… Four Rivers Out (Gen 2:10)
Into and Out of the Garden
10 and from there it splits and becomes four headwaters וּמִשָּׁם֙ יִפָּרֵ֔ד וְהָיָ֖ה לְאַרְבָּעָ֥ה רָאשִֽׁים׃
The meaning of this phrase seems obvious, especially when we know what immediately follows: the one river splits into four. When I work on translating, though, I’m finding three things that make me stop and think. “The Bible is written in human language,” as the Talmud sometimes points out, so there may not be anything profound to learn from them, but if there is anything to learn here we won’t learn it without looking at them. As they say over at the lottery booth, you can’t win if you don’t play.
Here are the “ungrammaticalities” I’ve noticed in v. 10b:
In v. 10a, the river “was coming forth” from Eden, using the participle form (the verbal adjective). Now the verse switches to the imperfect — implying that this is something that happens regularly, an ongoing feature of the world: this one river splits into four.
More precisely, it splits “and becomes” four: an imperfect verb (“it splits”) followed by a converted perfect (“and becomes”). What need is there to say this?
Finally, why doesn’t this one river split into four rivers? Instead, it literally splits into four “heads.”
Let’s see what we can figure out.
All the translations and commentaries that I’ve looked at actually ignore the first two of these problems. Most use a present tense, some a past, but they use the same tense both for the particple (“was coming forth”) and for the imperfect/converted perfect pair (“splits and becomes”). This kind of smoothing out happens all the time in Bible translations. It eliminates the bumps in the road, but sometimes those bumps are there for a reason.
So I’m going to give in to temptation and retranslate the beginning of v. 10 to make the whole thing read as follows:
A river coming forth from Eden to water the garden separates from there and becomes four headwaters.
It’s not the and in the verse that makes this translation difficult to accept, but “from there.” Biblical Hebrew does sometimes string phrases together with and that we have to translate as if the and weren’t there. But the examples of this I recall connect verb phrases, not a nominal sentence and an adverb. Still, this translation is possible, and I think it is worthwhile — because it will solve both those first two problems at once.
If we translate the verse this way, the imperfect verb yippared does not refer to the river’s splitting into four branches. Instead, it refers to the river’s separating from Eden. Presumably, by doing so, it leaves the world of myth and enters the world we know from Rand McNally. This, of course, is exactly what we find as we read on; vv. 11–14 move us solidly into the world of recognizable geography.
Now problem two is solved as well. This river leaves Eden — using the verb יִפָּרֵ֔ד — and then becomes four rivers instead of one, with the verb וְהָיָ֖ה. Those who know their Hebrew will recognize that this is the verb to be, but as I explained on Day Four of creation, היה + the preposition ל means not be but become.
That still leaves us with problem three. What is it, exactly, that this river becomes?
רֹאשׁ rosh is the word for a “head,” like what you presumably have atop your shoulders. It’s also used metaphorically, as we do in English, for a person who’s in charge of something or at the top of a hierarchy, like the “head priest” of 2 Kgs 25:18. But rosh in v. 10 here is a unique usage of the word. There seem to be two possibilities of what it may be implying:
This unnamed river divides and becomes the “beginnings” of four other rivers. If you think of the festival of Rosh Hashanah, literally “the head of the year,” you understand that this is a possible meaning of the word. The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew translation of “headwaters” is what I’ve chosen to use. Speiser in the Anchor Bible writes, “In Hebrew the mouth of the river is called “end” (Josh 15:5, 18:19); hence the plural of rōʾš “head” must refer here to the upper course. This latter usage is well attested for the Akkadian cognate rēšu.”
Despite that explanation, Speiser’s own translation calls these heads “branch streams.” Though that is obviously what they are, why should “heads” be used to describe branches of a river? The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament translates similarly, under ראשׁ meaning 9.f.ii, where meaning i refers to military “units” — not administrative units, but separate portions of a larger force that move in different directions or attack from different angles. See 1 Sam 11:11, where “Saul arranged the army into three columns [רָאשִׁים֒].” Why a word for “head” should mean this is not clear to me, unless it’s related to our idiom in English of “heading” off in a certain direction.
If there’s a reason our author chose this quite unusual way to say what it seems obvious he is saying, I cannot think of it — unless we are once again seeing a writer who is not merely trying to convey information, but doing so in a literary way.
This word ראשׁ, after all, is also at the root of the word ראשׁית, the word with which our story began. So I’m going to suggest that the use of yippared connects our story with the separation that was so characteristic of Genesis 1 (though this particular word has not appeared before), and that the use of rosh connects our story verbally with the first word of the Bible, bereshit, though its meaning here differs from its meaning there.
Why our story has been interrupted in this way is something we’ll discuss next time.