Texts in Conversation
Genesis 3 says that humans have become like one of the gods, with similar knowledge. The Aramaic translation in Targum Onkelos avoids this idea by reinterpreting the language to mean that the human is now unique in the world.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 3:22
Hebrew Bible
21 The Lord God made garments from skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not be allowed to stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God expelled him from the orchard in Eden to cultivate the ground from which he had been taken.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Onkelos Genesis 3:22
Targum
21 And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of honor to wear on their skin, and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, Look, man has become unique in the world by himself, knowing good and evil; and now he might reach out his hand and also take from the Tree of Life, eat, and live forever. 23 and the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to cultivate the ground from where he had been created.
Date: 50–500 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The Bible has the anthropomorphic 'as one of us to know good and evil.' Onkelos treats kehchad, usually translated 'as one,' as 'unique.' The translator adds 'in the world' to explain where humans are unique. He treats, as does Saadiah, mimenu 'as us,' as if it were written memeno - referring only to humans: 'by (or, from] himself.' The two disconnect the word from what precedes it, and connect it to the following phrase. In essence, our targumist avoids an anthropomorphic scene where God might be speaking to others and saying that humans are like divine beings. Instead, the verse is telling us that humans are unique in that they have free will to choose between good and evil ..."
Israel Drazin and Stanley M. Wagner, Onkelos on the Torah, Genesis: Understanding the Bible Text (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2006), 21.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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