No Curse on the Soil (Gen 8:21)
The Flood
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Find links to all the posts on Genesis 1 here, then visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here or here to get oriented.
Get your free Biblical Hebrew Starter Kit here!
21 I will not again go on cursing the earth any more on account of humanity.
לֹֽא־אֹ֠סִף לְקַלֵּ֨ל ע֤וֹד אֶת־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ בַּעֲב֣וּר הָֽאָדָ֔ם
As I pointed out long ago, trying to make the English of a Bible translation match the Hebrew when it’s necessary for understanding just doesn’t work as smoothly as we wish it did. Along with the surface meaning of the words, there’s a great deal to unpack in the particular meaning of this phrase. (And we haven’t yet reached even the halfway point of the verse.)
Let’s start where that link will take you and work backwards. The (small-e) earth here is ha-adama, just as the human beings in the phrase are ha-adam; see here and here. We have already seen éretz used for Earth (capitalized because God gave it that name in 1:10) and ish and isha (“man” and “woman”) used for human beings — and for animals too. We have also seen two words for “curse” (the verb), both used with adama. Finally, we’ve seen two different words used for repeated action, shuv and yasaf (the one used here). Is your translation making sure you realize all this?
If we look at previous biblical occurrences of יסף y‑s‑f ‘increase, repeat’, the “do it again” verb that begins our phrase, we find this:
“She went on [וַתֹּ֣סֶף] to give birth to his brother Abel” (4:2).
“When you work the ground, it will no longer go on [לֹֽא־תֹסֵ֥ף] giving its vigor to you” (4:12).
“He … went on [וַיֹּ֛סֶף] to release the pigeon once more from the box” (8:10).
“The pigeon … did not go on [וְלֹֽא־יָסְפָ֥ה] to return to him again” (8:12).
That last example is a Qal verb; all the others are Hiphil, like the one in our phrase. ⇥ See Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course for an explanation of these terms if you don’t know them. ⇤ If yosef of 8:10 looks to you like the name Joseph, congratulations! Increase Mather of American colonial history must certainly have acquired his name through an attempt to translate “Joseph” into English.
I haven’t been able to suss out the difference between שׁוב and יסף when it comes to repeated action. Perhaps (if we look at the example of Cain’s mother) shuv means doing the same thing again and yasaf means doing a similar thing again. So rather than a fingers-crossed “it won’t be water but fire next time,” our verse might really mean that YHWH has decided not to destroy all life ever again.
Now that “cursing.” Here are the previous examples of English-language “cursing the earth”:
“Cursed is the soil [אֲרוּרָ֤ה הָֽאֲדָמָה֙] on your account [בַּֽעֲבוּרֶ֔ךָ]” (3:17).
“You are cursed more than the ground [אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙]” (4:11).
“Noaḥ … will change our attitude about the grievous way we were made: from the ground that YHWH condemned [מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵֽרְרָ֖הּ י׳הוה]” (5:29).
The opposite of “bless” (ברך) is the “curse” (קלל) of our verse, as we’ll see once we get to chapter 12, but so far we’ve seen qll only in vv. 8 and 11, where the waters “lightened” off the earth (adama in v. 8 and éretz in v. 11). What this means is that what YHWH is saying in our verse that he will not do again is something he has never done before. Note that 3:17, where YHWH God says to Adam, “Cursed is the soil on your account,” should be what our verse is saying will not happen again.
Why a different verb for “curse”? The infinitive form of the root ארר (Hebrew uses the same form for the gerund “cursing”) does not occur anywhere else in the Bible while the one in our verse, of קלל, does occur five other times. As you can imagine, I don’t much care for this explanation, since I rejected something similar a couple of weeks ago, though it’s certainly not impossible.
A scholar named Idan Dershowitz says this of our phrase:
This promise is out of place in the context of the Flood, since throughout the Bible, cursed land relates to parched land.
The clickable link will take you to his discussion on thetorah.com. The abstract of his original scholarly article says this:
The original biblical Noah was not affiliated with the Flood. An early edition of J told of a devastating famine that afflicted the entire earth from the days of Adam and Eve until it was brought to an end on account of Noah. The Proto-J narrative was supplemented with a version of the popular Babylonian Flood story, ironically transforming a story of drought into a tale of torrential rain. It is this Noah who is referenced in Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah — not the familiar Flood hero.
I was not convinced by his argument; perhaps you may be. He does make a couple of points worth listening to:
Blessing the land means you get enough rain; cursing it means you don’t. (Today’s Jewish prayerbooks do have a clause when the prayers for rain begin in the autumn making clear that we are asking for a reasonable amount of rain.)
The idea that Noah was the first to make agriculture reasonably successful again makes a lot of sense out of Lemekh #2’s announcement that Noah “shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed” (5:29, KJV) and out of Noah’s identification upcoming in 9:20 as אִ֣ישׁ הָֽאֲדָמָ֑ה ish ha-adama ‘the man of the soil’.
Yet this suggestion leaves out how Noah did that. In any case, it doesn’t solve our conundrum, since the text with ארר is also a J text. We’ve seen at least two different P voices (the other is H), and within the J text we’ve also seen that the story that begins Genesis 3 is already in progress when we join and that the story of Cain was somehow grafted on to Genesis 3. Moreover, we have a reference here not just to Genesis 3 but also to the lead-in to the Flood story in the beginning of Genesis 6.
So we’re not quite done with this curse; we’ll pick up the discussion next time, when I expect to change my translation of קלל.