Bereshit 5

(25) And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

(1) Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman: ‘Yea, hath God said: Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’ (2) And the woman said unto the serpent: ‘Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; (3) but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said: Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’ (4) And the serpent said unto the woman: ‘Ye shall not surely die; (5) for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.’ (6) And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. (7) And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves girdles. (8) And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden toward the cool of the day; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. (9) And the LORD God called unto the man, and said unto him: ‘Where art thou?’ (10) And he said: ‘I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ (11) And He said: ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?’ (12) And the man said: ‘The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’ (13) And the LORD God said unto the woman: ‘What is this thou hast done?’ And the woman said: ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.’ (14) And the LORD God said unto the serpent: ‘Because thou hast done this, cursed art thou from among all cattle, and from among all beasts of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. (15) And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; they shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise their heel.’ (16) Unto the woman He said: ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’ (17) And unto Adam He said: ‘Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying: Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. (18) Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. (19) In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ (20) And the man called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. (21) And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them. (22) And the LORD God said: ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.’ (23) Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (24) So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life.

(3) Now the man Moses was very humble, more than all the men that were upon the face of the earth.

For no commandments are given to the brute creation or to those who are devoid of understanding. Through the intellect man distinguishes between the true and the false. This faculty Adam possessed perfectly and completely. The right and the wrong are terms employed in the science of apparent truths (morals), not in that of necessary truths, as, e.g., it is not correct to say, in reference to the proposition "the heavens are spherical," it is "good" or to declare the assertion that "the earth is flat" to be "bad": but we say of the one it is true, of the other it is false. Similarly our language expresses the idea of true and false by the terms emet and sheker, of the morally right and the morally wrong, by tob and ra’. Thus it is the function of the intellect to discriminate between the true and the false--a distinction which is applicable to all objects of intellectual perception. When Adam was yet in a state of innocence, and was guided solely by reflection and reason--on account of which it is said: "Thou hast made him (man) little lower than the angels" (Ps. 8:6)--he was not at all able to follow or to understand the principles of apparent truths; the most manifest impropriety, viz., to appear in a state of nudity, was nothing unbecoming according to his idea: he could not comprehend why it should be so. After man's disobedience, however, when he began to give way to desires which had their source in his imagination and to the gratification of his bodily appetites, as it is said, "And the wife saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to the eyes" (Gen. 3:6), he was punished by the loss of part of that intellectual faculty which he had previously possessed. He therefore transgressed a command with which he had been charged on the score of his reason; and having obtained a knowledge of the apparent truths, he was wholly absorbed in the study of what is proper and what improper. Then he fully understood the magnitude of the loss he had sustained, what he had forfeited, and in what situation he was thereby placed. Hence we read, "And ye shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil," and not "knowing" or "discerning the true and the false": while in necessary truths we can only apply the words "true and false," not "good and evil." Further observe the passage, "And the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked" (Gen. 3:7): it is not said, "And the eyes of both were opened, and they saw"; for what the man had seen previously and what he saw after this circumstance was precisely the same: there had been no blindness which was now removed, but he received a new faculty whereby he found things wrong which previously he had not regarded as wrong. Besides, you must know that the Hebrew word pakaḥ used in this passage is exclusively employed in the figurative sense of receiving new sources of knowledge, not in that of regaining the sense of sight. Comp., "God opened her eyes" (Gen. 21:19). "Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened" (Isaiah 38:8). "Open ears, he heareth not" (ibid. 42:20), similar in sense to the verse, "Which have eyes to see, and see not" (Ezek. 12:2).

They declared concerning R. Hannina b. Dosa that when praying on behalf of the sick, he would say, "This one will live, that one will die." They asked him, "How knowest thou?" He replied, "If my prayer is fluent in my mouth, I know that he is accepted; but if not, I know that he is rejected."

It happened in a certain place that there was a lizard which injured people. They came and informed R. Hannina b. Dosa. He said to them, "Show me its hole." They pointed it out to him, and he placed his heel over the mouth of the hole. The lizard came out and bit him, and it died. He put it on his shoulder and brought it to the House of Study. He said to them, "See, my sons, it is not the lizard that kills but sin that kills." At that time the saying originated : "Woe to the man who meets a lizard ; but woe to the lizard which R. Hannina b. Dosa meets."

(2) היה ערום מכל חית השדה, for the power of imagination which dangles before our mental eye all sorts of visions designed to stir our desire is more powerful within man than within any other creature This is what the sages meant when they said: (Sukkah 52) “anyone who is of greater stature than his fellow also has to contend with a more powerful evil urge than his fellow.” ויאמר אל האשה, her relatively weak intellect was too lazy to understand that the images dangled before her eyes were an illusion. אף כי אמר אלוקים, even though G’d has said not to eat from the tree of knowledge פן תמותון, in order that you do not die, this is not true, you will not die. Once the “serpent,” i.e. her power of imagination had sown the seed of doubt in her mind, so that her intelligence had already been undermined, she said:

(1) ומעץ הדעת טוב ורע, one of the operative, though apparently superfluous, words in this verse is the word ממנו, “from it.” Seeing that the verse had already commenced with the words ומעץ, “and from the tree,” this word appears redundant. It may therefore have been inserted in order to emphasise the severity of the effects of ignoring this warning. Alternately, the word refers to the fruit, seeing the fruit of the tree had not been mentioned at all previously. Interestingly, G’d had not forbidden Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of life, but, on the contrary, the fruit of this tree was included in the instruction to eat “from all the trees of the garden you shall surely eat.” This subject is dealt with at greater length in the kabbalistic writings of our sages.