An Earthling Made of Dirt (Gen 2:7)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁷ YHWH God molded the earthling וַיִּיצֶר֩ יְ׳הוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם

I am switching back at this point to calling ha-adam “the earthling,” because when we get to the rest of this phrase I’ll be using “earth” as well for adamah. We will not see ארץ éretz, the “earth” of Gen 1:1, again until vv. 11–13, where it means “land” or “country” (with a name), and then not again until Genesis 4 in the story of Cain and Abel. So bringing our story “down to earth,” as I described it a few posts ago, actually involves using a different word for “earth.”

Next, let me point out that this is the first action we’ve seen in Genesis 2. Our second version of the creation story started more or less in v. 5, but (like Genesis 1) with vv. 5–6 describing the background against which the story will play out. Now we have the first converted imperfect verb of this story, the standard verb form used to tell biblical stories and keep the plot moving.

The first action in Genesis 1 was that “God thought” (1:3), an action that was followed by light coming into being. In the Genesis 2 version, the first action we see is God molding an earthling out of dirt. Forgive me, by the way, if I say just “YHWH” or even just “God” when I’m discussing that character in our story. I’ve made the point that the Bible itself has the unusual “YHWH God” combination here in Genesis 2–3. If I revert to one or the other in our discussion, please don’t let that confuse you. The translation will always reflect what the text says.

The English translations I always consult first (NJPS, KJV, NRSV, Everett Fox) all say that YHWH “formed” the man, except for Robert Alter, who uses “fashioned.” I have deliberately chosen to say “molded,” but all of us are focused on the same task, evoking the word וַיִּיצֶר֩ va-yítzer, and the precise meaning it has elsewhere in the Bible: to shape clay.

A יוצר yotzer is a “potter.” There is a famous occurrence of this word in the words of Jeremiah, which grew into a famous poem sung on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement:

^{Jer 18:3} I went over to the potter’s house and saw him at work at the pottery wheel. ⁴ The object he was making out of clay got ruined under the potter’s hand, so he made it into a different utensil, as the potter thought right to do.

⁵ The word of YHWH came to me: ⁶ “Can I not do to you, O House of Israel, just what this potter does? Just like that clay in the potter’s hands — that is what you are in My hands, O House of Israel.”

Though it is definitely a word of artisanry — the idol-maker who does this verb in Isa 44:12 is a metal-worker, and the related verb צור is also be used for casting metal — God is the subject of this verb a remarkable number of times, and it is sometimes used in poetic parallelism with the verb ברא, the “create” verb of Genesis 1. You might say our chapter is doing the same.

The distinction in our case is that, literary parallelism aside, Genesis 1 uses this verb in 1:27 to say that God “created” ha-adam, presumably ex nihilo, while here the earthling is molded out of dirt. As we’ll see in v. 19, YHWH will also mold a set of animals using this same verb. In Genesis 1, as you remember, God thought, Let the Earth bring forth [תּוֹצֵ֨א] life (1:24) but eventually made [וַיַּ֣עַשׂ] the animals himself. Either way, there is a distinction between this and the creation of humans via ברא. In our chapter, it is even clearer that humans and animals are molded in the same way, not differently.

Before we get our hands dirty, a quick note about spelling.

The verb used to mold the earthling is וַיִּיצֶר֩, while the same verb in v. 19 is spelled וַיִּצֶר֩. Let me remove the vowels and punctuation so you can see a bit more clearly the feature I’m about to discuss:

• earthling — וייצר

• animals — ויצר

It is a question of using the letter י (y/i/j in our alphabet, yod in Hebrew, and ι [iota] in Greek) once (for the animals) or twice (for the earthling). I mention it not because it has any significance whatsoever for the kind of reading we are doing here; it doesn’t. Biblical spelling just isn’t regular.¹ Jewish tradition, however, has made much of this spelling in order to assert that human nature is not unified but bifurcated. Follow this link to Genesis Rabbah if you are interested in pursuing that thought.

of dirt from the earth עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה

Before our brief discussion of dirt, an even briefer one of of. Those who read Hebrew can see that the phrase above does not have a preposition. An over-literal translation of v. 7a would be “YHWH God molded the earthling dirt from the earth.” Biblical Hebrew has a way, strange at first to our English ears, of using nouns as adverbs. When an English translation has someone “at the entrance to the tent” or going “to the house,” those words are often missing in the Hebrew and added by the translator to make the English readable and clear. I’ve done the same.

Now, that dirt. עפר afar is often translated “dust.” Basically everyone who speaks the English language knows the King James translation of Gen 3:19, which ends, “dust [עָפָ֣ר] thou art, and unto dust [עָפָ֖ר] shalt thou return.” This is one of the many cases where I’m deliberately using a word we’re not used to in the context. Here’s why.

When I hear the word “dust,” I automatically think of furniture … of drawing my name (or, in honor of my friend Michael Lewis, QPR RULE OK) on the windshield of a parked car that hasn’t been moved for a while, or dust under the bed. But human beings were not made out of dust bunnies.

A UK English meaning of the word dust is actually closer to the Biblical Hebrew meaning. You’ll remember it if you think of Eliza Doolittle’s father in Pygmalion, a/k/a My Fair Lady. As portrayed by the great Stanley Holloway, he was a dustman — that is, in US English, a garbage collector. Here is a verse from the Psalms, in the NJPS translation, where עפר in the first line is paralleled by refuse (that is, garbage) in the second:

^{Ps 113:7} He raises the poor from the dust [עָפָ֣ר],

     lifts up the needy from the refuse heap.

Once again, my standard English go-to translations have stuck with “dust” here. Robert Alter uses “soil,” which is much closer to what must really have been intended in our verse. I’ve chosen dirt because the slightly more negative aroma of that word (to me) leans a little bit further in the garbage direction. It also makes what is about to happen in the rest of our verse — which we’ll look at in Tuesday’s post for subscribers — even more remarkable.

1. For more than you may want to know about the vagaries of spelling in the Bible, see the 1986 book by James Barr, The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible, reviewed here by Emanual Tov.