(BA) Genesis 2:4-7

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Here's how the RV reads Genesis 2:47-7.

These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven. And no plant in the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground; but there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

However, there are a number of interpretations on which much of verses 4-7 are thought of as one long sentence. A good representative -- though exact details vary -- can be found in the RSV.

4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; 6 but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground— 7 then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Something at least along these lines seems reasonable. On this reading, verses 4-6 are all a sort of introduction to the sentence, whose main clause appears in 7 when God creates a man. On this reading, there is a nice parallel between Genesis 1:1-3 and Genesis 2:4-7. Both begin with a clause about when God created "the earth and the heavens", followed by a description of the unsatisfactory condition of earth that calls out for creation, and then a creative act that begins the creation story.

In verse five, why are there two different mentions of plants: "plant of the field" and "shrub of the field"? In Hebrew, they are śyḥ hśdh and ʕsb hśdh, respectively. Without going into the arguments here, we may note that according to some interpreters, the term śyḥ hśdh refers to wild plants as a category, while ʕsb hśdh to domestic plants.

If so, we might read verse 5 as something like, "and no wild shrub was yet on the land, and no crops had yet sprouted; because Yahweh God had not yet made rain on the land, and there was no human to till the ground." Notice that two things are missing: wild and domestic plants; and two reasons are given: the absence of rain and the absence of man. And specifically, wild plants require only rain to grow, making Yahweh God their cultivator, while domestic plants won't sprout until a human has tilled the ground.

Thus, we could show the structure of verse 5 like so:

In the day that Yahweh God made land and sky, [a1] and no wild shrub was yet on the land, and [b1] no crop had yet sprouted, because [a2] Yahweh God had not yet made rain on the land, and [b2] there was no human to till the ground;

The next bit of text is wʔd yʕlh mn hʔrṣ whšqh ʔt kl pny hʔdmh wyyṣr yhwh ʔlhym ʔt hʔdm. This is the portion that reads, in the RSV, "but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground— 7 then the LORD God formed man".

It is unclear whether "mist" is the right translation of the ʔd. But let us gloss over, for the moment, that little issue. Whatever the ʔd might be, it gets the earth wet, which we might imagine solves the "no rain yet" issue. And then a human is formed, solving the "no human" issue.

So I am tempted to read the structure of these four verses like so:

This is the genealogy of the sky and the land. In the day that Yahweh God made land and sky, [a1] and no wild shrub was yet on the land, and [b1] no crops had yet sprouted,

because [a2] Yahweh God had not yet made rain on the land, and [b2] there was no human to till the ground;

then [a3] an ʔd went up from the land and watered the whole ground's surface, and [b3] Yahweh God formed the human of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being.

In other words, we have what is basically a giant sentence that describes a two-fold problem, the two-fold reasons for the problem, and the two-fold solution to the problem.

Genesis 1-2 contain some of the most scrutinized passages of ancient Hebrew ever written. If my proposal above is correct, we would imagine that someone else would have found it first. But so far, I cannot remember seeing this precise structure proposed by anyone else. (One possibility is that I read it somewhere and have since forgotten the source.) Regardless, I do not find it anywhere that I've read on Genesis 2 recently, and its absence most likely means that my proposal is wrong. Such an elegant structure, if it actually exists here, would surely have been found by now.

I can think of a number of weaknesses for my proposal. The expressions that I am treating as "wild shrub" and "crops" above may not really refer to wild and domestic plants as categories.

The ʔd doesn't seem to be rain, because rain does not "go up from the earth", and therefore it is hard to imagine that it's presence is the "solution" to the problem that "Yahweh God had not yet made rain". There's also an issue with the Hebrew "tense"; the verb "went up" is a yiqtol sort of verb here, not a wayyiqtol or qatal, and reads as though it might be describing the pre-created state, rather than God's creative intervention. God is only explicitly named as intervening in verse 7.

So, while I would like to read this passage in that elegant A, B, A, B, A, B structure, I think it's probably a bit too much of a leap over the probabilities.

It is interesting that Genesis 2 begins with the absence of plants, explains their absence as being due to a human, and then has a human created, followed by plants. It is almost as if the writer is indicating that human beings are in some sense created for the sake of plant life. Perhaps this seemingly odd logic foreshadows the curse later in the book, in which human beings are in a sense made slaves of agriculture.

RV. The Revised Version of the Bible, published in the 1880's.

RSV. The Revised Standard Version, 1971 edition, as found online at Bible Gateway.

As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from a limited set of public domain resources described at biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.

Tsumura, David Toshio (1989). The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2: A Linguistic Investigation. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 83.

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