There was some confusion for me when I read Dr. Kaufman words, “God already had a heavenly host comprised of immortal beings and did not need two more. What He needed was a sublime combination of heavenly ability and rootedness in the perishable earth.” I had originally interpreted the second sentence in light of the first as speaking of two created orders—the immortal angels (heavenly ability) and mortal man (rootedness in the perishable earth)—because God didn’t need any more “immortal beings.” Thus, I concluded that he meant that mankind was not only mortal but would forever remain thus, death being the finality of the individual life even if the collective lives on: so many dead cells flaking off the epidermis of the otherwise vibrant humanity beneath. And of course, if that assumption were true, the logical conclusion would be that there is no conception of an afterlife in Orthodox Judaism. But that is only what I had originally understood him to say.
With few exceptions, the verse-by-verse study in The Pentateuch and Haftorahs reads much like any standard Christian commentary, shedding new light on Kaufman’s intended meaning. Thus, rather than purely spiritual beings, God desired a new manifestation of His glory woven together in a combination of “heavenly ability” and “rootedness in the perishable earth”—two sides to the same creature: eternal portraits in temporal frames, just as Christianity maintains. If not man’s veritable birthright, at the very least it does appear that he has the potential to become immortal in Orthodox Jewish theology. However, it is not a doctrine that the Jew long dwells upon, for his greatest concern is with being a light here on earth: see, for example, Rabbi Harold Schulweis’s Afterlife: What Happens After I Die? Perhaps my initial confusion is part of the price one pays for wrangling with original accountings rather than getting everything nicely pre-digested from secondary sources. Or perhaps it was Kaufman’s insistence on such a drastically different interpretation between the two faiths that threw me off track. As it is, I don’t see that much difference between the Jewish conception of creation and the Christian one, at least on the surface level. Below deck, however, the Christian doctrine of the fall (a.k.a. original sin) creates its own interesting dynamics played against the backdrop of Orthodox Judaism (which we will not take the time to trace out here). These realizations are likely what Kaufman had in mind, our discussion a classic case of talking past one another.
Due of the extensive size of this entry, rather than cramming even more into it, I will post one more follow-up: the afterward to this verse-by-verse commentary: a summation taken from pages 193–195 of The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, entitled, simply enough, The Creation Chapter. Among other things, it comments on Orthodox Judaism’s relation to the contemporary evolutionary perspective, itself keenly interesting in our study of the Jewish theology of the creature called man. In any case, here is the relevant (emphasis on “relevant”; much has been left out in the interest of space) verse-by-verse commentary with particularly pertinent sections highlighted in boldface. Note that Hebrew words have been omitted with an asterisk [*] in their place, as there is no good way to reproduce Hebrew font with few people having it loaded on their computers. Also, following the original text, specific topics have been set off with discrete headings including “Creation Of Woman,” “The Trial of Man’s Freedom,” “The Sentence,” and “The Expulsion from Eden,” to make for easier browsing.
Enjoy!
21. creature. lit. ‘soul.’ In Hebrew, soul is used more widely than in English, often denoting, as here, merely a living being.
26. let us make man. Mankind is described as in a special sense created by God Himself. To enhance the dignity of this last work and to mark the fact that man differs in kind from the animals, Scripture depicts God as deliberating over the making of the human species (Abarbanel). It is not ‘let man be created’ or ‘let man be made’, but ‘let us make man’. The use of the plural, ‘let us make man,’ is the Heb. idiomatic way of expressing deliberation, as in XI, 7; or it is the plural of Majesty, royal commands being conveyed in the first person plural, as in Ezra IV, 18.
man. Heb. ‘Adam.’ The word is used here, as frequently in the Bible, in the sense of ‘human being’. It is derived from adamah ‘earth’, to signify that man is earth-born; see II, 7.
our image, after our likeness. Man is made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God: his character is potentially Divine. ‘God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity’ (Wisdom of Solomon II, 23). Man alone among living creatures is gifted, like his Creator, with more freedom and will. He is capable of knowing and loving God, and of holding spiritual communion with Him; and man alone can guide his actions in accordance with Reason. ‘On this account, he is said to have been made in the form and likeness of the Almighty’ (Maimonides). Because man is endowed with Reason he can subdue his impulses in the service of moral and religious ideals, and is born to bear rule over Nature. Psalm VIII says of man, ‘O LORD . . . Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands.’
27. male and female. A general statement: man and woman, both alike, are in their spiritual nature akin to God.
28. and God blessed them. Cf. v. 22. Here the words, ‘And God said unto them,’ are added, indicating a more intimate relationship between Him and human beings.
be fruitful and multiply. This is the first precept (mitzvah) given to man. The duty of building a home and rearing a family figures in the rabbinic Codes as the first of the 613 Mitzvoth (commandments) of the Torah.
and subdue it. ‘The secret of all modern science is in the first chapter of Genesis. Belief in the dominion of spirit over matter, of mind over nature, of man over the physical and the animal creation, was essential to the possession of that dominion’ (Lyman Abbott). ‘What we call the will or volition of Man . . . has become a power in nature, an imperium in imperio, which has profoundly modified not only Man’s own history, but that of the whole living world, and the face of the planet on which he lives’ (Ray Lankester). (4–5).
3. . . . [He rested from all His work which God] in creating had made. lit. ‘which God created to make’, i.e. to continue acting (Ibn Ezra, Abarbanel) throughout time by the unceasing operation of Divine laws. The thought is contained in the Prayer Book (p.39): ‘In His goodness He reneweth the creation every day continually’. Or, as the Rabbis say, the work of creation continues, and the world is still in the process of creation, as long as the conflict between good and evil remains undecided. Ethically the world is thus still ‘unfinished’, and it is man’s glorious privilege to help finish it. He can by his life hasten the triumph of the forces of good in the universe.
7. formed. The Heb. [*] is from the same root, yatzar, as is used of the potter moulding clay into a vessel, possibly to remind us that man is ‘as clay in the hands of the potter’. The Rabbis point to the fact that in this verse the word for ‘formed’ (vayyitzer) is written with two yods, whereas in v. 19, when relating the creation of animals, it has only one yod [*]. Man alone, they declare, is endowed with both a Yetzer tob (a good inclination) and a Yetzer ra (an evil inclination); whereas animals have no moral discrimination or moral conflict. Another explanation is: man alone is a citizen of two worlds; he is both of earth and of heaven.
dust of the ground. ‘From which part of the earth’s great surface did He gather the dust?’ ask the Rabbis. Rabbi Meir answered, ‘From every part of the habitable earth was the dust taken for the formation of Adam.’ In a word, men of all lands and climes are brothers. Other Rabbis held that the dust was taken from the site on which the Holy Temple, with the altar of Atonement, was in later ages to be built. That means, though man comes from the dust, sin is not a permanent part of his nature. Man can overcome sin, and through repentance attain to at-one-ment with his Maker.
a living soul. The term may mean nothing more than ‘living entity’. The Targum, however, renders it by ‘a speaking spirit’; viz. a personality endowed with the faculty of thinking and expressing his thoughts in speech.
9. tree of life. The fruit of which prolongs life, or renders immortal. The phrase also occurs in a purely figurative sense, e.g. Prov. III, 18.
the knowledge of good and evil. The Targum paraphrase is, ‘the tree, the eaters of whose fruits know to distinguish between good and evil.’ The expression ‘good and evil’ denotes the knowledge which infancy lacks and experience acquires (‘Your children, that this day have no knowledge of good or evil’, Deut. I, 39). ‘Knowledge of good and evil’ may also mean knowledge of all things, i.e. omniscience; see III, 5.
17. thou shalt not eat. Man’s most sacred privilege is freedom of will, the ability to obey or to disobey his Maker. This sharp limitation of self-gratification, this ‘dietary law’, was to test the use he would make of his freedom; and it thus begins the moral discipline of man. Unlike the beast, man has also a spiritual life, which demands the subordination of man’s desires to the law of God. The will of God revealed in His Law is the one eternal and unfailing guide as to what constitutes good and evil—and not man’s instincts, or even his Reason, which in the hour of temptation often call light darkness and darkness light.
thou shalt surely die. i.e. thou must inevitably become mortal (Symmachus). While this explanation removes the difficulty that Adam and Eve lived a long time after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, it assumes that man was created to be a deathless being. A simpler explanation is that in view of all the circumstances of the temptation, the All-merciful God mercifully modified the penalty, and they did not die on the day of their sin.
18. it is not good. From this verse the Rabbis deduce that marriage is a Divine institution, a holy estate in which alone man lives his true and complete life. Celibacy is contrary to nature.
a help. A wife is not a man’s shadow or subordinate, but his other self, his ‘helper’, in a sense which no other creature on earth can be.
meet for him. To match him. The Heb. term k’negdo may mean either ‘at his side’, i.e. fit to associate with; or, ‘as over against him’, i.e. corresponding to him.
19. Better, The LORD God, having formed out of the ground every beast of the field, and every fowl of heaven, brought them unto the man (S. R. Hirsch, Delitzsch, and W. H. Green). See I, 21, 25. The fishes are not alluded to because they are precluded from becoming man’s companions.
call them. Man alone has language, and can give birth to languages. In giving names to earth’s creatures, he would establish his dominion over them (I, 26, 28). The name would also reflect the impression produced on his mind by each creature, and indicate whether he regarded it as a fit companion for himself.
20. but for Adam. The dignity of human nature could not, in few words, be more beautifully expressed (Dillmann).
21. a deep sleep. As in XV, 12, the word implies that something mysterious and awe-inspiring was about to take place.
one of his ribs. Woman was not formed from the dust of the earth, but from man’s own body.
‘We have here a wonderfully conceived allegory designed to set forth the moral and social relation of the sexes to each other, the dependence of woman upon man, her close relationship to him, and the foundation existing in nature for the attachment springing up between them. The woman is formed out of the man’s side; hence it is the wife’s natural duty to be at hand, ready at all times to be a “help” to her husband; it is the husband’s natural duty ever to cherish and defend his wife, as part of his own self’ (Driver).
22. made, lit. ‘builded’; the Rabbis connected this striking use of [*] with the noun [*], ‘understanding,’ intuition, and remarked, ‘This teaches that God has endowed woman with greater intuition than He has man.’
23. bone of my bones. The phrase passed into popular speech (XXIX, 14).
woman. The Heb. word is Ishshah; that for man is Ish. The similarity in sound emphasizes the spiritual identity of man and woman.
24. shall a man leave. Or, ‘therefore doth a man leave his father and his mother, and doth cleave . . . and they become one flesh.’ Rashi says: ‘These words are by the Holy Spirit [*]; i.e. this verse is not spoken by Adam, but is the inspired comment of Moses in order to inculcate the Jewish ideal of marriage as a unique tie which binds a man to his wife even closer than to his parents.
The Biblical ideal is the monogamic marriage; a man shall cleave ‘to his wife’, not to his wives. The sacredness of marriage relations, according to Scripture, thus goes back to the very birth of human society; nay, it is part of the scheme of Creation. The Rabbinic term for marriage is lit. ‘the sanctities,’ sanctification; the purpose of marriage being to preserve and sanctify that which had been made in the image of God. [. . .]
one flesh. One entity, sharing the joys and burdens of life.
25. not ashamed. Before eating of the forbidden fruit (see on v. 9 above), they were like children in the Orient, who in the innocence and ignorance of childhood run about unclothed.
1. the serpent. According to the Rabbinic legend, the serpent in its original state had the power of speech, and its intellectual powers exceeded those of all other animals, and it was envy of man that made it plot his downfall.
subtle. The same Heb. root signifies both ‘naked’ and ‘subtle, clever, mischievous’. Seeming simplicity is often the most dangerous weapon of cunning. The gliding stealthy movement of the serpent is a fitting symbol of the insidious progress of temptation.
yea, hath God said. lit. ‘Is it really so, that God (Elohim) hath said’—a statement expressing surprise and incredulity with the object of creating doubt in the reasonableness of the Divine prohibition.
2. the woman. Guileless and unsuspecting, she falls into the trap—even enlarges on God’s command.
3. neither shall ye touch it. There was no word concerning ‘touching’ in the original prohibition. This exaggeration on the part of the woman, says the Midrash, was the cause of her fall.
4. ye shall not surely die. The serpent boldly denies the validity of God’s threat.
5. God assigned no reason for the command; the serpent suggests one; viz. when God gave His order, it was not for man’s benefit, but because God was envious of what man would become, if he ate the forbidden fruit.
opened. To new sources of knowledge, hidden from ordinary sight—a strong appeal to the curiosity of the woman.
as God. i.e. you will become endowed with a power which is at present reserved exclusively to Himself, viz. omniscience (Sforno); and, having acquired omniscience, you will be in a position to repudiate His authority.
good and evil. A Heb. idiom for ‘all things’ (Cheyne, Ehrlich); cf. II Sam. XIV, 17. The same Heb. idiom occurs in a negative form in XXIV, 50 and XXXI, 24, 29, where it means ‘nothing at all’. The ordinary explanation of the phrase ‘good and evil’ in the literal sense assumes that God would for any reason withhold from man the ability to discern between what is morally right and wrong—a view which contradicts the spirit of Scripture. Moreover, Adam would not have been made ‘in the image of God’ if he did not from the first possess the faculty of distinguishing between good and evil. And if he lacked such faculty, his obedience or disobedience to any command whatsoever could have no moral significance. None of these objections holds good in regard to the temporary withholding of ordinary knowledge from Adam, pending his decision to work with or against God.
6. the woman saw. Though the tempter did not tell the woman to eat the fruit, he had woven the spell. The woman looked upon the tree with a new longing—it was good to eat, a delight to the eyes, and it would give wisdom. She turns her back upon the impulses of gratitude, love, and duty to God. The story mirrors human experience.
with her. Either, ‘who was with her,’ or, ‘to eat with her.’ The desire for companionship in guilt is characteristic of sin.
7. were opened. The knowledge attained is neither of happiness, wisdom, or power, but of consciousness of sin and its conflict with the will of God (Ryle). Next come shame, fear, and the attempt to hide.
naked. They forfeited their innocence. Rashi gives a metaphorical interpretation to the words: ‘They knew that they were naked’—naked of all sense of gratitude and obedience to the Divine will: one precept alone had they been asked to obey, and even this proved too much for them!
fig-leaves. Because they were the largest and best suited for a loin-covering.
8. the voice. Or, ‘sound.’
toward the cool of the day. i.e. towards evening, when, in the Orient, a cooling breeze arises (Song of Songs II, 17). It was this evening wind that carried to Adam and Eve the sound which heralded the approach of God.
hid themselves. Conscience makes cowards of them.
9. where art thou? The Midrash explains that this question was asked out of consideration for Adam, to afford him time to recover his self-possession. ‘Where art thou? is the call which, after every sin, resounds in the ears of the man who seeks to deceive himself and others concerning his sin’ (Dillmann).
10. because I was naked. The Rabbis maintain that ‘one sin leads to another sin’. Adam commits a further offence by attempting to conceal the truth by means of this excuse.
11. hast thou eaten? An opportunity is given Adam for full confession and expression of contrition. A sin unconfessed and unrepented is a sin constantly committed.
12. Finding his excuse useless, Adam throws the blame upon everybody but himself. First of all it is ‘the woman’; then he insolently fixes a share of the responsibility upon God—‘whom Thou gavest to be with me.’
13. Instead of a question, the words may be taken as an exclamation, ‘What is this thou hast done!’
14. the serpent. As the tempter and instigator of the offence, sentence is passed upon it first; and as the tempter, the serpent is cursed, and not its dupes and victims.
shalt thou go . . . shalt thou eat. Better, upon thy belly thou goest and dust thou eatest. ‘Till the eighteenth century it was the general belief that the serpent had been walking upright and was now reduced to crawling. This is quite un-Biblical.
The meaning is, Continue to crawl on thy belly and eat dust. Henceforth it will be regarded as a curse, recalling to men thy attempt to drag them to the dust’ (B. Jacob).
All the days of thy life. As long as thy species lasts.
15. enmity. The sight of the serpent will create loathing in man, and fear of its deadly sting will call forth an instinctive desire to destroy it.
bruise. Because of its position on the ground, the serpent strikes at the heel of man; while the man deals the fatal blow by crushing its head. Therefore the victory will rest with man.
16. greatly multiply . . . over thee. Better, Much, much will I make thy pain and thy travail; in pain wilt thou bring forth children, and thy desire is unto thy husband and he ruleth over thee (B. Jacob). This is no sentence upon the woman. It does not contain the term ‘cursed’. Moreover, God himself pronounced the fruitfulness of man a blessing (I, 28), and therewith woman’s pain and travail are inextricably bound up, being part of woman’s physical being. The words addressed to the woman are therefore parenthetical, and signify in effect: ‘Thee I need not punish. A sufficiency of woe and suffering is thine because of thy physical being’ (B. Jacob).
thy desire. In spite of the pangs of travail, the longing for motherhood remains the most powerful instinct in woman.
17. cursed is the ground. It was Adam’s duty from the beginning to till the ground (II, 15): but the work would now become much more laborious. The soil would henceforth yield its produce only as the result of hard and unceasing toil.
for thy sake. Only as long as Adam lived was the earth under a curse; see on v. 29 and VIII, 21.
18. thou shalt eat the herb. Render, ‘whereas thou eatest the herb of the field.’ The spontaneous growth of the soil will be weeds, which are unsuitable for human consumption. Man’s food is the herb, which he can only acquire by toil.
19. in the sweat. ‘The necessity of labour has proved man’s greatest blessing, and has been the cause of all progress and improvement’ (Ryle).
20. the mother of all living. This translation is incorrect. Render, the mother of all humankind. Otherwise, some word must be supplied after ‘living’, so as to exclude animal life (Onkelos, Saadyah). W. Robertson Smith has shown that the word [*] in the text, which is here wrongly translated ‘living,’ is the primitive Semitic word for ‘clan’; Eve was the mother of every human clan, the mother of mankind. [*] in this sense occurs also in I Sam. XVIII, 18 (‘Who am I, and who are my kinsfolk, [*], or my father’s family, etc.’ RV Margin).
21. The LORD God made. Despite their sin, God had not withdrawn His care from them. Divine punishment is at once followed by Divine pity.
garments of skin. Better suited for the rough life in front of them than the apron of leaves they were wearing.
and clothed them. This is one of the passages on which the Rabbis base the Jewish ideal of Imitatio Dei, the duty of imitating God’s ways of lovingkindness and pity. ‘The beginning and the end of the Torah is the bestowal of loving-kindnesses,’ they say; ‘at the beginning of the Torah, God clothes Adam; and at its end, He buries Moses.’
22. man is become as one of us. As one of the angels; or, ‘us’ is a plural of Majesty (cf. I, 26), meaning, man is become as God—omniscient. Man having through disobedience secured the faculty of unlimited knowledge, there was real danger that his knowledge would outstrip his sense of obedience to Divine Law. In our own day, we see that deep insight into Nature’s secrets, if unrestrained by considerations of humanity, may threaten the very existence of mankind; e.g. through chemical warfare.
live for ever. Through further disobedience he could secure deathlessness. Immortality, however, that had been secured through disobedience and lived in sin, an immortal life of Intellect without Conscience, would defeat the purpose of man’s creation (Sforno). Therefore, not only for his punishment, but for his salvation, to bring him back from the sinister course on which he had entered, God sent man forth from the Garden. Man, having sunk into sin, must rise again through the spiritual purification of suffering and death (Strack).
24. drove out. Sin drives man from God’s presence; and when man banishes God from his world, he dwells in a wilderness instead of a Garden of Eden.
at the east. Either because man dwelt to the east of the Garden, or because the entrance was on that side.
cherubim. What these really were is a matter of uncertainty. According to Rashi, they were ‘angels of destruction’. The first man was forbidden to enter the Garden again, and the slightest attempt on his part to do so would bring down upon him instant destruction. In the Bible generally, the cherubim are symbols of God’s presence (Exod. XXV, 18).
to keep the way. Though the entrance to Eden was guarded by the angels with the flaming sword, the gentler angel of mercy did not forsake them in their exile. Adam and Eve discovered Repentance—the Rabbis tell us—and thereby they came nearer to God outside of Eden than when in Eden.
Hertz, J.H. (Ed.). The Pentateuch and Haftorahs: Hebrew Text, English Translation, and Commentary, 4–13.
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