The Blaze (Gen 3:24)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²⁴ … and the Blaze of the Tumbling Sword … וְאֵ֨ת לַ֤הַט הַחֶ֙רֶב֙ הַמִּתְהַפֶּ֔כֶת

Along with the Griffins, YHWH installed one more thing east of Xanadu Park: a sword.

More precisely, he installed a devouring fire, The Blaze, somehow associated with or perhaps created by this sword. There’s a lot to talk about here, so let’s ease into it with the one common word in this phrase, חרב ḥérev ‘sword’.

One of the things a biblical ḥérev does a lot that an English sword doesn’t much do is “eat.” The sword “consumes” its victims, but the verb that says that is אכל akhal, the standard verb for eating; the knife Abraham is ready to use to kill Isaac is a מאכלת ma’akhélet. Fire eats too — some 90 times in the Bible — so the risk here is not that you will be cut or stabbed. It’s that the fire that is somehow connected with the sword will eat you, even if the verb “eat” is not written here.

This fire is a להט láhat, and it is (drum roll) a hapax legomenon; it occurs nowhere else in the Bible than here. Verbs from this root occur about a dozen times, mostly describing flame, but at least once describing “man-eating [לֹ֫הֲטִ֥ים בְּֽנֵי־אָדָ֗ם] lions (in Ps 57:5). The combination of all these things is what led me to choose to call this not just a flame, which could be pictured as burning steadily and calmly, but a blaze — dangerous and always threatening to get out of control.

And of course I should not have said that it is “a” blaze; it is “the Blaze.”

 Like “the Griffins,” this too (to quote Nahum Sarna) “carries the definite article and so was also something well known to the Israelite imagination, even though it is not again mentioned in the Bible precisely in this form.” (להט itself cannot take the definite article; for the grammar, see Lesson 13 of my Biblical Hebrew course; remember you can always watch the first lesson for free here.) Sarna doesn’t explain, and it isn’t obvious to me, why he specifies “precisely this form.” Those Griffins are well known to us from elsewhere in the Bible, but this Blaze is not. It’s a hapax, don’t forget. Was it part of the Israelite creation word cloud? Unless we stumble on another reference to it in some newly discovered ancient text, we may never know.

As Speiser points out in his Anchor Bible commentary, there are ancient Near Eastern stories that do seem to come from this part of the “creation cloud”: