Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Has God really said?
Genesis 3:1-7
1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any animal of the field which Yahweh God had made. He said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” · WEB
The first attack is on the word of God and then on the motive of God, and the woman is deceived by a promise that is half true.
The serpent is introduced as a creature — more subtle than any animal of the field which Yahweh God had made — and the chapter never explains how a creature came to speak or to want this. Genesis leaves it there. Scripture itself supplies the identification much later and in plain words, naming the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world Revelation 12:9, so the connection is made by revelation rather than by inference.
The method is worth tracing exactly, because it is used again on everyone.
It opens with a question, not a claim: Has God really said, "You shall not eat of any tree of the garden"? The question misquotes by widening. God had forbidden one tree and given all the rest; the question puts a universal prohibition in his mouth and invites the woman to defend him. Anyone who begins by defending God against a charge he never incurred has already accepted the frame.
Her reply corrects the exaggeration and then adds one of her own — You shall not touch it — which God had not said. The command has been enlarged on both sides within two verses, and a rule that has grown is easier to resent and easier to break.
Then the flat contradiction: You won't really die. It is the first lie in Scripture, and its content is precisely a denial of what God had said death would be. The whole of the conversation turns on that sentence, and so does a great deal of what Scripture says afterward about death.
And then the motive is impugned: for God knows that in the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The accusation is that God's command was self-serving — that he is withholding something good in order to keep his creatures small. Every element of the temptation to this point has been about God's character rather than about the fruit.
The cruelty of the promise is that it is partly true. Their eyes were opened, and they did come to know good and evil. What they were not told is the manner of the knowing. They would learn the difference between good and evil the way a person learns the difference between health and disease by contracting one.
The act itself is described in a sentence of three attractions — good for food, a delight to the eyes, to be desired to make one wise — and then four short verbs: she took, and ate, and gave, and he ate. The narrative gives the deliberation four clauses and the deed eight words.
And the immediate result is not wisdom but exposure. Their eyes were opened, and they both knew that they were naked. The first thing the new knowledge produced was a need to hide from each other, and the first human manufacture was a covering.
settled What this mark means