World English Bible · Before the nations
Genesis 3
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Now was more subtle than any animal of the field which had made. He said to the woman, "Has really said, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" The woman said to , "We may eat fruit from the trees of the garden, but not the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden. has said, 'You shall not eat of it. You shall not touch it, lest you .'" said to the woman, "You won't really , for knows that in the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like , knowing good and evil." 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 to make one , she took some of its fruit, and ate. Then she gave some to her husband with her, and he ate it, too. Their eyes were opened, and they both knew that they were . They sewed fig leaves together, and made coverings for themselves. They heard voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the of among the trees of the garden. called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?" The man said, "I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was ; so I hid myself." said, "Who told you that you were ? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it." said to the woman, "What have you done?" The woman said, " deceived me, and I ate." said to , "Because you have done this, you are above all livestock, and above every animal of the field. You shall go on your belly and you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between and her . He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel." To the woman he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. You will bear children in pain. Your will be for your husband, and he will you." To he said, "Because you have listened to your wife's voice, and have eaten from the tree, about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat of it,' the ground is for your sake. You will eat from it with much labor all the days of your life. It will yield and to you; and you will eat the herb of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your until you return to the ground, for you were taken out of it. For you are , and you shall return to ." The man called his wife Eve because she would be the mother of all the living. made garments of animal skins for and for his wife, and clothed them. said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand, and also take of , and eat, and live —" Therefore sent him out from , to till the ground from which he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of , and a flaming which turned every way, to guard to .
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis