King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 3
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Now was more subtil than any beast of the field which had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto , We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye . And said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely : For doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be to make one , she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were ; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and and his wife hid themselves from the of amongst the trees of the garden. And called unto , and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was ; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast ? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, beguiled me, and I did eat. And said unto , Because thou hast done this, thou art above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy and her ; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy shall be to thy husband, and he shall thee. And unto 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: is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; also and shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for thou art, and unto shalt thou return. And called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. Unto also and to his wife did make coats of skins, and clothed them. And 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 , and eat, and live for ever: Therefore sent him forth from , to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of Cherubims, and a flaming which turned every way, to keep of .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. 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