The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary

"The story as we have it is told in chapters 1-3 of Genesis in very few lines, 50 verses or so. It’s next to nothing, and yet it is unforgettable. I chose the Robert Alter translation because it’s extremely sensitive to the Hebrew original. You can find online a word-by-word translation of the Hebrew original, but that has no poetic power. Robert Alter has a profound literary sensibility and he’s highly alert to the implications of the Biblical Hebrew. To take a single example, in the King James version of the Bible, it says that Eve was hungry and saw the tree was ‘pleasant’ to look at. The translators deliberately chose a rather neutral word. Alter points out in the notes that the Hebrew word is actually ‘ ta’awah, ’ which means ‘ lust for the eyes.’ You wouldn’t know, if you didn’t read Hebrew, that the tree is described as an object that arouses intense desire . “You wouldn’t know, if you didn’t read Hebrew, that the tree is described as an object that arouses intense desire” Why is it so interesting that God creates a particularly alluring tree? The United States is filling the world with potentially disastrous nuclear waste. We naturally desire to put this waste somewhere where people can’t get their hands on it and destroy themselves. We bury it deep underground, and we worry about the signs we put up to guard it, because we take in that someone coming upon the sign in 10,000 years may not understand our words and images. Genesis too is a story about an evil that will poison the entire human race; indeed God knows that it will poison the entire human race. He says to Adam—not to Eve, but to Adam—‘Do not eat this, lest you die.’ He does not explain to the human what death is. He puts the tree in the middle of the garden. He doesn’t build a fence around it. And the tree produces fruit that is ‘lust for the eyes.’ That’s a turn of the screw, and one that people for several thousand years have brooded about. Ta-awah focuses the story on the relationship between freedom and desire and raises questions about the responsibility of god as well as humans. It’s quite important that they’re not there. No motivation is given to the serpent; there’s no account of original sin. It’s unclear from the verses whether mortality—either for humans or all creatures—is an actual consequence of this act, or that it was part of a natural fate that eating the fruit of the tree of life might have averted, had the humans not been expelled. Many questions are left open. The story cunningly, brilliantly represents the fatal transgression as the eating of a piece of fruit. Not the digging of a tuber, not the killing of an animal, not the planting of wheat. We still represent, in fact we still experience the plucking and eating of fruit as one of the fundamental human pleasures. I’ve never killed a chicken in my life, but I’ve eaten a lot of apples off trees. The eating of fruit is human survival in its perfect form, in the Bible’s own account and in our lives, and yet that is the act that causes the disaster. At least according to al-Kisa’I’s early 13th-century Tales of the Prophets , yes. It’s a particularly beautiful, alluring camel. In the Quran, the serpent is identified as Iblis, the Satanic tempter who stood up and resisted Allah out of pride and arrogance. It’s a nice, long life, but it’s not a round number like one thousand. At least in one account, he gave seventy to King David. But there’s a dauntingly long record of commentary and speculation."