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׃
I said back in January that I was going to translate adam as “earthling” because “groundling” just means something different. And here we are at the spot I want to use it most — demonstrating that discussion, not translation, is the real point of this column. This is very definitely not a possible assonance, as I described himtir and terem earlier in the verse. There is no question whatever that (1) אדם adam ‘human’ and אדמה adamah ‘ground, soil’ are etymologically related, and (2) that relationship is being deliberately highlighted here. Human beings are made out of dirt, as far as Genesis 2 is concerned.
I will hold off on further comment about that until we see it happen in v. 7. What I want to talk about right now is what we are being told, for the first time: a reason for the creation of human beings: God needs agricultural workers. (Gee, it’s hard to get good help these days.) Something else I’ll speak more about when we get there, but if you have (spoiler) a garden, somebody’s got to take care of it — and God is a busy man.
I am jumping the gun a bit with both of today’s observations, that the ecosystem has not yet been turned on and that we are starting to be given some reasons for creation, making us realize for the first time that Genesis 1 never explained why God created the Sky and the Earth. I want to make one more point today that jumps the gun as well, another thing that we’ll discuss more at a later point in the series. It’s this.
In Genesis 1, everything is hunky-dory, as good as it can possibly be. To quote Dr. Pangloss, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” The chaos of Gen 1:2, the verse that gives us the background to Version 1 of creation, has been shaped, in orderly fashion (Take that, Entropy!) into a world that can run by itself. But here, in the first of the two background verses to Version 2, what we see is not chaos but deficiency: no shrub, no plant, no rain, no one to do the heavy lifting.
If that strikes you as the setup for a story … read on.
Yes, I am dialing back the precise transliteration after making that point.