The Pigeon’s Foot (Gen 8:8–9)
The Flood
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8 to see whether the water had lightened off the surface of the ground.
לִרְאוֹת֙ הֲקַ֣לּוּ הַמַּ֔יִם מֵעַ֖ל פְּנֵ֥י הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃
The pigeon has a specific task: not to take a message anywhere, but to bring back a message. Land ho! If, that is, any land has yet reappeared.
This may be the time to return to the construction of this box on which, and in which, the future hope of the late great planet Earth is riding, and specifically to this verse:
Gen 6:16 Make a vault light for the box and finish [the box] to a cubit on top. The opening to the box you should put in its side; make it bottoms, seconds, and thirds.
Noah could certainly tell when the box had grounded — but could he see out? We all, I suppose, can visualize what the “ark” looked like, but few of us (perhaps no one) can accurately picture how the actual text of the Bible intends us to imagine it.
It’s a good reminder for me that this is a story told with words, not the script for a movie — let alone a cartoon. There is an opening in the side of this box, but if you open it too soon the box will flood. There is a window in the box, and so far as we know (contra Abraham ibn Ezra) there is just one. What can Noah see out of this window? Blue sky, perhaps, or perhaps a patch of gray or white cloud. Or perhaps water stretching as far as the eye can see. Claus Westermann asserts:
The bird which is set free can see whereas the man shut up in the ark cannot.
He goes on to say:
The object of the experiment is to say that the bird can communicate in some way to the man what it has seen. It is not clear at the start how this happens; it can only be the result of several experiments.
V. 9 will give us another chance to look through, or at least at, this window. For now, a moment with the unusual verb that the water is doing: קלל q‑l‑l ‘to be light’. This is not usually how water is described, in the Bible or anywhere else! “A pint’s a pound, the world around.” Thanks, I would just as soon you don’t write in to contest this statement. The point is that water is heavy, not light.
Since this is our first look at קלל, I should perhaps make clear that this root is indeed the antonym of כבד k‑b‑d ‘to be heavy’. We won’t see that root until we get to Genesis 12, so let me take a moment here to confirm what some of you may be thinking: yes, both these roots can be and are used metaphorically. Biblical Hebrew can call a person kaved to explain, as it does of Abram in Gen 13:2, that he is “loaded”:
Gen 13:2 Now Abram was very rich [כָּבֵ֣ד מְאֹ֑ד] in cattle, silver, and gold.
More significantly, one can use the Piel forms of these roots to show respect (כבד) and to curse someone (קלל). That latter use may be what the verb in our phrase is setting up, says Hendel:
In 8:21, Y׳hweh's promise never again "to curse" (laqallel) the soil may resonate with the water that "subsided" (qallû, from the same root) on the soil here.
Since water doesn’t do this verb anywhere else but here and in v. 11, the literary resonance seems like the best explanation.
9 But the pigeon found no rest for the כ [kaf] of her leg.
וְלֹֽא־מָצְאָה֩ הַיּוֹנָ֨ה מָנ֜וֹחַ לְכַף־רַגְלָ֗הּ
We normally think of יד yad as ‘hand’ and רגל régel as ‘foot’. My wife had an experience during her Peace Corps days that always occurs to me when I see either of those Hebrew words in the Bible. She had a side gig as physical therapist for local sports teams, and a guy came to her — a cricket bowler, if I remember correctly — and said, “I threw out my hand.” She started examining his wrist and he looked at her as if she was nuts. He had dislocated his shoulder.
Hebrew clarifies what’s meant, when necessary, by referring to the kaf of the yad or régel. You can mimic the Hebrew letter כ with your hand but not (unless you are uniquely talented) with your foot — so kaf by itself is used for what we call (in American English) the hand, but the foot is specified as kaf ha-régel. A pigeon, I guess, has an easier time making a kaf with its foot than we do.
A later poet (I presume) took this homey image, got rid of the bird’s claws, and transferred it to another time that must have seemed like one of utter destruction:
Lam 1:3 Judah has gone into exile
Because of misery and harsh oppression;
When she settled among the nations,
She found no rest [לֹ֥א מָצְאָ֖ה מָנ֑וֹחַ].
[NJPS]
This word מנוח mano’aḥ ‘rest’ is not about getting some shut-eye. Just as Deuteronomy predicted, when Jerusalem was destroyed and those who lived there were exiled …
Deut 28:65 Among those nations you shall find no ease, no resting place for the sole of your foot [וְלֹא־יִהְיֶ֥ה מָנ֖וֹחַ לְכַף־רַגְלֶ֑ךָ].
As when Naomi told Ruth that she was trying to find some mano’aḥ for her — NJPS translates it “security” in Ruth 3:1 — it means a place where you can relax. You are safe and at home, the place where (as Robert Frost put it), “when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” The pigeon (יונה yona), like Judah in the Lamentations verse, like Ruth, is grammatically feminine, which lends a tender aspect to the use of this word. It may be the reason why our author kept Utnapishtim’s crows in the story — to be able to contrast them with this yona. We’ll take another look at her next time. In the meanwhile, though she has not found mano’aḥ, at least she has found No’aḥ. More on that next time as well.