Genesis 2:15

Summary

The verse narrates two sequential actions: Yehovah Elohim takes ha'adam ("the man", H0120) and places him in the garden of Eden, with the stated purpose of tilling and keeping it. The two infinitives at the end express the intended function of the man's placement there.

Key words

• va-yiqqach ("and he took", H3947) — qal narrative form; the vav-consecutive marks this as the next event in the story sequence, following directly from the prior narration.
• ha-'adam ("the man", H0120) — definite noun with article ha (H9009), marking a specific, already-introduced referent rather than "a man" in general.
• va-yannichehu ("and he put him", H5117) — hiphil (causative) stem with narrative vav and a pronominal suffix -hu ("him", H9033) attached, meaning "he caused him to rest/settle" inside the object itself; the suffix avoids repeating "the man" as a separate word.
• gan-'Eden ("garden of Eden", H1588 + H5731) — construct chain: gan is in construct state ("garden of..."), linking directly to the place name Eden without an intervening preposition.
• le-'ovdah ("to till it", H5647) and le-shomrah ("to keep it", H8104) — two qal infinitives, each prefixed with le (H9005, "to") and each carrying a feminine suffix -ah (H9034, "her/it") referring back to gan ("garden"), which is grammatically feminine in this suffix usage.

What the text says

The verse is built on two narrative verbs joined by vav-consecutive: va-yiqqach ("and he took") and va-yannichehu ("and he put him"). Both carry Yehovah Elohim as subject, and the second verb incorporates its object as a suffix rather than repeating ha-'adam. This suffix construction is common in Biblical Hebrew narrative and creates a tighter syntactic link between the two clauses than a woodenly literal translation shows.

The purpose clause that follows — le-'ovdah u-le-shomrah ("to till it and to keep it") — uses two infinitives with the preposition le, a standard way in Hebrew to express purpose or intended result ("in order to..."). Both infinitives take a feminine pronominal suffix agreeing with gan ("garden"), confirming that the antecedent of "it" in both cases is the garden itself, not the man.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint adds the relative clause "ὃν ἔπλασεν" ("whom he formed") after "the man," specifying the man as the one previously fashioned — this qualifying phrase has no counterpart in the Hebrew text, which only says ha-'adam. The Vulgate renders gan-'Eden as "paradiso voluptatis" ("paradise of pleasure/delight"), interpreting or expanding the proper name 'Eden (H5731) rather than transliterating it as a place name, unlike the Hebrew and the LXX (which uses "τῷ παραδείσῳ" without naming Eden explicitly in this clause).