That is so clear, it does not need any explanation. He knew her, and suddenly she has a baby! I should not say suddenly. It was nine months.
The word in the Hebrew that is there translated into the English know, is yada (transliterated) and it has a wide variety of application and one of which is to lie by man, which the translators chose to interpret by the English word know, or in this case, by the past tense, knew. Now, what this does is it adds intimacy to the knowledge of God. It is not just something from which we are detached, but it adds to the knowing God the fact of being close to Him within a relationship. So it is not merely being acquainted. I think today we would probably say something that, it is like we're inside of His head. We know Him inside and out in a way that we are just beginning to understand.
So to know God then includes all the impressions of mind and life which a fair view of God should produce. This includes things like love and reverence and obedience and honor and gratitude and deep affection for Him. Besides, we know Him as our Sovereign, our parent, our friend, our lawgiver; and in the case of Jesus Christ, as our Elder Brother and husband-to-be, and thus we can yield to Him with all of our heart while we are striving to obey Him.
The corresponding Greek word to the Hebrew yada is ginosko. Incidentally, this is exactly the same word that is translated know in John 17:3, and so it is used in the Greek, in the English, and in the Hebrew all in the same way.
All this taken together points to Jesus indicating that eternal life is not merely endless, even though that is its dominant sense, but rather that the one having it is living in close intimacy with God and conducting his life in the same manner as God; otherwise, there would be no close intimacy with Him, because sin separates.
We are going to go to the verse in Genesis 4 that we are probably most familiar with of all in which the verb to know appears. This is perhaps the application that is best known to us.
Here the word is yada again. Perhaps because of the picture that this verse communicates to us, it helps us most to understand the feeling, the closeness, the devotion, the cherishing, the interaction that the words themselves simply cannot imply.
The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible has a very complete, detailed explanation of this word in fine print. It takes them about two or three pages to explain this word. We are not going to go into all the details of that, but I am going to extract a few things from there:
We are not even going to consider the scientific sense because it merely means to have knowledge about something or someone. It means only to be aware of the general features of some object, and that is obviously the way the Jews knew God. They were aware of a few things, but they did not know God at all in a realistic way.
They also call the realistic sense an objective sense.
That word is not even in the dictionary. It is not in my spell check, either, but I will tell you what it means. It means specific things.
Just think about that. To understand the whatness is to understand specific things about the object that one has a relationship with. Put that back into Genesis 4:1 where it says Adam knew Eve his wife, and she bore a son.Now who knows more specific things about the one with whom one has a relationship than a man of his wife, or a wife of her husband? Are you beginning to get the idea of the intimacy, of the closeness, of the cherishing, of the desire, of the feeling that is in this word? I hope you are.
There is a little aside here that we should get to before we go past it, but it will not take long. When these verses are combined with Genesis 1:28-29 and Genesis 4:1-5, it shows that this is not mankind's introduction into eating animal flesh. You can read verse 3 in chapter 9. But in Genesis 1, what God is doing is showing that all life, animal and human, ultimately depends on vegetation: I have given you all the green herbs to eat. And that is true.
Remember Genesis 4:1-5. Abel brought to God an animal sacrifice. That shows us that God had already showed them that their dominion over animals extended to the place that they were able to take an animal's life. God was well pleased with Abel's animal sacrifice. He was so well pleased that it is recorded back in Hebrews 11 that it still witnesses. So God was not overly concerned about the killing of an animal, but what we need to understand is that they understood about sacrificing, and some of the sacrifices had to be eaten. That was a requirement of God. The sin offering was to be eaten, part of it anyway, and the peace offering was to be eaten.
