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?
Nahum Sarna, in his JPS Torah Commentary volume to Genesis, translates as flow and says this:
The idea seems to be that the primordial, subterranean waters would rise to the surface to moisten the arid earth, thereby making it receptive to the growth and survival of vegetation and providing the raw material with the proper consistency for being molded into man.
The idea that this moisture is necessary for molding the soil into a human comes from Rashi (11th-c. France), who adds an interesting wrinkle:
A flow would well up. Rather, “He [God] caused a flow to well up”; the verb is a causative Hiphil, not a simple Qal. He brought up the deep and watered the clouds, to moisten the dust so that man could be created—like a baker who adds water and then kneads the dough. Here too He first “watered” the earth and then “formed” man.
In other words, God had not yet “caused” rain (with the Hiphil verb himtir, as we discussed last time) but had caused this alternative source of moisture to arise. The word יַֽעֲלֶ֣ה could be either rise (as most people understand it) or raise (as Rashi takes it) due to the unique feature that this form of this root looks the same in both binyanim, Qal and Hiphil. The syntax is a little awkward if God is “raising” the flow, but it is not impossible.
A much simpler answer is given by Joseph Bekhor Shor (12th-c. France). What is the êd? Neither a mist nor a flow (either of which could have been indicated by a much commoner word). Rather, “The ground had not yet dried up from the water that had been moved off it.”
There is one more possible explanation that seems unlikely to me, but I will present it and let you make that decision on your own. It is the only solution I’ve seen that actually solves the problem of why the darn plants don’t grow: There was no flow. Abraham ibn Ezra (12th-c. Europe) cites it as the idea of Saadia Gaon (10th-c. Babylonia). According to Saadia, we should read vv. 5–6 this way (adapting my translation):
There was yet no shrub on earth and any field plant was yet to sprout, for YHWH God had not yet made it rain on the earth, and there was no adam to work the adamah, nor a haze that would well up from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
The Hebrew conjunction ו has a much wider range of meaning than and (as it’s usually translated). I translate it here as but and we saw it as the vav explicativum in 1:14, but it can also be or; following the negatives in v, 5, that would be nor. There are so many negative words in v. 5 that it seems odd to me they would be implicit rather than explicit in v. 6. But if Saadia is not correct, why haven’t the plants been growing? That’s another reason I’m calling the êd a “haze” — the haze surrounding what it’s doing in this verse.
We will see rain falling down and water rising up, down the road in Genesis 7. For now, in Sunday’s free post, we’ll turn once again to the moment we were all waiting for in Genesis 1: God creates ha-adam. But this time, it’s “Earthling,” Take Two.