"Let the earth sprout greenery" (Gen 1:11)
Reading through the story of creation
11 God thought וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים Once again, I’ll direct those who expected to read “God said” at the beginning of v. 11 to my discussion of this phrase in v. 3. Readers who have been with us since then will not be surprised to see it here.
But you will be surprised — at least, I was — to see va-yomer elohim again right now. Jewish tradition likes to think of Tuesday as a lucky day, the day where “God saw that it was good” occurs twice, but (though I had never given it serious thought before) something much more important has happened. This is the first time God has had two thoughts on the same day.
On Day One, God decided that light should come into being. On Day Two, he decided to make a cupola (which he named Sky) to divide the water above from the water below. And, as we’ve recently seen, on Day Three he decided that the water below should move out of the way of the dry land, which he named Earth. But the work of Day Three is not finished!
We’ll discuss this again at the end of Day Three (and, I imagine, again at the end of Day Six or perhaps Day Seven). But it’s worth spending at least a few moments now to consider why two creations happen — for the first time — on Day Three. Was this part of the original plan? Was God excited by the possibilities when he saw the dry land and couldn’t wait for tomorrow to get to work on it? Was there a second creation on Day Two as well, but in the heavenly realm about which we are not told and perhaps are forbidden to ask? Again, we’ll come back to this later when we’ve got some more data.
Let the earth sprout greenery תַּֽדְשֵׁ֤א הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ דֶּ֔שֶׁא
Tuesday, then, is Earth Day — and the new hire is put to work immediately. The Sky has not been asked to do anything except act as a waterproof barrier (which is hard enough, I guess). But the Earth – now that it is above the surface of the water – must bring forth plant life. As we’ll see later in our story, “life” is a bit of an exaggeration; Genesis 1 seems to reserve that concept for things that can move around. Nonetheless, we will soon learn that these plants are going to reproduce.
The Hebrew of our phrase — tadshe ha-aretz déshe — uses the root דשׁא twice, as a verb and as the “cognate accusative.” Impress your friends at parties with that one; it simply means that the verb takes an object derived from the same Semitic root. In English, we try to avoid this kind of repetition. You would not say “I dreamed a dream” but “I had a dream.” Hebrew, however, and perhaps especially Biblical Hebrew, prefers this kind of repetition.
All of which leaves open the question of what the root דשׁא really means. The verb occurs in just one other place, in Joel 2:22, “The pastures in the wilderness have דָשְׁא֖וּ.” The context there suggests that animals will be able to eat their fill of grass. In Modern Hebrew the noun (which occurs 14 times in the Bible) refers to what we call in English a lawn. The Earth must not remain barren but turn green with plant life.
Neither “sprout” nor “greenery” conveys the flavor of the Hebrew phrase using the same root twice, but at least I don’t think we lose any actual meaning. Robert Alter has done about as well as anyone can do here with the phrase “Let the earth grow grass,” where the repeated gr- does at least something to convey the likeness of verb and object.
It’s worth pointing out that everywhere else in the Bible, דשׁא seems to be a word of poetry, not prose. To me, this nicely demonstrates that Genesis 1 – though it is prose, and not verse – nonetheless has elements that make it much more akin to a poem than to a narrative. There is a rhythm in the repetitiveness that we’ve already begun to see. Now we also have vocabulary that is poetic rather than prosaic.
It may be that some of the questions we have been asking would be more appropriate if this were indeed a journalistic report, and are less appropriate for an atmospheric description (no pun intended) of how creation occurred. Don’t get me wrong; this will not stop me from carefully analyzing what the text tells us. I still want to understand what this writer intended to convey. But the poetic flavor of the text seems to me to be part of that.
James Kugel, in his book The Idea of Biblical Poetry, makes a somewhat tongue-in-cheek argument that there is no poetry in the Bible, and others have tried to make a serious argument that what we today call literature is an inappropriate term for anything in the Bible. I disagree but am not going to argue with them here. Instead, I will just point you in the opposite direction. My friend (and former student) Donald Antenen has started a project (as I mentioned in an earlier post) to translate all of Genesis into verse. For our phrase, he simply says “sprout plants.” (You’ll find his whole translation of Gen 1:1-13 here.)
Next time, a post that will …
introduce the idea that created things can create things on their own;
continue our sideways glance at the differences between the Septuagint and the MT; and
lead us to another example of Jewish tradition filling a gap in the text with literary creativity.