Thorns and Thistles (Gen 3:18)

Into and Out of the Garden

[This post is scheduled to drop on October 12^th, by which time I expect to be in Jerusalem. I’m hoping to continue on schedule after that but can’t be sure I’ll be able to do so; I’ll alert everyone if I must pause subscriptions.]

¹⁸ Thorns and thistles will it sprout for you וְק֥וֹץ וְדַרְדַּ֖ר תַּצְמִ֣יחַֽ לָ֑ךְ

In case you were wondering, as I was, thistles are edible. To be fair, the Google search warns, “Thistles are edible but how good they taste depends on the variety.” I’m not aware of any thorns that are edible, but there are edible plants that have thorns to interfere with your grabbing the food. Those thorns occur a dozen times in the Bible, always with the most negative connotations, as in Jer 12:13, where “they planted wheat and harvested thorns” — which sounds like it is the fate decreed here for the man.

The combination of qōtz ve-dardar together, though, occurs just one other time in the Bible, and that is the only other time you will see דרדר anywhere. So it seems worth our while to have a look.

^{Hos 10:8} The shrines of Aven, the sin of Israel, will be destroyed; thorns and thistles [ק֣וֹץ וְדַרְדַּ֔ר] will grow up on their altars. They [the shrines] will say to the mountains, “Cover us!” and to the hills, “Fall upon us!”

This is not just difficulty in growing one’s food. This is a sign of utter destruction. What’s interesting is that the utter destruction will overcome the (once) holiest of places. That’s because Aven (אָ֗וֶן), to use the translation of my teacher Mayer Gruber, means “Wrong-Doing,” and in the Hosea verse it’s being used as shorthand for Beth-aven, which is a dysphemism for Bethel, the location where Jacob had his famous dream but also the location where the breakaway northern kingdom established a center of worship. (A dysphemism is the opposite of a euphemism.)

I don’t know whether Hosea knew our text, but his “thorns and thistles” overgrowing an altar are a good reminder that, as we saw earlier in the week, Ezekiel called this location “the garden of God.” Our story does not explicitly suggest that it is a holy location, and vv. 10-14 seemed to be integrating it into the geography of our own world. Yet these thorns and thistles may be a subtle way of suggesting that the man’s action has brought some level of degradation to a once holy location.

We’ll come back to the thistles before the end of this post, but first we turn to the verb. It’s a feminine verb because it describes what the now cursed soil, adama, will be sprouting. We’ve seen this verb twice before, both times in Version 2:

• “any field plant was yet to sprout [יִצְמָ֑ח]” (2:5)

• “YHWH God caused to sprout [וַיַּצְמַ֞ח] from the ground [מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה]” (2:9)

Now we have:

• “Thorns and thistles will it sprout [תַּצְמִ֣יחַֽ] for you”

In 2:5, nothing had sprouted yet, because YHWH had not made it rain. What he caused to sprout in 2:9, of course, were the trees, all of which (apparently) had fruit that could be eaten. Now — just as happened in Version 1 — the adama itself is assigned to take over the job of causing plants to sprout, but instead of what the stereotypical grandmother would call “a nice piece fruit,” the ground will produce qōtz ve-dardar.¹

Let’s take another look at that word dardar, and not merely because it is so fun to say. The other reason to look at it is because it rhymes with har-ar. Where am I getting har-ar, you ask? Answer: from harbah arbeh of v. 16, the phrase that explains that the woman’s pregnancies will be way more grievous than they previously had been.