ABSTRACT
This play of sound and sense prolnpts the thought that the serpent was called Carum for engineering the realization of the significance of being carum.73 Once the association is made, the reader is not surprised to find that, upon realizing the import of being nude, Adam and Eve become shrewd in their venal efforts to shift blame?4 This rhetorical phenomenon of playing with homonyms through the use of more than one sense, both physically and lexically, to enrich the reading experience has been astutely called "polysensuous polyvalency. ,,75
A similar rhetorical phenomenon lies behind the third association, which involves an intricate play on Eve's name. According to Gen. 3:20, the woman is named Ifavva ostensibly for being the progenitress of allliving?6 But if that were all, she would have been named Ifayya) i.e. life-bearer. What /;Javva adds to /;Jayya is an allusion to the serpent, for in Aramaic and other cognate languages "serpent" is bivya.77 Since there has not yet been found a Semitic source for the word /;Javva)78 it may be adjudged a neologism, created to stand phonologically between /;Jayya and /:livya in order to encompass both. Such portmanteau-like words are coined to telescope two terms into one by exploiting the overlap between homonymy and synonymy.
