The Purple Robe Stripped in Eden and the Word in the Evening Garden

What the Eyes Found When They Opened

The fruit was eaten. The Torah says their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked. The Targum says their eyes were opened and what they found was an absence.

The purple robe in which they had been created was gone.

Before the fruit, the first humans had been clothed not in spun fabric but in a garment of royal color, the color of the throne's own court. The word the targumist uses is argivan, purple, the royal dye that in the ancient world belonged to kings and priests and to what stood above kings and priests. Adam and Eve in their innocence had been clothed in something that indicated their status before the One who had made them. They were not naked. They were dressed for the place they occupied.

The eating stripped it. Their eyes opened to show them not their bodies in themselves but the loss of what had covered those bodies. The shame was not nudity as a physical fact. The shame was nudity as a displacement from the condition they had been made in. They had been royal. Now they were bare. They covered themselves with fig leaves and improvised girdles and tried to make something of what was left.

The Image Alongside Other Traditions

The rabbinic tradition preserved a second account of the primordial garment. Bereshit Rabbah held a tradition that the garments of skin given by God at the close of the Eden chapter were originally garments of light, and that the Hebrew word for skin and the Hebrew word for light were distinguished only by a single letter. On that reading, Adam and Eve were first clothed in light, then reclothed in skin after the sin, and the animal skins were a diminishment from the original luminous covering.

Pseudo-Jonathan's purple robe stands alongside this tradition rather than inside it. The color is royal rather than luminous. The loss happens at the moment of eating rather than being replaced at the moment of expulsion. But both traditions read the plain text of nakedness as evidence that something had departed, something that the original humans wore in the garden that their descendants have not had since.

The Voice of the Word in the Evening

Then something moved through the garden.

The Hebrew says the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, or more precisely in the wind of the day. The plain text has been read as a theophany, a walking divine presence audible in the afternoon breeze. The Targum will not say it that way.

The Aramaic renders it as the voice of the Word of the Lord God walking in the garden in the repose of the day. Not God walking. The Memra, the Word, the divine speech treated as a presence in its own right, moving through the garden at the hour of rest.

The Memra is the targum's standard solution for any verse that seems to describe God acting inside the physical world in a way that might imply bodily movement or spatial location. The Memra does not spare God the encounter with the physical. It is the medium through which the encounter takes place without requiring the divine presence to be locatable in coordinates. The Memra walked in the garden. The garden heard it. Adam and Eve, stripped of the purple robe that had been their covering, hid among the trees.

The Hour of Meeting and Its Failure

The repose of the day, the cooling evening hour, was not an arbitrary time for the Targum. It was the hour appointed for the meeting between the Creator and the creature. In the garden as it was meant to be, this was the hour of encounter. The Word came through at evening. The humans who had been placed in the garden were supposed to be there, still wearing what they had been created in, ready to receive whatever passed through the garden at the hour of rest.

Instead they were hiding. The robe was gone. The meeting that the evening had been set aside for could not happen in the way it had been designed. The Word moved through the garden at the usual hour and the ones it had come to find were crouched behind the trees, dressed in improvised fig leaves, already beginning the exile that would not be formally pronounced until the next chapter.