We are still close to the beginning of the geography lesson we were talking about last Sunday. At the moment we are still discussing the first river and the first land on the way out of Eden to reality.
12 The gold of that land is good וּֽזֲהַ֛ב הָאָ֥רֶץ הַהִ֖וא ט֑וֹב
Is there such a thing as bad gold? There can certainly be too much gold, as King Midas found out. I understand the huge amounts of gold the Spaniards brought back from the Americas in the 16th century crashed the home economy with inflation. But our verse can’t really be assuring us that neither of those things was true.
The general consensus about this “good gold” seems to be that either the ore was particularly rich in gold or the gold was alluvial, that is, you could pan the waters of the river for gold. Abraham ibn Ezra explains:
The purpose of saying this is to lavish praise on the river that issues forth from the garden. But I have seen a river with gold in it in Spain, too.
Our text does not exactly say that the gold comes from the river; this is an additional description of the land the river flows around. Nahum Sarna adds something that seems to tilt in favor of the “richness” explanation:
The term “good gold”—that is, high-grade ore—was used in Egyptian commercial transactions.
That seems most reasonable to me. But we will come back to Ibn Ezra’s comment before we finish this verse.
That is where the bdellium is שָׁ֥ם הַבְּדֹ֖לַח
Quick — no Googling! — what is bdellium?
I didn’t know either. The Oxford English Dictionary explains:
1. The name given to several trees or shrubs of the family Amyridaceæ, chiefly of the genus Balsamodendron, from which exudes a kind of gum resin resembling impure myrrh, of pungent taste and agreeable odour, used in medicine and as a perfume.
2. The gum resin thus procured.
3. The translation, in the English Bible, of the Hebrew word b'dōlakh; see above.
Okay, then! Num 11:7 explains that the color of manna resembled the color of bdellium, a factoid which is not particularly informative. I’m leaning in the direction of the idea that Num 11:7 is trying to give a miraculous, Edenic quality to the manna rather than giving us any information that would help us identify b’dolaḥ.
HALOT defines b’dolaḥ as “the odoriferous yellowish transparent gum of a South Arabian tree, Commiphora mukul Engler,” — a different species than the OED suggests — and points to an Akkadian cognate, budulḫu, apparently with this same meaning. But the LXX calls it ἄνθραξ (yes, that says anthrax), which means “carbuncle” in Greek.
This is not the nasty thing on your skin that anthrax apparently shows up as; it is a bright red precious stone. Another dictionary definition of this word is “ruby.” I’m guessing that the “red” of this jewel and the “yellow” of this resin are not as different in color as they sound in the English. In any case, interpretation of this rare word has apparently always wavered between the “precious resin” and “precious stone” meanings.
The Jewish commentators prefer to see bdellium (or at least b’dolaḥ) not as red or orange or yellow. According to them, it is white. Here I’m guessing that they are matching the description of manna as “the color of bdellium” (Num 11:7) with the description in the original story of manna as “thin as frost” and somehow combining them into the notion that manna is white and b’dolaḥ must be too. In Modern Hebrew, b’dolaḥ is “crystal” (and Kristallnacht is B’dolaḥ Night).
and lapis lazuli וְאֶ֥בֶן הַשֹּֽׁהַם׃
This shoham-stone is clearly a jewel of some sort. Here are some of the various translations one can find for this phrase in different sources:
carnelian [red]
lapis lazuli [blue]
onyx [assumed by the commentators to be white]
I’m not enough of a scholar of ancient materials or of comparative Semitics to be able to evaluate these suggestions, especially if the translations prepared by different scholars more competent than I don’t agree. This may be a good place to mention, since I believe this is the first time we’ve faced the problem, that natural things from the ancient world can be extremely difficult to identify from their biblical names.
I’m talking about everything from animal to vegetable to mineral. That’s a problem in this geography lesson too. Don Isaac Abarbanel explains:
The four rivers symbolize four aspects of creation: mineral, vegetable, animal, and human.
Back to the difficulties for translators, the birds of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are a great case in point. We have around twenty or so specific ornithological names in each of those chapters and the identifications of many of them (I believe) is still up in the air. Which Hebrew word refers to an eagle and which to a vulture is more of a conundrum than you might think. I still can’t think of Maimonides as “the Great Vulture.”
Nonetheless, it’s clear that we are to understand b’dolaḥ and shoham as precious materials. Do the colors matter? If we can’t identify the materials with certainty, the colors also escape us. I’ve chosen to call אֶ֥בֶן הַשֹּֽׁהַם lapis lazuli simply because lapis means “stone,” and the word אבן éven ‘stone’ is included in the name of this jewel.
What does matter — at least with shoham — is (1) that it is a jewel and not something else; (2) that Job 28:16 uses it as an example of something extraordinarily precious; and (3) that 8 of the other 9 occurrences of the word in the Bible associate it with the Tabernacle/Temple, and the 9th is Ezek 28:13, addressing the King of Tyre in Eden.
Why are we being told all this about the Pisher? It is the one river about which the geography lesson includes not merely the land it flows around, the Havilah, but also the principal products of that land. It is the beginning of stepping out of the garden and into the real world, where we will most certainly be by the end of v. 14. We do not recognize the names of this river or the land it flows around, but we do recognize at least the names of the remarkable natural resources that must give this land enormous wealth.
If we are supposed to think of this as a real country somewhere vaguely in the Near East, it’s a good bet that they also grew a lot of barley and brewed a lot of beer. We are not really being given a description of the country, though. We’re being told all this, as Ibn Ezra put it …
to lavish praise on this miraculous, Edenic river;
to begin moving us from Eden into the real world via these paradisical but real luxury items.
Next time, we’ll move on to River #2 and Country #2. The country is identifiable, another step toward the world we live in today.