Plants of "the field" (Gen 2:5)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁵ … and any field plant was yet to sprout וְכָל־עֵ֥שֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶ֖ה טֶ֣רֶם יִצְמָ֑ח

Last time we discussed térem ‘not yet’ and siaḥ ha-sadeh ‘shrub of the field’, and I promised we would talk about that “field” this time. I could not bring myself to say “field shrub,” but this time, with “plant,” that English phrase sounds at least a little bit more natural. As I pointed out, we are back in Version 1 language with ésev, only wondering why the word paired with it was the rare “shrub” and not “greenery” or “tree,” both of which we saw in Genesis 1.

I have just learned the word meonic, the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Day” last Sunday, and it’s relevant today. So I think I had better employ it before I forget it once again. Here’s what the OED has to say about it:

meonic, adj.

[‘Of, relating to, or consisting of a kind of pregnant nothingness or void (as distinguished from an absolute blank nothingness) having the potential to transform into matter.’]

The background to Version 2 of creation is not the chaos of Genesis 1. It seems to be understood that we are on the earth we all recognize — yet it is meonic. We start neither with tohubohu nor with an absolutely blank slate, but with “a kind of pregnant nothingness”: no shrub, no plant, only because they have not yet appeared. Nahmanides, the 13^th-c. Spanish commentator, explains that fact, along with “field,” in the following comment [translation taken from my Commentators’ Bible series]:

     When no shrub of the field was yet on earth. According to Genesis Rabbah¹, the plants waited just at the surface of the earth from the third day until the sixth, when they sprouted after the Lord sent rain upon them. But in my opinion the plants achieved their full growth on the third day, just as the straightforward sense of the text would imply. What our verse is saying is that there was no one to plant or sow more crops from them. The earth would not continue to bloom until man was created to sow and plant and tend the growth. Note that our verse refers to shrubs of “the [cultivated] field,” not of “the earth.” (See Exod. 23:16 and Num. 20:17 for the use of “field” to refer to cultivated land.) That would be the normal course of things, starting after the six days of creation and forever more: water would rain from heaven and cause the seeds in the earth to sprout.

We’ll talk more about the rain next time. For now, let me juxtapose the two beginning phrases of v. 5, which match each other in a way similar to the matching of the two halves of v. 4. If we limit our view to this part of v. 5 alone, the parallelism is actually even tighter than in v. 4. I’ll leave out the word בָאָ֔רֶץ ba-aretz ‘on earth’ at the end of the first phrase so you can see the likeness left-justified as Substack insists on doing it:

וְכֹ֣ל ׀ שִׂ֣יחַ הַשָּׂדֶ֗ה טֶ֚רֶם יִֽהְיֶ֣ה

וְכָל־עֵ֥שֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶ֖ה טֶ֣רֶם יִצְמָ֑ח

Each of the two halves has the following 5 elements, in order from right to left:

1. כל ‘all’ or ‘every’ or ‘any’

2. a “plant” word

3. שדה, describing them as “field” plants

4. טרם ‘not yet’

5. a 3ms Qal imperfect verb (for you grammar fans); remove the י from the front of the word to see the root.

I would not say that this verse is poetic, though parallelism is most definitely a feature of biblical poetry. (I’ll have much more to say about it in the Biblical Poetry book/course/blog I hope to create one day.) It is also, however, a feature of biblical rhetoric — you say things that are profound, or at least significant, out loud with this kind of repetition to give them weight.²

Leaving aside the contradiction with what we had already read on Day 3 of Creation Week in Version 1, it seems obvious that referring to “field” plants here must be important, given that the word is repeated in both phrases.

שָׂדֶה sadeh can certainly refer to a “field” of crops, as we use that word in English. Yet given that the whole point is that there were no plants yet, why would we specify that the plants that didn’t exist are “field” plants?

שדה is often used in the Bible to refer to the countryside as opposed to the city:

You will be blessed in the city, and you will be blessed in the country

‏בָּר֥וּךְ אַתָּ֖ה בָּעִ֑יר וּבָר֥וּךְ אַתָּ֖ה בַּשָּׂדֶֽה׃ [Deut 28:3]

In Gen 34:28, NJPS goes so far as to translate the Hebrew phrase ‏אֵ֧ת אֲשֶׁר־בָּעִ֛יר וְאֶת־אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּשָּׂדֶ֖ה as “all that was inside the town and outside.” Sadeh can also refer to “country” in the sense of the nature of a region of land (as in “Marlboro country”; see Ruth 1). We are clearly in a world where there are no cities yet, but since there aren’t any people yet either, it is hard to see why we need a hint about that.

The rest of the verse (which we’ll get to next time) and the continuation of this story might well make us think that sadeh is intended to put us in an agricultural frame of mind — we are not talking about plants of all kinds, as Genesis 1 implies, but of cultivated plants, the plants that we learned on Day Six were intended as food for the earthlings and the animals. Why then use the rare word “shrub” if what you want to evoke is wheat and barley and olives? That’s another mystery that I have no good answer for.

In our next post, we’ll see that the rest of the verse can also be described as two parallel halves, though the structure is somewhat looser than in the first half of the verse. We’ll also meet the second of the characters that will animate this story.

1. A collection of midrash (rabbinic fan fic) filling in the imagined gaps in the text of the Bible as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead fills in some of the imagined gaps in Hamlet. Nahmanides is presumably referring to #4 at the link.

2. See this article by Ed Greenstein for more.