No Rain & No Workers (Gen 2:5)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁵ … for YHWH God had not yet made it rain on the earth

כִּי֩ לֹ֨א הִמְטִ֜יר יְ׳הוָ֤ה אֱלֹהִים֙ עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ

      At the beginning of v. 5, we learned (contrary to Genesis 1) that there were no plants on earth; now, we have an explanation. Plants need water, and there has been no rain — because God had not yet made it rain. In Hebrew, “made it rain” is all a single word, a verb in the Hiphil binyan, which often means “to cause something to happen.”

In this case, the verb is denominative, a fancy word meaning that the verb was created from a noun. The common English example is “to table a motion,” though nowadays a more familiar one might be “Beer me” — appropriate if we imagine Earth saying to YHWH, “Rain me.”

This denominative verb comes from the noun מָטָר matar ‘rain’, making the root of the verb מטר m-ṭ-r. That dot under the ṭ is how careful transliteration indicates the difference between Hebrew ט and the t that came down to us in English, ת = Greek τ ‘tau’. In the old days, it was pronounced as an emphatic — like ק as opposed to כ. I presume they are still distinguished by Arabic speakers, and perhaps by some Israelis too, but not by most of us.

The noun מָטָר matar is the commonest word for rain in the Bible, though only by a field goal. It occurs 38 times in the Bible, versus 35 for the word most commonly used in Hebrew today for rain, גֶּ֫שֶׁם géshem — though an umbrella is a mitriyah, not a gishmiyah. You can “make it rain” with גשׁם as well, or rather you can’t, because the only time this verb occurs is in Jer 14:22, where the prophet asks, “Can any of the idols among the other nations make it rain?” (Implied answer: I don’t think so.)

The verb מטר, on the other hand, occurs a dozen and a half times, all but three of them in the same verb binyan as here in v. 5. See, for example, Gen 19:24, where God “made it rain” fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah. Still, I would like to think that the choice of himtir in our verse has something to do with the sound of ṭerem (also with a ט), the “not yet” word that has just appeared twice.

That brings up a point that I’m not going to try to write an essay about just now, but one that we’ll certainly be discussing over and over again as we keep reading: What role does esthetics play in the biblical text? Put more simply, “Is the Bible literature?”

The short answer is that “the Bible” isn’t any one single thing, because it was written over the course of 1,000 years. (For more on this topic, see this post on my other Bible Guy blog; for even more, read The Bible’s Many Voices.) Some scholars don’t think any of the Bible can be called “literature” as we use the term today. I vehemently disagree, but I certainly do agree that much of the Bible was never intended to be belles-lettres, “beautiful writing.”

Good writers appreciate their own writing and sometimes are happy to include a little gem that most readers might not catch; great composers, the same. I think that the use of himtir here with terem¹ is not a coincidence, and will continue to think so until someone convinces me differently.

Good writers don’t amuse themselves at the expense of their readers, though. If God has not yet made it rain, there must be a reason we’re being told this. Since the world we live in now has both plants and rain, I’m going to contradict the observation I cited last week that there isn’t much creation in this version of the story. We are actually looking at a moment when much of the world has been created — but God (or rather YHWH) has not yet turned on the ecosystem. That’s what has apparently “not yet” happened.

and there was no one to work the ground, no adam to work the adamah

וְאָדָ֣ם אַ֔יִן לַֽעֲבֹ֖ד אֶת־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃