Genesis , Commentary to Chapter 2 : 4 - 24 Robert Alter

Robert Alter 4. As many modern commentators have noted, the first Creation account concludes with the summarizing phrase in the first half of this verse: " This is the tale [literally, these are the begettings] of the heavens and the earth when they were created," these two paired terms, "heavens" and "earth," taking us back in an envelope structure to the paired terms of the very first verse of the Creation story. Now, after the grand choreography of resonant parallel utterances of the cosmogony, the style changes sharply. Instead of the symmetry of parataxis, hypotaxis is initially prominent [parataxis is a rhetorical and syntactic arrangement in which clauses are strung together in series, without subordination: We ran, we sang, and we told jokes; hypotaxis is the syntactic subordination of one clause to another: As we ran, we sang and told jokes]: the second account begins with elaborate syntactical subordination in a long complex sentence that uncoils all the way from the second part of verse 4 to the end of verse 7. In this more vividly anthropomorphic account, God, now called YHWH 'Elohim instead of 'Elohim, as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yatsar instead of bara', "create"), blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib. Whatever the disparate historical origins of the two accounts, the redaction gives us first a harmonious cosmic overview of creation and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins. 7. the human, humus. The Hebrew etymological pun is 'adam, "human," from the soil, 'adamah. 16-17. surely eat ... doomed to die. The form of the Hebrew in both instances is what grammarians call the infinitive absolute: the infinitive immediately followed by a conjugated form of the same verb [in this case, mot tamut, ‫תמות‬ ‫.]מות‬ The general effect of this repetition is to add emphasis to the verb, but because in the case of the verb "to die" it is the pattern regularly used in the Bible for the issuing of death sentences, "doomed to die" is an appropriate equivalent. 18. sustainer beside him. The Hebrewèzer kenegdo (King James Version "help meet") is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means "alongside him," "opposite him," "a counterpart to him." "Help" is too weak because it suggests …