Genesis3chapter 3

Genesis 3:1-3

The first recorded words of the enemy are a question about what God said, and it is the first question anywhere in Scripture. He widens the command into a ban on every tree, and the woman answers by adding to it, saying they must not touch it either. The attack lands on the words themselves long before it reaches the fruit, which is why Jesus answered his own temptation three times with it is written.

Genesis 3:4-5

The serpent's second move is a flat contradiction of God, and his third is an accusation about God's motive, that he is holding something back. Jesus called him a liar and the father of it, and pointed back to this scene. The offer, ye shall be as gods, is the same reach that later builds the tower at Babel, where men set out to make themselves a name and a top that reaches to heaven.

Genesis 3:6

good for food: Three things are named in the fruit, and the same three appear again in John's letter as the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. The same three were put to Jesus in the wilderness and refused. The verbs run in order, she saw, she took, she ate, and she gave to her husband who was there with her. Paul builds his whole comparison of the two men on this one act, and calls Adam the figure of him that was to come.

Genesis 3:7

they knew that they were naked: The promise was that their eyes would be opened, and they were, but what they saw was themselves. The first thing the knowledge of good and evil produced was shame and a homemade covering. Genesis uses nakedness this way again after the flood, when Noah lies uncovered in his tent and two of his sons walk in backward to cover him without looking.

Genesis 3:8-10

the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden: God comes walking in the garden and the man who was made to meet him hides among the trees. The question, Where art thou, is not asked for information, and God puts the same kind of question to Cain in the next chapter, Where is Abel thy brother. Both men are given room to say what they have done, and neither of them takes it.

Genesis 3:11-13

Given the chance to answer, Adam blames the woman and, behind her, God for giving her, and Eve blames the serpent. Neither of them denies the act and neither of them owns it. God's question to the woman, What is this that thou hast done, comes back in almost the same words much later in the book, on the lips of Pharaoh and then of Abimelech, both times rebuking a patriarch who had lied about his wife.

Genesis 3:14

The serpent is cursed without being questioned first, unlike the man and the woman. Dust as his food is a picture of defeat that Isaiah takes up again when he describes the restored creation and says dust shall be the serpent's meat. John names the power behind the creature at Revelation 12:9, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan.

Genesis 3:15

This is the first promise of a redeemer in Scripture, and it is spoken to the enemy rather than to the couple. Two lines of seed are set against each other here, and Genesis follows both from the next chapter on, one son killed in a field and another line kept alive through Seth to Noah and to Abraham. Paul reads the promise as running to one descendant when he says God did not say seeds, as of many, but seed, as of one, which is Christ. A struck heel and a crushed head are different injuries, and the older writers read the seed of the woman, in a book that traces descent through men, as pointing toward a birth with no human father.

Genesis 3:16

Two things are multiplied for the woman, pain in childbearing and a strain in the relationship with her husband. The Hebrew clause about desire and rule is difficult and is read in more than one way, some taking it as a description of what will now happen and others as a prescription for how things should stand. The same two words stand together again in the next chapter, where sin's desire is toward Cain and he is told to rule over it. Childbearing becomes the hard ground of the book, since the three mothers of the promised line, Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel, are each barren before they bear.

Genesis 3:17-18

The ground is cursed and the man is not. Work existed before the fall, so what is added here is resistance, thorns and thistles, and bread eaten in sorrow all the days of his life. Genesis keeps this sentence in view for chapters: Lamech names his son Noah because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed, and after the flood God says he will not curse the ground again for man's sake.

Genesis 3:19

Bread now comes by the sweat of the face, and the man formed out of the ground goes back into it. Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return, is a sentence carried out slowly across a lifetime rather than in a day. Chapter 5 is the record of it being carried out, a genealogy of very long lives that closes almost every name with the same three words, and he died.

Genesis 3:20

Adam names his wife Eve immediately after hearing the sentence of death, and the name means living. He had named the creatures in the garden by what they were, and he names her by what has just been promised about her seed. Giving that name at that moment reads as belief in the promise before there was any child to show for it.

Genesis 3:21

God replaces the fig leaves with skins, which means something died to cover them, and this is the first death and the first covering that God provides rather than man. Garments carry a great deal of the story after this, and every one of them is used to deceive: Jacob wears his brother's clothes and kid skins to steal a blessing, his own sons bring him a coat dipped in the blood of a kid, and Tamar changes her garments to catch Judah. The garment God makes covers a man, and the garments men make hide the truth about them.

Genesis 3:22-23

Sending them out is mercy as much as judgment, since to eat of the tree of life in this condition would fix them in it for ever. The reason given for the sending is to till the ground from whence he was taken, so the man is put back to work the dust he came from. The next chapter opens with his son Cain as a tiller of that same ground, and it is the ground that refuses Cain once it has drunk his brother's blood.

Genesis 3:24

Cherubim and a turning sword keep the way to the tree of life, and cherubim appear next worked into the mercy seat, the one place where blood is sprinkled and a man may come near. The garden is left behind eastward, and eastward is the direction of departure in Genesis, since Cain goes out from the presence of the LORD and dwells east of Eden, men move east and settle in the plain of Shinar, and Lot looks at the plain of Jordan and goes east. The way to the tree is shut at the end of this chapter and stands open again in the last chapter of Revelation.