… 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.