Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Where are you?
Genesis 3:8-13
8 They heard Yahweh God’s voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Yahweh God among the trees of the garden. · WEB
God comes looking and asks questions he knows the answers to, and both answers shift the blame one step further away.
They heard Yahweh God's voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The phrasing implies something habitual — this is not the first evening God has come, only the first on which his coming produces terror. What had been the best hour of the day is now the worst, and nothing has changed except them.
They hide among the trees, which is a poor plan and a very human one. The verse is quietly devastating: the two creatures made in God's image conceal themselves behind the vegetation he made on the third day.
Then the question. Where are you? God is not gathering information, and nothing in the chapter suggests otherwise; he arrives, he calls, and he already knows what has happened. The question is the opening of a conversation rather than a search, and it is the shape of everything God does in this chapter. He could have pronounced sentence from outside the garden. Instead he comes in, calls, and asks.
The man's answer is an accurate account of his feelings and an evasion of the subject: I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; so I hid myself. He explains the hiding by the nakedness and says nothing about the tree. Everything he says is true and it is not an answer.
God's follow-up cuts straight through it with two questions, and the first is the sharper: Who told you that you were naked? The fact he is offering as an innocent explanation is itself the evidence. Knowledge he should not have has revealed itself in the very excuse he chose. Then the direct question, which cannot be sidestepped: Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?
The answer is one of the most familiar sentences in Scripture because it is one of the most recognizable: The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it. The confession is there — and I ate it — but it arrives at the end of a sentence that has already assigned responsibility twice. First to the woman, and then, in a relative clause that is doing all the work, to God for having given her.
The woman is asked next, and her answer follows the same pattern and is briefer: The serpent deceived me, and I ate. Her account has the advantage of being true — she was deceived, and Scripture elsewhere says so 1 Timothy 2:14 — and it is still an explanation offered in place of a confession.
What neither of them does is the thing the questions were designed to allow. Each has been given an opening to say what they did without qualification, and each has used it to explain why it was not entirely theirs.
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