Water After All (Gen 2:6)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁶ But a haze would well up from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.

 וְאֵ֖ד יַֽעֲלֶ֣ה מִן־הָאָ֑רֶץ וְהִשְׁקָ֖ה אֶֽת־כָּל־פְּנֵֽי־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃

There is a very difficult linguistic problem in this verse, which I think has distracted those who are trying to understand the verse from what seems to me an even more difficult problem. The best way of working, from my perspective, is to clarify the details (if we can) before discussing larger issues, so that’s what I’ll try to do this time. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bigger issue before the end of this post.

Here’s the linguistic problem. What does the first word of this verse, the word אֵ֖ד êd, mean? I’m using that ˆ not to be scientific, but to indicate that êd sounds not like “Ed” but more or less like the English word aid. Its more common homonym אֵיד ‘calamity, disaster’ is always spelled with a י and in any case would make no sense here.

Our word êd may or may not be a hapax legomenon — a phrase I love to say; can’t believe I haven’t used it yet on this blog. The literal Greek means “once read.” Scholars use it to indicate a word that occurs only once in a particular corpus: literally, a “body” (of work; this one is Latin, not Greek). Our corpus is the (Hebrew) Bible, of course, but a hapax (as it’s called for short) could be in Shakespeare or Homer or any other large but limited text you might want to study.

Okay, enough stalling: How come I’m not sure whether or not this word אֵד is a hapax? The answer is that it occurs one other time than here, but in Job, a book whose Hebrew is extremely complicated and might easily have prompted a scribal error. Whenever you find a difficult word in a biblical text, if it also occurs only in Job, it is more likely that your word helps us understand Job rather than vice versa.

In this case, one of the great Job scholars of our day, who’s spent his career working carefully on the book, emends this word אֵד out of existence. Here is Ed Greenstein, in his recent Job: A New Translation, translating Job 36:27–28 and footnoting his translation:

For he sheds drops of water,

Pours rain on humanity [‏לְאֵדֽוֹ];³⁴

As the skies precipitate,

Showering all humanity [אָדָ֬ם רָֽב].

³⁴ Reading le’adam for le’eido “for its mist.” Elihu is correcting the deity’s assertion in 38:26, according to which God provides rain specifically where people do not dwell. The shared [between 38:26 and 36:27–28] stems for “rain” and “humanity” tighten the link.

There are certainly plenty of water words in these two verses; “rain” in line 2 is matar, which we discussed last time. But even if we leave אֵד here as it is, it doesn’t really help us understand our verse. As E. A. Speiser says in his Anchor Bible commentary:

The only other occurrence of the term, Job 36:27, “mist” or the like, need signify no more than the eventual literary application of this rare word.

The two meanings that various English translations seem to prefer for the word are (1) mist and (2) stream or flow — though flow might be an attempt to compromise. Good examples of each are the Greek πηγή ‘spring, fountain’, which the LXX uses not just once but many times, and the Aramaic עֲנָנָא ‘cloud’, which of course is common in the Targum. HALOT helpfully points both to Jewish-Aramaic אידותא ‘sea-foam’ and to Akkadian edū ‘inundation’ (derived from Sumerian a-dé-a ‘flood from the deep’), and DCH defines it as “stream or perhaps mist.” So I am going to flip a coin and say … haze. Fairly rare, similar vowel to the Hebrew word, and if I translate עלה as “well up” instead of “rise,” then I have squeezed in a bit of the other possible meaning as well.

Now for the bigger question that the linguistic question has obscured:

If, despite the lack of rain so far, there is a mist or a flow of water welling up from the ground, what is stopping the plants from growing?