, "and she gave to her husband, who ate," so that the Latin reader, unlike the Greek, may suppose the man elsewhere.²⁶³ The pattern is the reverse of the Greek's. The Greek harmonised the details and kept the order; the Latin kept the details and harmonised the order. Of the two, the Latin's is the harmonisation that lasted, because the West read it for eleven centuries and the first English Bible was made in its shadow: Coverdale's pluperfect at 2:19 and his "and he ate" at 3:6 are the Latin's readings in English, and the Great Bible of 1540 is the version that took them out.²⁶⁴

C. The Pun Carried, and the Words

At 2:23 the Latin did what no other version did. Hæc vocabitur Virago, quoniam de viro sumpta est: for the woman's name Jerome chose virago, a Latin word built on vir, so that the Latin reader hears in the name the word it is taken from, as the Hebrew reader hears אִישׁ in אִשָּׁה.²⁶⁵ The Greek had given up the sound for the sense, Γυνή and ἀνήρ; the English would half-carry it by the accident that "woman" contains "man." Only the Latin carried it on purpose. It is the mark of a translator who heard the Hebrew as sound, and it should be set beside the pluperfect of 2:8 as the other face of the same man: the reader who heard the pun did not trust the order.

The Latin's other choices at the words divide between recoveries and losses. It restored the doubled image of 1:27 that the Greek had halved, ad imaginem suam: ad imaginem Dei creauit illum, and the English from 1540 has the doubling from the Latin.²⁶⁶ It kept "living soul" as one phrase for the creatures and the man, anima viuens at all five places, where the English of 1540 would divide it.²⁶⁷ Its serpent is callidior, "cleverer," a word that can be praise or blame, and it leaves the serpent's quality open where the Greek had decided it toward wisdom.²⁶⁸ Its mandate is milder than the Greek's, præsit at 1:26 and subiicite eam, & dominamini at 1:28, against the Greek's κατακυριεύσατε.²⁶⁹ At 3:8 it kept the wind that the Greek had turned into an hour, and added the hour beside it, ad auram post meridiem, "at the breeze after midday."²⁷⁰

Against these, the Latin dissolved the thread the Greek had collapsed. The Hebrew's עָפָר is one word at 2:7, 3:14 and 3:19; the Latin has de limo terræ, "of the mud of the earth," then terram comedes, "earth shalt thou eat," then puluis es, & in puluerem reuerteris, "dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return," three words for one, so that the Latin reader cannot see that the serpent is sentenced to eat what the man is made of, or that the man's end is his beginning.²⁷¹ And at 3:20 it transliterated the woman's name, Heua, where the Greek had translated it; the Latin reader is given the sound and told, in the same verse, a meaning he cannot hear in it.²⁷² Every English Bible transliterated as the Latin had, and the 1611 supplied in its margin, "Heb. Chauah," the only correction English could make.

D. The Two Readings That Are the Latin's Alone

Two verses of the sentences read in Latin as they read in no earlier text, and the tradition's teaching on both descends from the Latin.

The first is 3:15. Ipsa conteret caput tuum, & tu insidiaberis calcaneo eius: "she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel."²⁷³ The Hebrew pronoun is הוּא, masculine, agreeing with the seed; the Greek has αὐτός, masculine. The Latin's ipsa is feminine and agrees with the woman, and it has no warrant in either text before it. The Hebrew uses one verb, שׁוּף, for what the seed does to the serpent and what the serpent does to the seed; the Latin uses two, conteret and insidiaberis, and the two acts are no longer one act. From ipsa descends the reading of the verse as a promise about the woman, and from the woman as Mary. No English Bible took it: Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Bishops' and the 1611 have "it," the Geneva "he," and the 1611 alone kept one verb for the two acts, "bruise … bruise."²⁷⁴

The second is 3:16. In dolore paries filios, & sub viri potestate eris, & ipse dominabitur tui: "in pain shalt thou bear children, and thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have dominion over thee."²⁷⁵ The Hebrew noun is תְּשׁוּקָה, the word the Song of Songs uses for the lover's longing; the Greek heard ἀποστροφή, a turning toward. The Latin heard power, and with sub viri potestate eris the subjection of the woman entered the text of Western Christendom at a place where the Hebrew has a noun whose sense is open and a clause that states a consequence, not a command. The English did not follow the Latin's text, but they felt it: the Geneva supplied "shal be subiect" in the italic of the translators' own words, the 1611 moved it to the margin, "Or, subiect to thy husband," and the Douay, translated from the Latin, kept "under thy husband's power" whole.²⁷⁶

A third reading is smaller and belongs with these. At 3:1 the serpent's opening, which in Hebrew is two particles and a verb that may be read as a half-question, becomes in Latin a plain question about God's reason, Cur præcepit vobis Deus, "why has God commanded you"; the Greek's Τί ὅτι had gone the same way, and the English "Yea, hath God said" did not.²⁷⁷

E. What the Latin Is to the Reading

The Vulgate is the ancient version the book must reckon with most, because it is the one whose readings reached the English. At the connective Jerome is the most careful reader of the Hebrew's shape among the versions, and the book takes his turns, his virago, his doubled image, his one word for the soul and his seventh day. At the order he is the first to rearrange it, and the book follows his pluperfect and his ablative absolute to Coverdale and to the modern "had planted." At the sentences he wrote two readings into the text that the Hebrew and the Greek do not contain, and the book follows those too: ipsa to the Marian reading, sub potestate to the Geneva's italics and the King James's margin and the Douay's text. What the Latin understood, the book uses. What the Latin added, the book names as the Latin's, and reads the Hebrew without it.

4.3 The English Before 1611: Range, Recovery, and the Heading of 1568

Between the first complete English Bible and the King James lie seventy-six years and four Bibles, and this book has read Genesis 1–3 in all four: Coverdale's of 1535, made from the Latin and from Luther by a man who did not read Hebrew; the Great Bible of 1540, Coverdale's own revision of his text against the Hebrew, set up in every parish church by royal order; the Geneva Bible of 1560, made by English exiles with the Hebrew before them and printed with notes in the margin; and the Bishops' Bible of 1568, the revision the Elizabethan church made of the Great Bible to replace the Geneva on the lectern, which it never replaced in the home.²⁷⁸ The four are read here in the copies on the shelf and cited by their leaves. They are English, and the author reads them; the black letter and the abbreviations have been read from the image, and a doubtful letter has been said to be doubtful.²⁷⁹

The chapter finds three things in the four. They kept a range at the connective that neither the Latin nor the King James kept, marking the Hebrew's turns where the sense forced them and varying the sequence in English as the Latin had in Latin. They recovered, chiefly in 1540, three things the Latin had lost: the order of the second telling at 2:19, the man's presence at the tree, and the one word for dust. And one of them, in 1568, printed at the head of the second chapter a statement of what the chapter is that no Bible before it had printed and that its own later printings, and every Bible after it, let go.

A. The Range

The first thing an English reader of 1535 or 1560 met at the connective was variety. Coverdale closes each day of the first chapter "Then of the euenynge and mornynge was made the first daye," opens the acts that follow a speech with "Then God made," "Then God deuyded," and sums the work at 2:1 with "Thus was heauen and earth fynished."²⁸⁰ The Great Bible closes each day "The euenynge also and the mornyng" and opens the second telling's acts with "also" and "And so."²⁸¹ The Geneva has the widest range in English: "Then God said," "Againe God said," "God said againe," "Afterwarde God said," "Moreouer God said," "Furthermore God said," and "So the euening and the morning were," in the first chapter alone; and in the second and third "Therefore" for the sleep of 2:21, "So" for the woman's seeing at 3:6, "Also" for the man's sentence, "Therefore" and "Thus" for the sending and the driving out.²⁸² The Bishops' is the plainest of the four, "And" at every verse of the first chapter to 1:24, and then, having dropped the connective at 1:25 and 1:26, "And" through most of the second and third.²⁸³ None of this variety is the Hebrew's. In the first telling the Hebrew has the vav of sequence at every verse after the second, and "And" renders it exactly; the Geneva's "Againe" and "Afterwarde" are English laid over a Hebrew that has none, as the Vulgate's quoque and etiam were Latin, and the book has said in Part 1 that they are not faults.²⁸⁴

The second thing the reader met, if he read closely, was that the same Bibles marked the Hebrew's turns where the sense made the turn audible. At 2:6, where the verse before has said it had not rained, Coverdale, the Geneva and the Bishops' have "But there arose a myst," "But a myst went vp," "But there went vp a mist," and only the Great Bible has "And."²⁸⁵ At 2:17, where the forbidden tree is set against all the others, every one of the four has "But."²⁸⁶ At 2:20, where the man's search ends without a help, Coverdale has "But vnto man," the Geneva "but for Adám," the Bishops' "but for man," and again only the Great Bible "And."²⁸⁷ At 3:1 Coverdale and the Great Bible have "But the serpent," the Geneva "Now the serpent," the first "Now the serpent" in English and the one the King James would keep; the Bishops' alone has "And."²⁸⁸ Where the sense did not force the issue the four did what the ancient versions had done at 2:5 and wrote "and": at 1:2 only the Great Bible marked the scene, by dropping the connective altogether, "The earth was voyde and emptye," which is the English way of setting a scene when the language has no particle for it; at 2:5 Coverdale and the Great Bible run the verse into the heading without a break and the Geneva and the Bishops' begin it "And euerie plant"; at 2:10 all four have "And."²⁸⁹ At 3:17 the Great Bible and the Bishops' drop the connective, "Unto Adam he sayde," the Geneva has "Also to Adám," Coverdale "And vnto Adam"; at 4:1 Coverdale has "Morouer" and the Geneva "Afterwarde."²⁹⁰

Set beside the ancient versions, the English record at the seven verse-openers is this. The Greek marked six, the Latin five. Of the four English Bibles the Geneva marked four (2:6, 3:1, 3:17, 4:1), Coverdale three (2:6, 3:1, 4:1), the Great Bible two (1:2, 3:1), the Bishops' one (2:6), and each of them marked the mid-verse turn of 2:20 except the Great; the bare "Unto Adam he sayde" of the Great and the Bishops' at 3:17 is counted as neither, since it follows a "But" at 3:16 that the Hebrew does not have.²⁹¹ The English translators of these years were not reading the shape of the clause as the Greek translators had; they were reading the sense of the passage and writing "but" or "now" where the sense turned. But because the sense turns where the clause turns, they marked, between them, every one of the seven but 2:5 and 2:10, and they marked them in a range of English, "But," "Now," "Also," "Morouer," "Afterwarde," that told the reader something was beginning. The book will show in the next chapter what the King James did with that range.

B. The Recovery

The Latin had lost three things in the second telling, and the English of 1540 recovered all three. The book has recorded each at its verse; here they are set together because they were recovered together, in one revision, and because the man who made the revision had lost them himself five years before.

The first is the order at 2:19. Coverdale, working from the Latin and from Luther, had the pluperfect: "And whan God the LORDE had made of the earth all maner beastes of the felde … he brought them vnto man," which is Jerome's ablative absolute in English, and places the forming of the animals before the second telling begins.²⁹² The Great Bible of 1540 reads "And so out of the grounde shope the Lorde God euery beast of the felde, and euery foule of the ayre, and brought it vnto man," a simple past in sequence, and the Geneva kept it, "So the Lord God formed of the earth euerie beast."²⁹³ The Bishops' of 1568 went back to Coverdale's tense, "the Lorde God had shapen euery beast of the field," and that is the text the King James translators were given to revise; what they did with it is the next chapter's.²⁹⁴ From 1540 to 1568 the Bible on the lectern, and from 1560 the Bible in the home, agreed with the Hebrew and the Greek that the animals were formed after the man.

The second is the man at the tree. The Hebrew of 3:6 says the woman gave also to her husband עִמָּהּ, "with her"; the Greek has μετ᾿ αὐτῆς; the Latin dropped it, deditque viro suo, qui comedit, and Coverdale, following the Latin, dropped it too, "and gaue vnto hir husbande also therof, and he ate."²⁹⁵ The Great Bible put the man back beside the woman, and did so with emphasis: "and gaue vnto her husband beynge with her, which dyd eate also." The Bishops' kept "beyng with her," the Geneva and the 1611 "with her," and the man has stood at the tree in every English Bible since.²⁹⁶ The reading of Part 3, that the man was present and heard the serpent and ate with knowledge of the commandment the woman had never been given, rests on a word that the English reader has had since 1540 and the Latin reader never had.

The third is the dust. Coverdale had followed the Latin into three words, "moulde" at 2:7, "earth" at 3:14, "earth" at 3:19; the Great Bible has "euen dust from of the grounde" at 2:7, "dust shalt thou eate" at 3:14, "thou art dust, & into dust shalt thou be turned agayne" at 3:19, one English word for the one Hebrew word, and the Geneva, the Bishops' and the 1611 kept it.²⁹⁷ The Great Bible of 1540 is the first version in any language on this shelf, Greek, Latin or English, in which the man is made of dust, the serpent eats dust and the man returns to dust in a single word. The thread that binds the making to the two sentences, on which the reading of chapter 3.3 depends, was made visible to a reader who had no Hebrew for the first time in 1540, in English.

Two smaller recoveries stand with these. The Great Bible restored the doubled image of 1:27, "in his awne ymage: in the ymage of God," which Coverdale had not had at all, and every English Bible after it kept the doubling.²⁹⁸ And the Geneva coined at 2:18 the phrase the English language would keep, "an helpe mete for him," with the Hebrew in its margin, "Ebr. before him": a help suitable for him, which is what the Hebrew says, and nothing about rank.²⁹⁹

Against the recoveries the same years made three losses, and the book has recorded them too. The Great Bible divided the one Hebrew phrase נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה into "lyuing creature" for the animals and "a lyuing soule" for the man, where Coverdale had "lyuynge soules" for the beasts of 1:24 and "a lyuynge soule" for the man, and every English Bible since has kept the division and put the Hebrew in the margin.³⁰⁰ Every English Bible from Coverdale on has "in the coole of the day" at 3:8, a paraphrase in which the Hebrew's wind is neither wind nor Spirit, and only the Geneva's and the 1611's margins confess it.³⁰¹ And Coverdale's "subdue it, & haue domynion" of 1535, kept by the Great Bible, the Bishops' and the 1611, is the English the reader has heard the mandate in ever since, for a Hebrew whose first verb is the verb of bringing land under cultivation and whose second is the verb of a king's rule.³⁰² The English of these years gave the reader the Hebrew's order and its thread, and took from him its one name for what lives, and its wind.

C. The Geneva: The Reader's Bible and Its Hand on the Text

The Geneva deserves a paragraph of its own, because it did more to the text than any of the four and told the reader more about the Hebrew than any of them. It kept the order at 2:19; it has the Hebrew's shape at 3:16, "Vnto the woman he said," with no connective, as the Hebrew has none; its margins give the Hebrew at 1:20, "Ebr. the soule of life," at 2:18, "Ebr. before him," at 2:23, "for in Ebr. Ish is man, and Ishah the woman," and at 3:8, "Or, winde."³⁰³ But it also printed 2:9 and 3:20 in parentheses, "(For out of the grounde made the Lord God to growe euerie tre …)" and "(And the man called his wiues name Heuáh …)," turning two narrated acts into asides, a gentler harmonisation than Jerome's pluperfect but a harmonisation still, and the 1611 did not keep either.³⁰⁴ At 3:16 it supplied "shal be subiect" in the italic it used for the translators' own words, and sent the reader in the margin to 1 Corinthians 14:34.³⁰⁵ And its notes read the story throughout in the manner of its church: the plural of 1:26 as God taking counsel with his wisdom, the knowledge of good and evil as "miserable experience," the serpent as Satan's instrument, the seed of 3:15 as Christ, the man's eating as "ambicion," and the hiding as those who "soght not to God for remedie."³⁰⁶ The book has recorded the notes at their verses and taken one of them, on the knowledge as experience, as a witness. The Geneva is the Bible in which the English reader was given most of the Hebrew and most of the translators, on the same page, and its parentheses and its italics are the first places where an English translator's reading of the story entered the printed text of the story.

D. The Heading of 1568

The Bishops' Bible went back, at 2:19 and at 3:1, on what the Great Bible and the Geneva had gained, and the book has said so at those verses. It is nonetheless the one of the four that matters most at the seam. Three of the four English Bibles gave each chapter a summary of its contents. The Great Bible's summary of the second chapter is a list: the hallowing of the Sabbath, the four floods of Paradise, the setting in of man, the tree forbidden, the naming, the creation of Eve, the institution of marriage. The Geneva's is a list: "God resteth the seuenth day, and sanctifieth it. 15 He setteth man in the garden. 22 He createth the womā. 29 Mariage is ordeined."³⁰⁷ The Bishops' wrote: "2 The day of rest is blessed. 4 A repeatyng of thynges foretolde in the first. 6 The cloude from the earth as a well to water it. 7 He rehearseth agayne the fashionyng of man. 8 Man in the paradise of pleasure …"³⁰⁸ Two of its eleven lines say what the other summaries do not: that verse 4 begins a repeating of things foretold in the first chapter, and that verse 7 rehearses again the fashioning of man.

The book does not claim that the Bishops' translators held the reading this book argues, or that "repeatyng" meant to them what "one narrative told twice" means here. It claims what the leaf shows: that the Bible of the English church stated in its own heading that the second chapter goes back over the first, and that the heading stood at the head of Genesis 2 in the Bishops' folios of 1568, 1574 and 1578 and in the edition of 1575, and was gone from the edition of 1577 and from the folio of 1602.³⁰⁹ The Hebrew of the seam is a gap in the codex and the formula אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת; the Bishops' told the reader what kind of heading that formula is. Its margins elsewhere show the same translators reading Hebrew as Hebrew: "Hebre. buylded" at 2:22, "Heb. As before hym" at 2:18, and at 3:22 the one note in any version that tells the reader God's sentence is unfinished, "You may supplie the sentence with these wordes: let vs cast hym foorth."³¹⁰ Its supplements it marked in brackets, "[he made] starres also" at 1:16, "[shalbe]" at 3:16, so that the reader could see what was the translators' and what was the text's.³¹¹ Its notes read the story as the Geneva's did, the plural of 1:26 as "One God, and three persons," the image as what man "by sinne he afterwarde corrupted," the seed as "Victorie promised by Christe."³¹² The King James translators were instructed to revise this Bible and no other, and the copy they revised was the folio of 1602, in which the heading had already given way to the Great Bible's list. What they kept of the Bishops' and what they changed is the subject of the chapter that follows; the heading they never saw.

E. What the English Before 1611 Is to the Reading

The four Bibles of 1535 to 1568 are the years in which the Hebrew's second telling came into English whole. Coverdale brought it in the Latin's shape, with the animals formed before the man, the man absent from the tree and the dust dispersed into three words. The Great Bible, five years later and against the Hebrew, restored all three, and the Geneva kept the restoration and added the Hebrew in its margins. The Bishops' lost the order again at 2:19 and said in its heading what the order is for. Between them they marked the Hebrew's turns in a range of English the King James would narrow, they made the losses at the soul and the wind that the King James would keep, and they handed on, in the Bishops' text of 1568, a pluperfect to be struck, and a heading its own printers had already let go. The book takes from these years the recoveries of 1540, the Geneva's margins and its "help meet," and the Bishops' heading, and it reads the King James, in the next chapter, as what its translators made of them.

4.4 The King James and After: The Levelling, the Margins, and the Modern Return

The King James Bible of 1611 is the English text of record in this book, and Parts 1 to 3 have quoted it at every verse from the facsimile of the first printing. This chapter reads it as a whole, and it reads it beside a second witness that the earlier chapters could not use: the copy of the Bishops' Bible of 1602 that one company of the King James translators marked up as they worked, now in the Bodleian Library, whose leaves for Genesis 1–4 are on the shelf and have been read at the image.³¹³ The marks are in a secretary hand, they are one company's and not the final text, and the author, who does not read the hand with ease, gives the readings below as the author's own and holds them for professional review; where the 1611 did what the mark proposes, the mark is cited, and where it did not, the difference is said.³¹⁴

The chapter finds four things. The translators revised the Bishops' text toward the Hebrew at the verbs and the words, and the marked copy shows them doing it. They levelled the Hebrew's scene-clauses to "And" at five of the seven, further than any English Bible before them and further than either ancient version, while supplying at other verses a chain of consequence the Hebrew does not have. They confessed the Hebrew in their margin at every place where the text departed from it, so that the King James is two texts, and the reader of the margin has the Hebrew the reader of the text has not. And the English versions since 1611, read here as witnesses only, have returned to the Hebrew's shape at the scene-clauses by returning to the Greek's practice, and have returned to Jerome's order at 2:8 and 2:19 by returning to his pluperfect.

A. The Revision: The Translators at Work

The instruction to the King James translators was to revise the Bishops' Bible, and the copy of 1602 shows the revision being made at the verses this book has read. At 2:19 the Bishops' "the Lord God had shapen euery beast of the fielde" is underlined and "formed" is written in the margin; the 1611 reads "the LORD God formed."³¹⁵ At 2:18 and 2:20 the Bishops' "an helpe like vnto him" is struck and "meet for him" written above, the Geneva's phrase; the 1611 has "an helpe meet for him" at both.³¹⁶ At 3:1 the Bishops' "AND the Serpent" has its "And" struck through and "Now" written above, again the Geneva's; the 1611 has "Now the serpent."³¹⁷ At 3:15 the Bishops' two verbs, "tread downe" and "tread vpon," are struck and "bruise" written for each, so that the Hebrew's one verb, used twice, is twice "bruise"; the 1611 has "it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heele."³¹⁸ At 3:16 the Bishops' "But vnto the woman" has its "But" struck, leaving the sentence without a connective as the Hebrew has it, and "subiect" is entered above the clause "thy desire shall be to thy husband"; the 1611 prints the bare "Unto the woman he said" and puts "Or, subiect to thy husband" in the margin.³¹⁹ At 3:12 the Bishops' "And Adam sayd" has "the man" written against it; the 1611 has "And the man said," where the Bishops' had "Adam" and where the 1611 itself keeps "Adam" at 3:17, 3:20 and 3:21.³²⁰ At 3:21 "he put them on" is struck for "clothed them," at 3:23 "dresse" for "till," at 3:17 "Unto Adam hee said" is given the "And" the 1611 prints.³²¹ And at two verses the marked copy shows what the translators left alone: the "And" of 1:2, "And the earth was without forme, and voyd," where the hand brackets a second "was" and touches nothing else, and the "And" of 4:1, "AND Adam knew Heua his wife," where the hand underlines "who conceiuing, bare" and leaves the connective alone.³²²

What the copy shows is a company reading the Hebrew for its words and its verbs and taking from the Geneva what the Geneva had got right, and not reading the Hebrew for the shape of its clauses. The pluperfect at 2:19 went because the Hebrew has a sequence verb; "bruise … bruise" came in because the Hebrew has one verb; "the man" at 3:12 because the Hebrew has the article; the bare opening of 3:16 because the Hebrew has no connective. Where the Hebrew opens a scene with a noun and a vav, at 1:2 and 4:1, the copy shows no mark at the connective at all. The translators were not levelling by decision. They were not looking.

B. The Levelling, and the Chain of Consequence

The result at the seven scene-clauses between 1:1 and 4:1 is the record the Method stated. The 1611 has "But there went vp a mist" at 2:6 and "Now the serpent" at 3:1, and "And" at the other five: "And the earth was" (1:2), "And euery plant" (2:5), "And a riuer went out" (2:10), "And vnto Adam he said" (3:17), "And Adam knew" (4:1); at the mid-verse turn of 2:20 it has the Geneva's "but for Adam."³²³ Two of seven is fewer than the Geneva's four or Coverdale's three, fewer than the Latin's five and the Greek's six. At 1:2 the translators chose "And" over the Great Bible's bare "The earth was" and the Vulgate's autem, both of which were before them; at 4:1 they chose "And" over Coverdale's "Morouer" and the Geneva's "Afterwarde"; at 3:17 over the Great Bible's and the Bishops' bare "Unto Adam" and the Geneva's "Also."³²⁴ The two they marked are the two the sense forces, the mist after the drought and the serpent after the two naked, and both marks the Geneva had made before them. Where the sense did not force the issue the King James wrote what the Hebrew's letter says and not what its clause does, and it did so at more verses than any English Bible before it.

The King James is nonetheless not a flat text, and the book has said so at each place. In the first chapter its "And … and … and" is the Hebrew's, and exact; the variety of Coverdale and the Geneva was English variety over a Hebrew that has none.³²⁵ At 1:27 it has "So God created man," from the Bishops'; at 2:1 "Thus the heauens," from the Geneva and Coverdale; at 2:24 "Therefore shall a man leaue"; at 3:6 "And when the woman saw … she tooke," a subordination no other version made; and at the close of the third chapter "Therefore the LORD God sent him foorth" and "So he droue out the man," both from the Geneva.³²⁶ The 1611 prints "and" some two hundred and ten times in Genesis 1–3 and opens sixty-three of the eighty verses with it, and where it departs from "And" it departs toward consequence, "So," "Thus," "Therefore," at verses where the Hebrew merely continues.³²⁷ The pattern is the reverse of the Hebrew's. The Hebrew marks the turns and runs the sequence flat; the King James runs the turns flat and marks the sequence with consequence. The reader who follows the King James's connectives is told that the driving out followed from the sentence, which is true and which the Hebrew does not say, and is not told that the earth of 1:2 and the serpent's knowledge of 4:1 are scenes, which the Hebrew does say.

Where the Hebrew has no connective the King James has none. At 2:4, "These are the generations," and at 3:16, "Unto the woman he said," the 1611 begins its sentence as the Hebrew begins it, and the Geneva had done so before it; at 2:4 it adds a pilcrow.³²⁸ The translators read the absence of the vav exactly. It is its presence before a noun that they did not read.

C. The Margins

The 1611 is two texts, and the second is in its margin. Wherever the translators smoothed the Hebrew in the text they wrote the Hebrew beside it, and the margin of Genesis 1–3 is a record of their choices that no English Bible before it kept so fully and no English Bible since has printed. At 1:5, where the text has "the euening and the morning were the first day," the margin has "Hebr. and the euening was, and the morning was."³²⁹ At 1:20 the text has "the mouing creature that hath life" and the margin "Or, creeping" and "Heb. soule"; at 1:28, "euery liuing thing that mooueth" and "Heb. creepeth"; at 1:29 "Hebr. seeding seed."³³⁰ At 2:3, "which God created and made," the margin has "Heb. created to make."³³¹ At 2:6, "But there went vp a mist," it offers "Or, a mist which went vp from &c."³³² At 2:7, "the dust of the ground," it says "Heb. dust of the ground," to mark the phrase as the Hebrew's own.³³³ At 2:15 and 2:19 it has "Or, Adam" against "the man" and "Or, the man" against "Adam."³³⁴ At 2:16 and 2:17, "thou mayest freely eate" and "thou shalt surely die," it has "Hebr. eating thou shalt eate" and "Hebr. dying thou shalt die."³³⁵ At 2:18, "an helpe meet for him," it has "Hebr. as before him"; at 2:22, "made hee a woman," "Hebr. builded."³³⁶ At 3:1, "Yea, hath God said," it has "Heb. Yea, because, &c."; at 3:6, "pleasant to the eyes," "Heb. a desire"; at 3:7, "aprons," "Or, things to gird about."³³⁷ At 3:8, "the coole of the day," it has "Heb. wind."³³⁸ At 3:16, "thy desire shall be to thy husband," it has "Or, subiect to thy husband."³³⁹ At 3:20, "Eue," it has "Heb. Chauah."³⁴⁰

Read together, the margins are the translators' account of where their English is not the Hebrew, and at three of these places the book's reading depends on the margin against the text: the wind of 3:8, which the text has made into weather; the idiom of 2:17, which the text has made into an adverb; and the subjection of 3:16, which the text does not have and the margin offers. At a fourth, the dust of 2:7, the margin confirms that the text's phrase is the Hebrew's own. The reader of the King James text has "the coole of the day" and "surely die" and "thy desire shall be to thy husband"; the reader of the King James margin has "wind" and "dying thou shalt die" and "subiect." The book has read the margin as part of the version, because the translators printed it as part of the version, and it has taken the margin's Hebrew over the text's English wherever the two differ.

The 1611 also kept the Bishops' practice of a summary at the head of each chapter, and wrote its own. The first chapter's runs from "The creation of Heauen and Earth" to "Also the appointment of food"; the second's, "1 The first Sabbath. 4 The maner of the creation. 8 The planting of the garden of Eden, 10 and the riuer thereof. 17 The tree of knowledge onely forbidden. 19. 20 The naming of the creatures. 21 The making of woman, and institution of Mariage"; the third's, "1 The serpent deceiueth Eue. 6 Mans shamefull fall. 9 God arraigneth them. 14 The serpent is cursed. 15 The promised Seed. 16 The punishment of Mankind. 21 Their first clothing. 22 Their casting out of Paradise."³⁴¹ Chapter 1.3 has told what "The maner of the creation" replaced and what it does not say. The running heads over the leaves say the same in fewer words: "The creation of the world," "The creation of man," "The first Sabbath," "Mariage instituted," "The fall of man," "The promised seed."³⁴²

D. Two Centuries, and the Modern Return

The King James was the English Bible for some two hundred and seventy years before a revision of it was published, and its "And the earth was," "And euery plant," "And a riuer," "And vnto Adam," "And Adam knew" were the English reader's Genesis for the whole of that time.³⁴³ The book has not read the versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at any page, and it does not treat them as witnesses to the Hebrew. It has read thirteen of them as edition text, in the public-domain files on the shelf, at the verses the Method marks, and it records what they show as a history of the English reader's connective after 1611, no more.³⁴⁴

At the scene-clauses the record is this. "Now the serpent" at 3:1 never left English after 1560: it is in the King James, the American King James, Webster's revision of 1833, the English Revised Version of 1885, the American Standard of 1901, the Jewish Publication Society's of 1917, the Douay-Rheims, and the two free modern versions on the shelf, the World English Bible and the Berean Standard Bible; only the literal school, Darby, Young and Julia Smith, has "And the serpent," and the Catholic Public Domain Version "However."³⁴⁵ "Now the earth" at 1:2 returns in the Jewish Publication Society's version of 1917 and in the World English and Berean Standard Bibles; the Catholic Public Domain Version has "But the earth"; every King James-lineage text and both English revisions keep "And the earth."³⁴⁶ At 2:5 the revisions of 1885 and 1901 and Young have "And no"; the Jewish version has "No shrub" and the World English "No plant," dropping the connective as the Great Bible did at 1:2; and the Berean has "Now no," the first English text on the shelf to write the particle at the verse where the Greek, the Latin and every English Bible before had missed it.³⁴⁷ At 4:1 the King James lineage keeps "And Adam knew," the revisions "And the man," and the World English alone drops the connective, "The man knew."³⁴⁸ The return of "now" to the noun-first clauses in the twentieth century is a return to what the Septuagint did in the third century before Christ and the Vulgate did at five of the seven, and the book has said in chapter 4.1 whose practice it is.

At the two verses where the order of the second telling is at stake the record runs the other way. Of the thirteen texts on the shelf the two Catholic versions carry Jerome: the Douay-Rheims has "the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning" and "the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts," the Catholic Public Domain Version "Now the Lord God had planted" and "Therefore, the Lord God, having formed"; Darby alone of the Protestant texts has "had formed" at 2:19; the other ten have the King James's simple past in sequence, "planted" and "formed," or Young's present and Smith's future, which keep the order as well.³⁴⁹ The "Now the LORD God had planted" and "Now the LORD God had formed" that the book's predecessor quoted as its text are the New International Version's, which is in copyright and not on the shelf, and the book cites them as the predecessor quoted them and as what Parts 2 and 3 have read them to be: Jerome's pluperfect of 2:8 and his ablative absolute of 2:19, come into English by way of a "now" that the Hebrew's clause does not have.³⁵⁰ The two modern returns are therefore of opposite value to this book's reading. The return of "now" to 1:2 and 2:5 and 4:1 restores the Hebrew's shape. The return of "had" to 2:8 and 2:19 restores the Latin's order.

At the words the thirteen texts show what the book has said in Parts 1 to 3 becoming the English reader's settled text. "Dust" at 2:7 and 3:14 and 3:19 is in every text but the two Catholic versions, which have "slime" and "clay" at 2:7 and "earth" at 3:14 from the Latin.³⁵¹ "Living soul" at 2:7 holds in eleven texts and gives way to "living creature" in Young and "living being" in the Berean.³⁵² "Subdue" at 1:28 is in all thirteen.³⁵³ "Help meet" runs from the Geneva through the King James to the revisions of 1885 and 1901 and the Jewish version of 1917, and is dropped by every later text on the shelf, for "helper," "helpmate," "helper suitable for him."³⁵⁴ "As gods" at 3:5 holds in the King James lineage and the Douay; the revisions and the moderns have "as God" or "like God," singular again.³⁵⁵ "Subtil" holds in the King James lineage and the revisions; "crafty," which no version before the nineteenth century had, is Darby's, Julia Smith's, the Catholic Public Domain Version's and the Berean's.³⁵⁶ The Vulgate's ipsa survives in English only in the two Catholic texts, "she shall crush," and the Vulgate's sub viri potestate only in the same two, "under thy husband's power"; every other text has "it" or "he" at 3:15 and "desire" at 3:16.³⁵⁷ The Latin's two readings that are its own have stayed the Latin's.

E. What the King James Is to the Reading

The King James is this book's English because it is the English in which the Hebrew's order at 2:19 was restored against the Bishops', in which the Hebrew's one verb at 3:15 was rendered by one verb for the first time, in which the Hebrew's bare opening at 3:16 was kept and its subjection moved to the margin, and in which the Hebrew itself was confessed, at every departure, in a margin the reader may hold against the text. It is also the English in which the Hebrew's scene-clauses were levelled at five of seven, further than any version before it, by translators who read the Hebrew for its words and not for the shape of its clauses; the marked copy of 1602 shows them doing the one and not the other. The book reads the King James as its text and the King James's margin as its corrector, and where the two are silent together, at "And the earth was" and "And Adam knew," it reads the Hebrew's clause and says so. The versions' history closes where this book began: the versions divide at the places the Hebrew's clause-shape marks, and the version that levelled most at those places is the one that recorded the Hebrew most faithfully everywhere else.

Conclusion

Genesis 1–3 is one narrative told twice. The first telling gives the frame, six days and a rest, and ends with a man and a woman made in the image of God and the whole judged very good. The second telling goes back over the sixth day and gives the detail: the man formed, then the garden and its trees, then the animals, then the woman; the commandment given to the man alone; the serpent's account of the knowledge, given to the woman who had not heard the commandment, and true; the eating, with the man present; the examination and the sentences in the order the examination set; and God's declaration that the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil, which is the image of the sixth day achieved. The rest of the seventh day follows, in the order of events, everything the second telling narrates. That is the reading, and the book has taken it from the shape of the Hebrew clauses, one clause at a time, and has set down at every clause what the versions did.

The versions divide into those that kept the order of the second telling and those that rearranged it, and the line between them does not run where a reader might expect. The Septuagint, the oldest of them, kept the order and twice added a word to insist on it. The Vulgate, the version of the West for eleven hundred years, moved the garden before the man and the animals into the background, and is the ancestor of every English version since that reads "had planted" and "had formed." The first English Bible followed the Latin; the Great Bible of 1540 restored the Hebrew's order, its man at the tree and its one word for dust; the Geneva kept the restoration; the Bishops' lost the order again at one verse and said in its heading what the order is for; the King James restored the verse and, by the time it was made, had never seen the heading. The modern versions have returned in two directions at once, to the Hebrew's shape at the scene-clauses and to the Latin's order at the two verses where the order matters most. No version kept everything. The Greek kept the order and lost the words; the Latin kept the words and lost the order; the English recovered the words in 1540 and levelled the shape in 1611.

A reader who follows the shape of each clause finds four things the tradition's readings of these chapters have not rested on. The first is that the second telling is told as sequence throughout, without one clause that lifts an event out of its place, and that its order is therefore the order of the events. The second is that the commandment was given to one person, in the singular, before the woman existed, and that the text never says she heard it from anyone but the serpent. The third is that the man was there, "with her," when she ate, and that the two versions which lost that word, the Latin and the first English Bible, are the two in which the man could be supposed elsewhere. The fourth is that God's own sentence at 3:22 says what the man has become, in the words of 1:26, and that the versions kept the sentence whole. None of these is an interpretation laid over the text. Each is a clause read for its shape and a word read at its place, and each was in the Hebrew before any version touched it.

What follows for the doctrine the book states in a paragraph and hands on. The teaching that these chapters record a fall from a finished perfection into sin, transmitted to every descendant, rests on readings this book has found to be the versions' and not the text's: on the Latin's order, in which the garden and its trees were made before the man and the man was set down in a finished world; on the Latin's ipsa at 3:15 and its sub viri potestate at 3:16, which the Hebrew and the Greek do not contain; on a "because" at 3:16 that no version supplies and the Hebrew does not have; and on a reading of 3:22 that hears irony where every version but one heard a declaration. The book does not answer the doctrine here. It has read the text, and the reading is that the knowledge of good and evil is what the image of God required and what the sixth day, told in full, was for. What that means for the teaching of the church, and for Augustine, who built the teaching on the Latin, is the subject of the companion volume, and the reader who has followed the clauses this far will know where that argument has to begin.

The book's last word is about its method, because the method is what it has to offer beyond the reading. Every claim in it about a version is a claim about a leaf, and the leaf is cited. Every reading of the Hebrew is a reading of the codex, made by an author who does not read the language and says so, and held for the review of those who do. The book has found the versions to be other than the author's own earlier essays took them to be: the Greek those essays said had flattened the Hebrew's connective marked its turns more faithfully than any English Bible before the twentieth century; the Latin those essays said lacked the Hebrew's flexibility read its clauses with care and moved its events; and the King James, which those essays set beside modern versions as though the moderns were the text, levelled the Hebrew's scene-clauses further than any version before it and confessed the Hebrew in its margin at every other place. The reader who wants to know what Genesis 1–3 says is sent, by this book, to the page: to the codex for the shape of the sentences, to the versions for what was made of them, and to the margin of the King James for the translators' own account of where their English is not the Hebrew. What the page shows is one narrative told twice, and a knowledge that was promised, taken, confirmed, and not called a fall by anyone in the text.

Appendix

The tables below gather what the chapters have cited at their verses, for the reader who wants the witnesses side by side. The witnesses and their leaves are tabulated in Method § C and are not repeated here. A cell reads "—" where the book did not record that witness at that place; the book's readings are of the leaves cited in the chapters, and a blank here is a blank in the book, not in the witness. Early English spelling is as printed; "none" means the witness begins the clause with no connective.

A. The Connective at Every Clause the Method Marks

The seven noun-first verse-openers between 1:1 and 4:1 with a verb following (Method § B), the four verbless clauses of the rivers, the three in-verse turns the book has read, and the three verses that open without a connective.

Sources: Method § B and its notes; chapters 1.1 § A, 2.1 §§ A–B, 2.2 §§ C–D, 2.3 § C, 3.1 § A, 3.3 §§ B–C, 3.4 § D; Great Bible, opening 11 R, and Bishops', leaf 56, at 4:1.

B. The Three Words for the Ground

אֶרֶץ (earth), אֲדָמָה (ground) and עָפָר (dust) at the verses the book reads. Where a verse has more than one of the words, the cells give them in the order of the Hebrew, separated by a slash.

In the Hebrew and in the English from 1540 the man is made of dust, the serpent eats dust and the man returns to dust in one word; in the Greek the three are one word with the ground; in the Latin they are three words; in Coverdale they are two. The Geneva, which keeps "grounde" in chapter 2, has "earth" for אֲדָמָה in chapter 3, and the 1611 restores "ground." Sources: chapters 2.1 § B, 2.2 §§ A–B, 2.3 § B, 3.3 §§ A, C, 3.4 § D, 4.1 § C, 4.2 § C, 4.3 § B; Bishops', leaf 56 (3:19, 3:23).

C. The Terms of Genesis 1–3 and Their History

The words whose renderings the chapters have traced, in the order of their first occurrence. The last column reports the thirteen public-domain English texts described in chapter 4.4 § D, by count where they agree and by name where they divide.

The codes in the last column are those of the text files' distributor: KJV, the King James Version in the Pure Cambridge Edition text; AKJV, the American King James Version (1999); WBT, Webster's revision (1833); DBT, the Darby Bible Translation (1890); YLT, Young's Literal Translation (1862, revised 1898); SLT, Julia E. Smith's Literal Translation (1876); ERV, the English Revised Version (1881–1885); ASV, the American Standard Version (1901); JPS 1917, the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh (1917); DRB, the Douay-Rheims Bible in Challoner's revision (1749–1752); CPDV, the Catholic Public Domain Version (2009); WEB, the World English Bible; BSB, the Berean Standard Bible (2016–2023). A count in parentheses is the number of the thirteen that agree.

Sources: the chapters named at each term in Parts 1–3 and the summaries in Part 4; the thirteen texts as chapter 4.4 § D and its notes.

D. Where the Material of the Earlier Essays Now Stands

The author's essays of 2024–25, assembled in 2026 as Genesis: Hebrew Translations and Interpretations, are the predecessor this book replaces. The table records where each of their chapters has gone.

E. Witnesses and Image Sources

Every reading in this book is cited at a leaf, and this table records where the leaves are. The copy is named as the shelf names it; the identifier is the one the holding library or archive assigns, so that a reader may reach the same image set. Where the shelf does not record where a set came from, the table says so.

The New International Version, the English Standard Version and the New American Standard Bible are in copyright and were not consulted; where the book names them it reports what the author's earlier essays quoted, and only that.