The “Curse” (Gen 5:29)

The Genealogy of Adam

²⁹ from the ground that YHWH condemned. מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵֽרְרָ֖הּ יְ׳הוָֽה׃

There’s an odd repetition in v. 29 that many translations don’t show you. The Septuagint does! Here it is in the NETS English translation:

This one shall give us respite from [ἀπὸ apó] our labors and from [ἀπὸ apó] the pains of our hands and from [ἀπὸ apó] the earth that the Lord God has cursed.

The problem is that the and before that third from isn’t there. The Hebrew punctuation has a pause after “hands,” which I take to indicate that the third from is not another thing Noah will “give us respite from.” Standard English translations follow that punctuation, so they too take the third from to be doing some other work in this sentence. I’ll bold the word translating this third occurrence of “from” in the following translations:

• KJV: because of the ground

• NJPS: out of the very soil

• NRSV: Out of the ground

• Fox: coming from the ground

Don’t ask me where the “very” soil of NJPS comes from or what that is supposed to mean. The translations are basically implying (if I understand them correctly) that the “work” (ma’aseh) and “toil” (itzavon) stem from the fact that the ground was cursed.

That’s certainly worth noting. This is the 4^th time we’ve seen the verb ארר aleph‑r‑r ‘curse’ in our story (!):

• the snake is cursed (3:14)

• the ground is cursed (3:17)

• Cain is cursed min-ha-adama (4:11, using the same phrase as in our verse)

• a reminder that the ground was cursed by YHWH (here in our verse)

Somehow the newborn Noah is going to change our attitude about this. Presumably our current attitude (as voiced by Noah’s father Lemekh) is that we are unhappy about it. However, as we said when we first looked at 4:11, the phrase in that verse is usually taken to mean one of two things: