Dialogue and Speech

Count the verses in Genesis 3:1-13 that contain somebody speaking and you will find ten out of thirteen. Only verses 6, 7 and 8 are pure narration: she saw, she took, she ate, she gave, their eyes were opened, they sewed, they heard, they hid. Everything else is talk. This is typical, and Robert Alter, in The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), made it one of the foundations of his reading. He argued that Hebrew narrative gives dialogue a primacy that surprises a modern reader, that much of the meaning of a scene is carried by what is said, and that the narration often serves to bridge from one speech to the next or to confirm what a speech has claimed.

Notice too that the exchanges happen two at a time. The serpent talks with the woman; the man is present (3:6 says he was with her) but says nothing. Then the LORD God talks with the man, then with the woman, then speaks to the serpent, who is given no reply. The Danish folklorist Axel Olrik, in his laws of folk narrative (1909), called this the law of two to a scene, and Hermann Gunkel brought Olrik's observations into the study of Genesis. Whether or not you accept their folklore framework, the pattern helps you read: when a third person is present and silent, ask why.

Hebrew marks speech without quotation marks. The usual signal is a form of אָמַר (amar), to say, most often the wayyiqtol וַיֹּאמֶר (vayyomer), and he said, sometimes followed by לֵאמֹר (lemor), saying, an infinitive construct that works like an English colon. Interlinears and translations add the quotation marks for you, and occasionally they disagree about where a speech ends. When that happens, the Hebrew has not said, and an editor has decided.

This lesson reads Genesis 3 in the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) with three questions in hand. What are a character's first words? How does a speech repeat or change something said earlier? And what does a question do, when the one asking it already knows the answer? The Old Testament Survey track has a full lesson on the fall itself; this lesson stays with the speech.

Alter pointed out that the first words a character speaks in a narrative are often a defining moment of characterisation, the point at which the narrator lets you meet the person. His best-known example is the pair of brothers in Genesis 25. Esau comes in from the field famished and says to Jacob הַלְעִיטֵנִי נָא מִן־הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה (hal'iteni na min-ha'adom ha'adom hazzeh). The BSB renders it 'Let me eat some of that red stew', which is fair, but Esau's words contain no word for stew, though the narrator has just used one, נָזִיד (nazid), in 25:29. Esau says something like let me gulp down some of the red stuff, this red stuff. The verb, a hiphil imperative of la'at, occurs only here in the Hebrew Bible, as the free morphology confirms, and later Hebrew uses it for feeding animals. Esau cannot even name the food. He points at it.

Jacob's first words follow at once, and they are as controlled as Esau's are urgent: מִכְרָה כַיּוֹם אֶת־בְּכֹרָתְךָ לִי (mikhrah khayyom et-bekhoratkha li), sell me, as of today, your birthright. The BSB has 'First sell me your birthright'. It is a legal formula, with a date and an object and a beneficiary. In two sentences the narrator has given you both brothers: one ruled by his appetite, the other already calculating. Nothing in the narration says so. The speeches do it.

You have already met two first speeches in this module. In 1 Samuel 3 Samuel's first word is הִנֵּנִי (hinneni), here I am, said to the LORD and then, mistakenly, to Eli. In Genesis 39 the first words of Potiphar's wife are two Hebrew words, שִׁכְבָה עִמִּי (shikhvah immi), lie with me, and Joseph's reply runs to more than thirty Hebrew words: about his master's trust, about the household, about God. The contrast in length is itself the characterisation, and it is visible to anyone who counts the words in an interlinear. In Lesson 5 you will meet Ruth's first words in her own voice, Ruth 1:16, which are among the most remembered sentences in the Old Testament.

Take this as a reading habit, not a law. Not every character's first speech is defining, and some characters never speak at all, which is itself worth noticing. But when you open a narrative, find the first thing each major character says and write it down. You will understand the person faster than from any amount of description, because the Hebrew narrator gives you almost no description to work with.

The serpent's first words open the dialogue: אַף כִּי־אָמַר אֱלֹהִים (af ki-amar Elohim). The BSB renders it 'Did God really say', as most English versions do. The phrase af ki is unusual at the start of a speech, and some grammarians take it not as a question but as an exclamation or an unfinished sentence: so God has actually said. Either way it is not an innocent enquiry. It overstates the command, you must not eat from any tree in the garden, so that the woman is drawn into correcting it, and once she is correcting it she is discussing it.

Notice the name. Throughout Genesis 2 and 3 the narrator calls God יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים (YHWH Elohim), the LORD God. The serpent says only Elohim, God, and in her reply so does the woman. The covenant name drops out of the conversation the moment the serpent begins it, and it does not return to a human mouth in the chapter. You can see this only by reading the speeches against the narration, and it is one of the clearest examples of a narrator characterising speakers by their choice of a single word.

Now set the woman's report beside the command, as the inquiry asked. The LORD God said in 2:16 מִכֹּל עֵץ־הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל (mikkol ets-haggan akhol tokhel), from every tree of the garden you may freely eat. The doubled verb is the infinitive absolute you met in Module 4, which strengthens the verb: eat, you may eat. The woman says מִפְּרִי עֵץ־הַגָּן נֹאכֵל (mipperi ets-haggan nokhel), from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat. The every has gone, and so has the doubled verb. Then the warning. God said מוֹת תָּמוּת (mot tamut), you will surely die, again with an infinitive absolute. She says פֶּן־תְּמֻתוּן (pen-temutun), lest you die. And she adds a clause God did not say: וְלֹא תִגְּעוּ בּוֹ (velo tigge'u bo), and you must not touch it.

Readers have weighed these changes in different directions, and the text does not settle it. One old reading, found in the rabbinic tradition, treats the added clause as a fence around the command that did harm: by making the rule stricter than God made it, she made it easier to doubt. Another reading points out that the narrator never tells us what the man told the woman about the command, which was given to him in 2:16-17 before she was made, and that touch it may be a faithful paraphrase of how they had both understood it. A third reads the softening of the warning as the real sign of drift. You can teach all three, and you should mark that the narrator has given you the materials and withheld the verdict.

Then the serpent answers in 3:4: לֹא־מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן (lo-mot temutun), you will not surely die. He restores the infinitive absolute that the woman left out, and puts a not in front of it. The serpent quotes God's own grammar more exactly than the woman does, in order to deny it. A good reader of speech will notice that the one who knows the command most precisely in this scene is the one contradicting it.

Now the anchor. After the eating and the hiding, the narrator restarts the chain: וַיִּקְרָא יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶל־הָאָדָם וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ אַיֶּכָּה (vayyiqra YHWH Elohim el-ha'adam vayyomer lo ayyekkah), and the LORD God called to the man and said to him, where are you? The whole question is one word. The interlinear parses it as the interrogative where with the suffix for you, masculine singular. It is an unusual spelling: the common question word is אַיֵּה (ayyeh), and the form with this suffix and this final he appears only here in the Hebrew Bible, by the free morphology's count. God's first recorded words to the man after the eating are a single, rare word, and it is a question.

Does God not know where the man is? Readers have answered this for a very long time, and most have answered the same way. Rashi, the great eleventh-century Jewish commentator, wrote that God knew where he was, and asked in order to open a conversation, so that the man would not be too terrified to answer if punishment came suddenly. Christian commentators have generally read it the same way, as a summons to give an account rather than a request for information. The inquiry questions point to the pattern: God asks Cain where his brother is (Genesis 4:9) and immediately speaks of the blood crying from the ground, and asks Elijah what he is doing in the cave (1 Kings 19:9). The question makes room for the person to answer. It is an act of grace as much as of judgment.

The rabbis also noticed the consonants. Written without vowels, ayyekkah is איכה, exactly the same four letters as אֵיכָה (eikhah), how!, the first word of Lamentations and the traditional Hebrew name of that book. A midrash in Genesis Rabbah plays on this, hearing in God's question in the garden the same lament that would later be raised over Jerusalem: the man, like the city, placed in a garden and then sent out. This is wordplay on the unpointed text, and the midrash knows it. The Masoretic vowels read where are you, and the plain sense is a question. But it is a fine illustration of what the vowel points do, and a reminder that the consonantal text can carry more than one sound.

Two more questions follow in 3:11, מִי הִגִּיד לְךָ (mi higgid lekha), who told you, and הֲמִן־הָעֵץ (hamin-ha'ets), from the tree?, and then one to the woman in 3:13: מַה־זֹּאת עָשִׂית (mah-zot asit), what is this you have done? Those three words are a formula of accusation that recurs. Pharaoh says them to Abram in Genesis 12:18, Abimelech to Isaac in 26:10, and Jacob to Laban in 29:25, the morning he finds Leah. In every case a person who has been deceived or harmed confronts the one responsible. Use the concordance and you will find the phrase elsewhere too. The LORD God speaks the language of a wronged party.

Now listen to the answers. The man in 3:10 begins אֶת־קֹלְךָ שָׁמַעְתִּי (et-qolkha shama'ti), your voice I heard, with the object put first, and then every verb is about himself: I heard, I was afraid, I am naked, I hid. Asked in 3:11 whether he has eaten from the tree, he answers in 3:12 with a sentence that puts the woman first and God's gift of her second: הָאִשָּׁה אֲשֶׁר נָתַתָּה עִמָּדִי (ha'ishah asher natattah immadi), the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree. Only then the last word: וָאֹכֵל (va'okhel), and I ate. The woman's answer in 3:13 has the same shape in fewer words: הַנָּחָשׁ הִשִּׁיאַנִי וָאֹכֵל (hannachash hishshi'ani va'okhel), the serpent deceived me, and I ate. Both answers end with the same single word. The admission is true, and it comes last.

Alter gave particular attention to a related technique: what happens when a speech repeats something the reader has already heard, in narration or in another speech. Hebrew narrative repeats a great deal, and the differences between the versions are where meaning gathers. You have just seen it with the command in Genesis 2 and 3. Go back now to Genesis 39, where you followed the leading word hand in Lesson 2. The narrator says twice that Joseph left his garment בְּיָדָהּ (beyadah), in her hand (39:12-13). She tells the household in 39:15 that he left it אֶצְלִי (etsli), beside me, and tells her husband the same in 39:18.

The other changes are as telling. To the servants in 39:14 she says הֵבִיא לָנוּ אִישׁ עִבְרִי (hevi lanu ish ivri), he has brought us a Hebrew man, not naming her husband but blaming him, and setting herself with the servants as Egyptians against a foreigner. To her husband in 39:17 Joseph becomes הָעֶבֶד הָעִבְרִי אֲשֶׁר־הֵבֵאתָ לָּנוּ (ha'eved ha'ivri asher-heveta lanu), the Hebrew slave whom you brought us: now the blame is direct, and the man is reduced from a Hebrew man to a slave. Each version is shaped for its listener. The narrator comments on none of it. He simply gives you the facts first, and then lets you hear her tell them.

And then a gap the next lesson will take up. In 39:19 her husband hears her words and וַיִּחַר אַפּוֹ (vayyichar appo), his anger burned. The narrator does not say at whom. A reader who assumes it was at Joseph has a ready explanation; a reader who notices that a captain of the guard put a slave accused of assaulting his wife into the king's prison rather than executing him may wonder. The text holds both readings open, and a preacher should too.

Alter's work has done more than any other book to teach English-speaking readers to read Hebrew narrative slowly, and almost everything in this lesson can be checked in the Hebrew without him. But a student should know the objections, and they come from more than one direction.

The sharpest concerns a word. Alter described biblical narrative as historicized prose fiction, meaning that its writers used the techniques of fiction to tell what they understood to be the history of Israel under God. Many readers who hold to the historical truth of the narratives object to the word fiction, and the objection is not only theirs. Meir Sternberg, whose work is at the centre of the next lesson, argued in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1985) that the biblical narrator writes as a historian, not a novelist, and makes truth claims that a reader is not free to set aside. V. Philips Long, in The Art of Biblical History (1994), has argued that a historian can use every literary skill Alter describes, and that literary artistry and historical reference are not rivals. Alter meant the word to describe the techniques of the storytelling, not to pronounce on whether the events happened, and readers still argue over whether the label fits. The debate is about what the word fiction implies, and you should know which sense a writer means before agreeing or disagreeing with him.

A second objection comes from historical critics. Alter reads the final form of the text as a crafted whole. Scholars who reconstruct its sources or editorial layers say that some of what he calls art is the trace of combination: two accounts woven together, or a later hand adding to an earlier one. Alter answered with the idea of composite artistry, arguing that an editor could join sources with literary purpose. The question is real, and it is not settled by preference. A third objection is anachronism: the fear that a reader trained on modern novels will look for psychology and irony that ancient writers did not intend. Literary readers themselves have warned against treating biblical characters as though they were people with inner lives the text never gives them.

None of these objections removes what you can see. The serpent says God, not the LORD God. The woman's report differs from the command. Both answers end in one word. Potiphar's wife drops the word hand. Those are facts of the Hebrew, and the critics accept them. What they debate is what kind of text produces them, and how far a reader may go in explaining them. Keep the facts and the explanations on separate lines of your page.

Your step this week: on a new page headed Speech, take the narrative you chose for your Narrator page. Using the interlinear, find the first words of each major character and copy them in transliteration with a short English gloss. Then look for any speech that repeats something already said, a command reported, an event retold, a message passed on, and write the two versions side by side, underlining every difference. Last, list every question in the passage, who asks it, and whether the asker already knows the answer. At the bottom of the page, keep two columns: facts of the text on the left, your explanations of them on the right. Lessons 4 and 5 and the capstone all draw on this page.