Humour in the Garden of Eden story (1)

We should not be surprised to find humour in Genesis. Some scholars have identified humour in the accounts of Abraham haggling with God over Sodom,^[1] the brotherly competition between Jacob and Esau,[2] the story of Joseph,[3] and, of course, the story of Isaac whose very name is a pun on “laughter.”[4]

I should state at the outset that all humour, including the humour of the Bible, is subjective. Whether or not someone will see something as amusing will depend on a huge range of factors including their primary language(s), their cultural background, and their life experiences. It is difficult – impossible at times – to translate humour from one language into another, and if we’re reading our Bible in English we will miss some of the Hebrew humour, although some of the biblical humour is not language-dependant so we don’t necessarily have to miss it all.

The features most commonly associated with humour in the Bible include puns, wordplays, exaggeration, hyperbole, absurdities, double entendre, sarcasm and contradictions. None of these elements on their own necessarily indicate that a text is humorous, but when several of them are found together in a cluster this is a strong indication that the text may have been intended to be amusing. In my view, we see this kind of cluster in the story about the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3.

Wordplay

Perhaps the most recognisable example of a pun or wordplay in what is often referred to as “the second account of creation” is the play on the word adam.[5]  God made ha-adam (הָאָדָם = the man with the definite article) from the ground, the adamah (הָאֲדָמָה),[6] to work or serve [לַעֲבֹד can mean either] the adamah (2:15) and later God formed all the animals and birds from the adamah and brought them to ha-adam (2:19). Phyllis Trible picks up the close relationship between adam and adamah and translates הָאָדָם, not as “Adam” or even “the man”,  but as “the earth creature”.[7]  The man is called by the proper name Adam for the first time in 2:20 “The man (הָאָדָם) gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for Adam [וּלְאָדָם this time without the definite article, so best translated as a personal name] there was not found a helper as his partner.” Notably, he is named after all the animals had been named.

There is also a wordplay on the word עָרוּם aroom which occurs in the narrative with two completely different meanings. In 3:1 we read that “the serpent was more crafty” (עָרוּם) than any other beast of the field. The word recurs in references to the man and woman as being naked (עֲרוּמִּים aroomim “they were naked” in 2:25; 3:7, 10, 11). Naked is from the root ערה, to uncover, reveal. Crafty is from the root ערם [8]. The adjectival forms of ערה and ערם are identical (עָרוּם). Not only is this a clever wordplay, the narrative may also contain a double-entendre based on it. When Eve is confronted by God about eating the fruit she said: “The serpent tricked or deceived me” (3:13). The word here comes from the root נשׁא “to be deluded” but it can also have the sense of to “be beguiled, enticed”. [9] If so, then we have an intriguing combination of seduction and nakedness, with a serpent which was “more naked” than the other animals.

Contradictions, hyperbole, and absurdities

We also have several contradictions, hyperbole, and absurdities in the narrative. First, we are told that before the creation of the man a mist or stream [אֵד] would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground (2:6). A few verses later we learn that a river [נָהָרּ] flowed out of Eden to water the garden (2:10). Which was it, a mist, or a river? [10] And then we discover that the river, in fact, branched into four rivers – including the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, one in Arabia and one which encompassed Cush – probably Sudan or Ethiopia. These rivers do not connect, and are located in different directions and on different continents. This absurdly impossible geography is somewhat similar to the absurd geography of the book of Judith, [11] a text full of irony and humour. This mythical river in Genesis was probably a deliberate device by the writer to serve a literary purpose, possibly a humorous one. If it was the only absurdity in the story we might be able to dismiss it.

However, we also find the man naming “all the cattle and the birds of the sky and all the wild beasts” (2:20). Did he really name all of them?! How long did this take? (Remember, it takes place between his creation and the forming of the woman.) Is the task even humanly possible? We find another case of hyperbole in the story when “the man named his wife חַוָּה Living because she was [qatal, so not “she would become”] the mother of all living” (3:20). Was she? Not then, only later would she become the progenitor of all humans, but never of “all living.” The root חיה (living) and its cognates has been used at least 10 times before this point (including 3 times in 2:19-20) with reference to animals.[12] Even if its meaning here is restricted to humans, the only other human alive at the time was Adam. Interestingly, there are near identical words in several semitic languages meaning “snake.”[13] Another wordplay?

We also have the problem that with reference to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God said to the man “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” – worded in such a way as to suggest that the penalty would be swift, yet they didn’t die in that same day.[14] In fact, things turned out exactly as the serpent said they would and Adam went on to live for 930 years (5:5.) David Wright says here we have “a tension between the deity’s need to sustain creation and vent his punishing”.[15] But, more importantly, I think we also have God being ridiculed – he is proven to be wrong while the serpent turns out to be right. We have something similar in Job where God responded to the Adversary’s report at their second meeting by saying: “you have incited me against [Job] to destroy him for no good reason” (2:3 NJPS). Having admitted to being deceived or tricked by the Adversary (which I believe is the meaning behind וַתְּסִיתֵנִי “you incited [or misled] me”),[16] God then gives his permission for the Adversary to conduct a further trial; practically setting himself up to be tricked again and for the adversary to destroy Job a second time for no good reason.  The reader or listener is drawn further into the plot and the suspense builds as they wait to see if the Almighty can be tricked again! The narrator of Job employs a form of sarcasm to portray God, not as omniscient, but as capable of being tricked. I think the narrator of Genesis is doing something similar.

Then, after they ate the fruit, “They knew that they were naked” (3:7). How could they know otherwise, or even what it was to be “naked”? Weren’t all the animals naked? Was it only seeing God clothed (or did they?) that they knew that there was an alternative to being naked?

Let’s not forget the greatest absurdity of all: a talking snake! We should also take note of Balaam’s (talking) donkey. There is a definite element of ironic humour in the Balaam story with a parody of the “Seer”[17] who was unable to see the angel, until “the LORD opened his eyes” (Num. 22:31). No doubt something similar is happening here in Genesis.

This article is in two parts. See its continuation in Humour in the Garden of Eden story (2)

---

[1] Arthur Quinn, “The Mirth of God: An Essay on Biblical Humor,” in Play, Literature, Religion: Essays in Cultural Intertextuality (eds. Nemoianu and Royal; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 46-48.

[2] Quinn, “The Mirth of God,” 50-52.

[3] Hershey H. Friedman, “Humor in the Hebrew Bible,”  Humor 13, no. 3 (2000): 262-270.

[4] Joel S. Kaminsky, “Humor and the Theology of Hope: Isaac as a Humorous Figure,”  Interpretation 54, no. 4 (2000).

[5] In twenty occurrences of this word the Hebrew is הָאָדָם with the definite article, and the definite article is never used with a personal name – so it should be the adam, or the man – and only twice without the definite article. In 2:5 it appears with a negation וְאָדָם אַיִן = “and there was no adam, or there was no one.” In 2:20 and 3:17 it has two prepositions וּלְאָדָם but without the vowel of the definite article (including compensatory lengthening of the vowel which would normally occur before gutturals including א). Delitzsch posits that it is without the article because it is employed qualitatively and should be translated “but for a man”  [see Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (trans. Biddle; Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997), 11-12.]. In 3:21 the Hebrew has לְאָדָם again without the definite article. It is probably best translated in the context as “to Man”.

[6] הָאֲדָמָה occurs 8 times in Genesis 2-3.

[7] Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 75.

[8] Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT; Leiden: Brill, 2001), 883.

[9] David J. A. Clines, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). I cannot, however, find another place in the Hebrew Bible where it clearly has this sense.

[10] אֵד is a rare word, occurring only here and in Job 36:27. Gunkel refers to the Babylonian edû (flood, high water)and argues that the meaning “flood” for אֵד is preferable. Gunkel, Genesis,  5.

[11] Please excuse my impudence for citing myself, but for a brief summation of the geographic and historical inaccuracies in the book of Judith see Stephen D. Cook, “‘Foiled by the Hand of a Woman’: Irony in the Book of Judith,” in Irony in the Bible: Between Subversion and Innovation (eds. Häner, et al.; vol. 209 of Biblical Interpretation Series; Leiden: Brill, 2023), 271-272.

[12] Also used of the tree of life (2:9) and the man became a living being (2:7). חיה is used 14X in the second creation story.

[13]Aramaic חִוְיָא See Gunkel, Genesis,  23. Also in Syriac and Mandean. See HALOT which also notes that חוה is an Old Arabic cognate for “snake” (296).

[14] Moberly argues that בְּיוֹם is simply a common Hebrew idiom meaning “when” and does not mean “in the same day.” R. W. L. Moberly, “Did the Serpent Get it Right?,”  JTS 39, no. 1 (1988): 14. However, this seems to be negated in 3:5 בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְכֶם מִמֶּנּוּ וְנִפְקְחוּ עֵינֵיכֶם “in the day (or when) you eat of it your eyes will be opened” and the consequence in verse 7 that their eyes were opened immediately upon eating of it.

[15] David P. Wright, “Holiness, Sex, and Death in the Garden of Eden,”  Biblica 77, no. 3 (1996): 317.

[16] See Koehler and Baumgartner, HALOT,  749.

[17] Note that Balaam is described as a Seer in the Deir ʿAlla Inscription, although not as such in Numbers.