This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
31 July 2022 Navigate 'up to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
And the human gave names to all the livestock, and to flying birds, and to all wild animals. And for Adam he did not find a suitable counterpart.
The parallelism of the verse is broken by "and to flying birds" (literally, and to bird[s] of the sky) instead of the expected and to all bird[s] of the sky. The expected all, while missing in the Masoretic Text, is present in the Septuagint, Peshitta, Vulgate, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.
"And for Adam he did not find" is perhaps a woodenly literal translation of the Masoretic Text's we-le-adam lo matza, which could also be read as "And for Adam there was not found", despite the grammatically active voice of the Hebrew verb, which in some cases without an explicitly defined subject functions like an English passive. Kittel suggests one of two possible possible readings:
(a) we-la-adam lo nimtsa, which is explicitly passive in Hebrew, and should be read as And for the man there was not found, or
(b) we-ha-adam lo matza, which by removing a preposition reads, And the human did not find [for himself].
Where the Hebrew reads le-adam, the intention of the consonantal text must surely be la-adam.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from a limited set of public domain resources described at biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.