What Kind of Wood? (Gen 6:14)
The Flood
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[14 Make yourself a box out of … עֲשֵׂ֤ה לְךָ֙ תֵּבַ֣ת ]
I left you hanging last time, desperate to know what the box that was going to save Noah and his family was made out of. The suspense is over!
cypress trees. עֲצֵי־גֹ֔פֶר
Come on, is he really gonna write a whole column on “atzei-gópher”?
Yes, I’m sorry, he is. When you get to the end of the column, you will understand why.
Hebrew uses עֵץ etz ‘tree’ for ‘wood’ as well; it doesn’t make the distinction that we do in English.1 So I am pushing things just a little bit when I translate atzei-gopher as “cypress trees” instead of simply “cypress” or “cypress wood.” As you know, I like to translate in a way that makes me think a bit about the text instead of (in this case) just writing gopherwood and going on with my life. That’s how we learn.
It actually seems to me that the using the plural עֲצֵי atzei is more common than the singular etz when you want to say what type of wood you are talking about. I have a vague sense, after looking through the biblical examples, that some groups used one and some the other, though I can’t quite put my finger on what groups or time periods the difference might indicate.
Speiser asserts that “The timber in question has not been identified,” and indeed it is not 100% clear that gópher refers to a type of wood at all. BHQ explains that the “versions” (the ancient translations) take two different approaches:
the material of which the ark should be made
the way in which the lumber has to be shaped or treated
They conclude:
It is therefore a case of establishing the meaning of an unknown word, rather than of textual divergence.
Nahum Sarna writes:
This otherwise unknown type almost certainly refers to a coniferous tree of great durability. Sanhedrin 108a and the Targums, as well as Radak, identify it with the cedar. Many modern scholars prefer the cypress both because of a similarity in sound to the Hebrew and because it was widely used in shipbuilding in ancient times, due to its resistance to rot.
I can’t resist adding Claus Westermann’s identification (in the English translation by John J. Scullion) of gopher as “teakwood.” Apparently this is still a good wood for boats and there’s now a crisis among yacht owners about obtaining it. It would be fun to go back and change my translation of teva to “yacht,” but I think I will resist temptation.
The Greek and Latin translations, as BHQ notes, make it sound as if Noah is being told to use a certain kind of lumber:
LXX: τετραγώνων (“four-sided”)
Aquila: τεθεωμένων (“sulfurated”)
Vulgate: levigatis (“smoothed”)
The translators into classical languages make it sound as if Noah is meant to pick up prepared timber at a lumberyard.
It’s interesting that Rashi’s comment, taken from rabbinic sources, seems to intersect with Aquila’s translation:
Gópher just happens to be its name. But why did it have to be made of that particular wood? Because the others had been condemned to be wiped out by gophrit, sulfurous fire.
Here’s why I am going with “cypress trees.” First and foremost, there just is no such thing as gopherwood; the translators who use that word are simply transliterating Hebrew gópher. (Actual gophers were apparently named by French speakers in North America from the word gaufre ‘honeycomb’ because their tunnels honeycomb the ground.)
Second, no one should lift an eyebrow if g in one language comes out as c in another, and the same is true with pand f. Hebrew פ is actually pronounced both ways depending on where it falls in a word. Here’s what Benjamin Noonan has to say about where gopher comes from:
[The] context does not permit a more specific identification. Nevertheless, it seems likely that it refers to a resinous wood such as that of the cypress tree.
The 17th-century French biblical scholar Samuel Bochart long ago postulated a connection between Hebrew גֹ֔פֶר and Greek κῠπᾰ́ρισσος and Latin cupressus, both meaning ‘cypress’. This identification is almost certainly correct. The ending -ισσος / -essus of the Greek and Latin forms reflects a Pre-Greek term, also the probable source of Hebrew גֹ֔פֶר. [In a note, he suggests the source may be Luvian, an Indo-European language from Anatolia, today’s Turkey.]
NRSV translates as “cypress” also, and so does Robert Alter. The reason for writing all this is the following question: Why is this “Pre-Greek” term is used — a hapax legomenon! — instead of the standard word for cypress in Hebrew, “b’rosh wood”?
Scholars have tried to determine which of the Mesopotamian Flood stories provided the background to the Bible’s version. Since it’s clear that this story has been integrated into an Israelite story of beginnings, it seems to me that trying to figure which story our authors were looking at may be a wrong perspective. Why not assume that many Flood stories were known in ancient Israel, and that elements were adopted from more than one of them?
As Rashi’s “sulfurous fire” and Aquila’s “sulfurated” wood show us, rabbinic tradition certainly interacted with the Greek world. I’m thinking too of R. Eliezer’s comment (on b. BK 45b) that an ox that gores cannot be “guarded” as Exod 21:29 insists it must except “with a knife,” that is, by killing it — a remarkable overlap with the LXX reading of יִשְׁמְרֶ֔נּוּ yishm’rennu (“he must guard it”) as “he must destroy it,” matching יַשְׁמִידֶנּוּ yashmidennu — reading Hebrew ר as ד, a common occurrence. The bottom line, for me, is that ancient Israel is in the triple overlap of the Venn diagram of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, receiving (and exchanging) influences at various times with all three.
If only we had the complete text of Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women! As we noted a while back, a new fragment of this work mentions a Greek Flood story that also bears comparison with ours. You have to wonder whether that’s the far-distant connection that created our English gopherwood. We will have to wait, I suppose, for another (genuine) fragment to appear to find out if that is the answer.
Update: Aaron Koller’s article “Tree and Wood, Polysemy and Vagueness: Detangling the Branches of the Hebrew word עץ,” in the Festschrift for Richard Steiner, explains that “wood” is likely the more basic meaning of this word.