Gen 3:5, 22, 24

 

“Your eyes will be opened and you will be like the gods who know good and bad” כאלהים ידעי טוב ורע) , Gen 3:5). The translation of the last phrase is disputed. Many modern translations, for example, Luther Bibel, Einheitsübersetzung, NAS, NIB, NIV, REB, RSV, NRSV, and CEB, render it as “you will be like God knowing good and evil.” Ancient versions translated more literally: LXX, Vulgate, the Peshitta, and the targums render: “you will be like gods, knowing good and evil,” and they are followed by early modern translations, such as Wycliffe, Geneva Bible, and KJV, as well as by some contemporary versions: NAB, NJB, and NJPS. Decisive, in my opinion, is the plural form of the participle ידעי , “knowing,” modifying אלהים ; the deliberate contrast of ידע אלהים , “God knows,” at the beginning of v. 5 with אלהים ידעי , “know the gods,” at the end; and the Lord God’s reference in 3:22 to “us, knowing good and bad.”

 

As just noted, heavenly beings appear again at the end of the story, in 3:22 and 3:24: “Then the Lord God said, ‘See! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad. And now, lest he stretch out his hand and take fruit also from the tree of life, and eat of it and live forever . . .’ ” (Gen 3:22). What group is God addressing? Certainly not the couple, since he refers to the man in the third person. Rather, God addresses the group to which he and others belong (“one of us”), characterized as “knowing good and bad.” As God expels the couple from the garden for eating of the tree of good and bad, he sarcastically points to the disgraced couple (“See!”), and tells the group that it is now even more important to keep the couple from eating of the tree of life, presumably the more potent of the two trees. The idea seems to be that since the couple has made such a mess of things by eating of the lesser tree, they would do even greater harm to themselves by eating of the greater tree.

 

The story ends in Gen 3:24 with the cherubim and a fiery revolving sword east of the Garden of Eden to guard access to the tree of life. Ronald Hendel has made a plausible case for the translation “flame of the whirling sword,” with the understanding that “the ‘flame’ is an animate divine being, a member of the heavenly host, similar in status to the cherubim, the ‘whirling sword’ is its appropriate weapon, ever moving like the flame itself.” (Richard J. Clifford, “The Divine Assembly in Genesis 1-11,” in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Najman, and Eibert Tigghelaar, 2 vols. [Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 175; Leiden: Brill, 2017], 1:279-80)