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11 at evening time לְעֵ֣ת עֶ֔רֶב
Just for grins, let’s look at the NJPS translations of the five occurrences of this expression:
“toward evening” (Gen 8:11)
“at evening time” (Gen 24:11)
“late one afternoon” (1 Sam 11:2)
“at eventide” (Isa 17:14 and Zech 14:7)
1 Samuel 11 is the story that starts with David strolling on the roof of his palace and watching a beautiful woman bathing. Why ערב érev became “late afternoon” in that particular verse is a question you will have to ask them. This is precisely the same “evening” that was succeeded by בוקר bóqer ‘morning’ throughout Genesis 1.
I’m making a big deal of this for two reasons. First … uh … that is what we do over here at The Bible Guy™, focusing in on the biblical text as relentlessly as we can to see what we might have been missing when we were just thinking of the Bible stories we learned as kids. Second, in the NJPS translation of v. 11 this sentence is going to end with an exclamation point! (Everett Fox has one, too.) So the time of day is leading up to something surprising and important.
Now let’s move the camera back just a bit to get a slightly larger-frame shot. So far Noah has tried three times to explore the planet with birds:
in v. 7, where one or more crows fly back and forth “until the water dried up off the Earth”
in vv. 8–9, where the pigeon “found no rest for the כ [kaf] of her leg” and returns, evidently quite soon
here in v. 11, where the pigeon returns “at evening time”
We conclude that this time our bird has put in a hard day’s work!
and whoa! there was a torn-off olive leaf in its mouth. וְהִנֵּ֥ה עֲלֵה־זַ֖יִת טָרָ֣ף בְּפִ֑יהָ
All right, just to be different — or rather because I am different — I have put that exclamation point in a different place in the sentence, exactly where the Hebrew text puts it.
There are no English-style punctuation marks in the Hebrew text, which instead has a system that puts a mark on each word to tell you how the words are connected. ⇥ See Lesson 34 of my Hebrew course to learn about this system. ⇤ The ! in our verse is provided by the word הִנֵּ֥ה hinneh, which we’ve talked about before. This word, so often translated “behold” (or “lo,” as the King James Version does here) does not carry the biblical flavor those archaic English words do.
What it really means is, “Would ya look at that!” This olive leaf is a surprise — in more ways than one.
I learn from the “Know Your Pet” page for pigeons and doves of a veterinary hospital chain:
Wild pigeons and doves eat a variety of grains, seeds, greens, berries, fruits, and will occasionally eat insects, snails and earthworms.
Antipasto is not listed on this menu, and neither are leaves. (Birds don’t like rabbit food any more than the rest of us.) Our friend the pigeon is signaling to Noah that the water has gone down far enough to reveal plants, and that the plants are still alive. Like the snake of Genesis 3, she is a professional, playing the role in this story that she was hired for. We will see her again, briefly, in v. 12 when, as with the snake, we will say farewell to her.
For now, let me just point out that this leaf was not “plucked” off a tree by the pigeon, as the translations uniformly say — let alone “freshly” plucked. It was torn off, whether by the bird or by the destructive force of the water we are not told. The dictionaries say that טָרָ֣ף ṭaraf occurs just once more in the Bible, in Ezek 17:9, but as Moshe Greenberg points out in his comment to that verse, that word is an Aramaism, “apparently unrelated” to ṭaraf of our verse.
It’s not clear how the Greek translator understood this word. Wevers says:
The translator understood טרף simply as something "torn off," and a torn olive leaf would not be fresh. Noe concluded from this that the water had abated from the earth, and so the leaf was probably lying on the ground from which the water had disappeared.
In other words, this was a remnant of the destruction. The (Aramaic) Targum says our leaf was תְבִיר t’vir ‘broken’. In fact, טרף is the verb Jacob uses in Gen 37:33 when he believes Joseph to have been ripped into bloody shreds by a wild animal. The point in our verse, I believe, is that this is not a leaf newly “plucked” from an olive tree that is still (or once again?) growing, showing that the Earth is returning to life. It is strictly a message about the water level -- contra Nahum Sarna:
The rare noun taraf connotes that it was freshly removed from the tree and was not flotsam, a sure sign that plant life had begun to renew itself.
Nahmanides asserts:
Apparently the trees were not uprooted and destroyed by the Flood. There was not a rush of waters; the whole world simply filled up with water.
See my Commentators’ Bible Genesis volume for the rest of his long description and analysis of various midrashim that say that the olive leaf came from the land of Israel (which was flooded but not destructively, or not flooded at all) or from Paradise. But, says Nahmanides:
The waters of the Flood did not enter Paradise. I suppose they may have been kept out by closing the gates, and when the waters receded the gates reopened.
Once again we are seeing that the kind of detail that would actually explain what “happened” is not essential to our story. What is important is that, as we’ll see next time, Noah understands the significance of this olive leaf.