Genesis 3:8

Summary

Genesis 3:8 recounts that the man and his wife heard the sound of Yehovah God moving through the garden at the time of the day's wind, and in response they hid themselves among the trees, away from his presence. The verse is built as a chain of narrative actions: hearing, then hiding.

Key words

• yishme'u ("they heard", H8085) — qal narrative verb (vav-consecutive), masculine plural; the subject "they" is only identified later in the verse as the man and his wife.
• qol ("sound of", H6963) — masculine singular construct noun; grammatically the participle that follows agrees with this noun, not directly with the divine name.
• mithhallekh ("walking about", H1980) — hithpael (reflexive/iterative stem) participle, masculine singular; describes an ongoing, back-and-forth movement.
• le-ruach ha-yom ("to/for the wind of the day", H7307 + H3117) — ruach is a feminine singular construct noun meaning "wind" or "breath"; combined with ha-yom ("the day"), it locates the action temporally/atmospherically.
• yitchabbe ("he hid himself", H2244) — hithpael narrative verb, reflexive in force, matching the reflexive form of mithhallekh earlier in the verse.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a narrative vav plus yishme'u, a plural verb whose grammatical subject is not stated until several words later, when ha'adam ("the man", H0120) and ishto ("his wife", H0802 + suffix) appear as the ones who hide. This means the opening clause reads literally as "and they heard the sound of Yehovah God walking-about in the garden to the wind of the day" — the identity of "they" is deferred, built into a chain of vav-consecutive verbs typical of Hebrew narrative sequencing.

The phrase qol Yehovah Elohim mithhallekh places the participle mithhallekh in agreement with qol ("sound"), a masculine singular noun, rather than requiring it to modify the divine name directly, though semantically the movement belongs to the subject producing the sound. The construct phrase le-ruach ha-yom uses ruach, a word whose range includes "wind," "breath," and "spirit," here anchored by "the day" to indicate the temporal setting of the sound and the concealment that follows.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders le-ruach ha-yom as τὸ δειλινόν, "the afternoon," a temporal expression rather than a literal rendering of "wind of the day." The Vulgate reads ad auram post meridiem, "to the breeze after midday," combining "breeze" (closer to ruach) with an added temporal marker, "post meridiem," not explicit in the Hebrew construct phrase. The Vulgate also restructures the opening as a subordinate temporal clause ("Et cum audissent..."), differing from the Hebrew's paratactic chain of independent narrative verbs (vayyishme'u... vayyitchabbe).