2.2 Commentary on Gen. 2:15
"And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."
And … took: Biblical Hebrew does not have tenses in the sense as English has. Rather, it has two inflectional patterns – one characterized by the addition of suffixes to the basic form, the other by the addition of prefixes and, in some cases, suffixes (but different ones) as well. These forms refer less to tense than to a verbal aspect (perfect/imperfect). However, under certain circumstances, the imperfect form can take the meaning of perfect forms and vice versa, depending on the syntactic context: In this verse (in the Hebrew), there is a wa- put in front of the verb which means basically ‘and’, but in this place and with this vocalisation (by default: wə-) it is used to express a ‘narrative mode’. The translations differ in the extent to which they retain the Hebrew construction: While 1 and 3 follow the original verb form, translation 2 varies: its translation with ṯumma (then, thereupon) emphasises that this verb is part of a narrative sequence of events of the creation of earth and man.
LORD God: In the original Hebrew, ‘God’ is evocated twice, one time by the word ‘elohim’ (meaning God[s]), one time by the Tetragrammaton YHWH . Unlike 2 and 3, 1 is reduced to one word for the Divine; 2 and 3 vary in the grammatical determination of the respective second term.
the man: Here translation 3 inserts an additional preposition. The reason might be that in Hebrew, the specific direct object is marked by the preposition ʾet, which in Arabic does not exist. The Hebrew word adam is not necessarily a proper noun. It has also the sense of ‘human being’.
put him: Every translation uses a different verb for this action. Nevertheless, 2 and 3 are closer to each other insofar as they use different stems of the same root (q-r-r).
garden of Eden: Every translation uses a slightly different word form for garden (1 uses the plural form of 2). However, they all share the same root (ǧ-n-n). It might be possible that 3 did not translate the expression ‘garden of Eden’, but rather took it directly from Hebrew where the cognate root is used (g-n-n).
to dress it and to keep it: 1 retains the subordinate clauses from the original, while 2 and 3 prefer the translation with verbal nouns. However, concerning the first part of the expression (“to dress it”) 2 and 3 differ by using different Arabic roots (f-l-ḥ and ḫ-d-m).