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 two of them were arumim, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed. And the serpent was more arum than any wild animal that Yahweh God had made. And he said to the woman, Has God really said you cannot eat from any tree of the garden?
If you're not aware, for a plural adjectives like this one, -im is the plural ending in Hebrew, like the English -s would function attached to a noun. But these aren't quite the same word. Arumim here is the plural of arom, "naked," while arum here is a word meaning something like "clever."
I cannot help but suspect, through, that the similarity between the two words, both spelled ʔrwm in the consonants-only Hebrew system, is no coincidence. I think it's more of the kind of low-level wordplay that the Hebrew Bible likes so much.
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