draft-bible 13 August 2022
4. These are the generations. Hebrew ʾelleh toldot, that famous phrase that introduces stories, especially when a genealogy is present in the story. “These are the generations” is not a perfect equivalent, and suffers a bit from being difficult to understand. I could understand if someone wanted to paraphrase, and say, “This is the history of the heavens and the earth”. That would at least grasp the narrative function of the introductory phrase. But it seems like the WEB, in choosing between a paraphrase and an over-literal rendering, chooses to conflate both, yielding “This is the history of the generations …”.
4. Yahweh. The spelling “Jehovah” is a strange historical accident, an amalgam composed of the consonants of the Hebrew tetragrammaton, vowels derived from the euphemistically used Hebrew term Adonai, and then some evolution of English phonology thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t come very close to how the tetragramaton would have been pronounced when the Hebrew Bible was written, prior to the taboo on its pronunciation. ‘Yahweh’ is a widely used scholarly attempt at reconstructing the pronounciation of the name of Israel’s deity, and so this translation will follow the WEB’s lead in reading ‘Yahweh’. Not every intance of it appearing will be noted; this will be registered in the appendix “Recurring Words” under the entry YAHWEH.
5. earth and heaven. As in the Hebrew, the WEB lacks the article. It is literally ‘earth and heaven’, not ‘the earth and the heaven’.
5. there was not a man to till the ground. What is the function of this clause in its immediate context? My understanding is that Genesis 2:5 is in a sort of A, B, A’, B’ format. That is:
(A) No [wild] plant of the field was yet in the earth, and
(B) no [domestic] herb of the field had yet sprung up;
because
(A’) Yahweh God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and
(B’) there was not a man to till the earth.
In other words, the second creation story, the one that begins at 2;4, opens with the lack of vegetation, and then explains that the wild and domestic vegetation of the world did not yet exist because the conditions for wild and domestic vegetation (Yahweh’s rain and man’s cultivation) were not yet present. Then the story immediately moves on to the solutions: (A) the bringing of divinely provided water, and (B) the creation of a human to till.
If this is indeed the logic of the second creation story, then verse 5 needs to be structured in such a way as to make that as clear as possible. It is for this reason that the clauses about rain and the missing human must be kept within the same sentence, and separated by a comma rather than shunted into its own separate sentence. The WEB’s sentence structure obscures what is going on in the story.
6. And. In Hebrew, simply the particle w-. It is not necessary to translate this into English as ‘but’. In particular, ‘And’ is preferable if verses 6-7 are read as God’s response to the unfortunate situation of verse 5. The reading but makes it sound as though the coming of the water is simultaneous with the rainless and unvegetated state of the earth, but the passage makes more sense if the coming of the water ends the dry unvegetated state. It is interesting to note that the first and second creation stories seem to open with opposite ‘water problems’ – the problem in the first is the omnipresence of water, while the second begins with a lack of water.
7. from the dust. This seems a tad clearer than the ASV’s ‘of the dust’.
7. being. Hebrew nefeš, commonly translated as ‘soul’, although this is generally unfortunate. The meaning of phrases involving nefeš can usually be better expressed without importing the assumptions that come with the English term ‘soul’. What is the difference between a human body molded of dirt which has not yet been given life and a breathing human? The breathing human is a living being. It would be unnatural to say a body upon being animated becomes a soul. In some understandings of the meaning of life, it might make sense to say that an animated body acquires a soul, but not that it becomes one. And yet, in the Hebrew, the human becomes a living nefeš.
9. was in the midst of the garden. Hebrew tends to omit a verb where an English writer would often have ‘to be’. So, if one wanted to say in Hebrew, ‘And the tree of life was in the midst of the garden’, a perfectly natural way to say this might be wᵉ-ʿeṣ ha-ḥayyim bᵉ-tok ha-gan. However, if one were translating a little too literally, one might leave out the ‘was’, and then read this Hebrew expression back into English as ‘and the tree of life in the middle of the garden’. Rather than a sentence, you now have a noun phrase. Dropping this next to the prior sentence, you wind up with a reading like that of the ASV, where in English it looks as if the ASV translators are treating ‘the tree of life’ and ‘the tree of knowledge’ as if they might be objects of the previous verb ‘made to grow’.
The ASV’s reading, then, has taken a sentence about the location of two trees, and turned those two trees into simply more specifically named objects of the previous sentence. The WEB then compounds this error by adding the word ‘including’, which explicitly makes the claim that the two named trees were ‘pleasant to the sight and good for food’. The NHEB fixes the WEB's mistake here.
10. became the source of four rivers. Literally, ‘became four heads’. Why exactly is ‘heads’ used? Driver suggests that it refers to the beginnings of the rivers as they branch of from the great river that waters the garden.1 I think we must go with a more loose reading like the WEB’s here because ‘became four heads’ will simply fail to register with readers.
11. it is the one which goes around. The Hebrew sbb typically refers to circular motion; thus the ASV’s ‘that is it which compasseth’. One interpretation is that the verb sbb might refer here to the way a river lazily meanders across a land, ideally forming something like successive half-circles as it goes along, and it is this ‘meandering’ interpretation that must be the basis for the WEB’s ‘flows through’. Whether the river literally circles Havilah, or simply goes through it, I think we can take an English rendering which allows for both possibilities: ‘goes around’.
Even if we settle upon the verb to be used, do we read ‘that is it which goes around’, like the ASV? That would be too archaic. But ‘it goes around’, following the syntax of the WEB, does not quite catch the force of the Hebrew. It is not simply hu sobeb ‘it is going around’, but hu ha-sobeb, literally, ‘it is the one going around’. So ‘it is the one which goes around’ should do the job.
12. there. Hebrew šam, ‘there’ as in ‘that location’, not the linguistic placeholder. In other words, the Hebrew text is saying that bdellium and onyx stone are ‘in that place’, not just that bdellium and onyx stone exist. The ASV’s translation could lead to a reader in which there is taken the wrong way; moving there to the end of the verse as in the WEB eliminates the possibility of such a misreading. However, while rearranging the syntax helpfully, the WEB also adds the word ‘also’, which is not found in the Hebrew.
13. it is the one which goes around. The Hebrew construction is as in verse 11. The ASV uses an archaic meaning of ‘same’; the WEB seems to mistakenly take ‘same’ in a more current sense and then add words until the sentence ‘works’; thus reading, ‘it is the same river’, which one would not derive from the Hebrew phrase here unless one were working through the intermediary of outdated English.
14. flows. Hebrew haholek, a different term from the one rendered goes around in the last few verses. On consideration of the word by itself, the ASV’s goeth might be better than WEB’s flows here, but I do want it to appear distinct from the uses of the word sbb, which I have been reading as ‘goes around’.
1 Driver, S. R. The Book of Genesis. Tenth Edition (1916). p. 39. https://archive.org/details/bookofgenesis00driv/page/39/mode/1up
15. cultivate. This seems like a good substitute for the ASV’s archaic ‘dress it’.
16. Of every tree. In the Hebrew, these words are pulled right up to the front of the sentence, putting a sort of emphasis on them as the ASV has it. The WEB moves them back to a more default position in the sentence structure, but I think literary English can handle the unusual construction.
16. you. Just as archaic verb forms like goeth are replaced with their contemporary equivalents like goes in this translation, so also obsolete pronouns like thou are replaced by their modern equivalents like you. This issue will not receive comment every time it comes up, and Is registered under Pronouns in the appendix “Recurring Issues”.
17. but of the tree. The sentence structure is analogous to that of verse 16.
17. shall … will. Here and there you will find people who have fairly detailed proposals for when one should use ‘shall’ as opposed to ‘will’. My rule will be simpler: where the ASV and WEB differ, I will simply use whichever form is found in the WEB, unless I see some compelling reason not to. I will not comment on every instance of this difference, which is filed under SHALL in the appendix “Recurring Words”.
18. a helper comparable to him (WEB). Though the phrase involved might be rendered any of several ways, the WEB chooses a suitable update of the ASV’s archaic a help meet for him.
19. beast of the field. The expression connotes wildness, as in the similar expression beast of the earth, for which see the note on 1:30.
19. sky. Hebrew šamayim, which most often simply refers simply to the ‘sky’. The English word ‘heaven’, though sometimes suitable for getting the point across, is a bit more complicated in its meanings, and sometimes carries all sorts of implications that the Hebrew term does not. I will often prefer ‘sky’, and will not note every instance. This issue is filed under SKY in the appendix “Recurring Words”.
19. that was its name. A plain translation of a plain Hebrew expression, huʾ šᵉmo.
20. beast of the field. As in verse 19.
20. but for the man. Hebrew wlʾdm, which the nakdanim read as ulᵉʾadam, which is often translated as “and to Adam”; taking ʾadam as a proper noun due to the lack of article. The ASV and WEB also seem to rely on the vowel-points here. They read simply ‘man’ (without the article), in contrast to ‘the man’ at the beginning of the verse (with the article in both the Hebrew and the English).
A closer look at the uses of ʾadam in the MT, however, discloses an interesting pattern. Let us begin with the consonantal text alone, that is, the Hebrew text in the sort of form it existed in up to about 800 AD. As is well know, there are two creation stories in Genesis. There is the ‘Genesis 1’ story (properly Genesis 1:1-2:3), and then the second story, which begins at 2:3 and, for our purposes, includes chapters 3 and 4.
In the first story, the term ʾdm appears twice. First, in Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let us make a human ( ʾdm, no article).” Then, in 1:27, “So God created the human (hʾdm, with the article) …” That is the entirety of the uses of ʾdm in the Genesis 1 story. When God is speaking hypothetically about created ‘a human’, no article, and then when the human is created, it is referred to with the article. Simple enough.
In the second creation story, the same essential pattern repeats itself. First, before human beings exist, we find ‘there was no human to till the ground’, in which the word ʾdm does not have the article. Then, over and over, we find hʾdm, ‘the (h-) human (- ʾdm). Wherever the consonantal text has the opportunity to distinguish whether it is speaking of ʾdm with or without the article, it opts to use the article consistently: in Genesis 2:7, 8, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25; 3:8, 9, 12, 20, 22, 24; and 4:1. There are just three potential exceptions.
Ordinarily, the Hebrew prefix ha- is the equivalent of the English word ‘the’. So, written without vowels ʾdm (read ʾadam) is ‘a human’ or the name ‘Adam’, while hʾdm (read ha-ʾadam ) is ‘the human’. However, a special situation arises when another prefix, l-, meaning ‘to’ or ‘for’, is involved. In consonants, both ‘to a human’ and ‘to the human’ would be spelled the same way: l ʾdm. They would, however, be pronounced differently. ‘To a human’ would be pronounced lᵉ-aʾdam, while ‘to the human’ would be pronounced la- ʾadam. Instead of ‘the’ being expressed as ha-, in this particular grammatical position, ‘to the’ is contracted to la- instead of being pronounced as the hypothetical form lᵉ-ha- that you might expect from just adding the two prefixes together. And so, as a result, if you are reading consonantal Hebrew, whenever you come to the form lʾdm you must choose whether to read lᵉ-ʾadam or la- ʾadam. And l ʾdm appears three times: Genesis 2:20, and 3:17 and 21. In 2:20, we find “And hʾdm gave names to all livestock … but lʾdm there was not found a helper …” In this case, given that the consontal text uses an article in all of the surrounding cases when it has the option, it follows that laʾadam is intended here. So also in Genesis 3:21, where we read “And Yahweh God made l ʾdm and for his wife coverings of leather …”, and verse 17, which reads, ‘And lʾdm he said’.
So the context dictates that the three formally ambiguous cases of lʾdm must be laʾadam, even though for some reason the Masoretes chose to leave off the article in the two cases where it was technically possible to do so. This, by the way, is not simply my own opinion. BHK (Leipzig 1913 printing) also expresses the opinion that the correct readings of all three verses include the article, and BHS (5th ed., 1997) concurs with this judgment.
21. a deep sleep to fall upon the man. Does a deep sleep fall upon the man, or does the man fall into a deep sleep? Though both are practically the same thing, in the Hebrew text it is the former.
21. and he slept. Hebrew wayyišan, literally, ‘and he slept’. The WEB’s reading paraphrases a bit.
21. in its place. This is equivalent in meaning to the more archaic ‘instead thereof’.
22. formed the rib .. into a woman. This rendering sticks a little more literally to the Hebrew than the ASV or WEB does here.
24. join with. Better than the somewhat obsolete ‘cleave to’.
24. become. Hebrew hayu lᵉ-. It is on account of the preposition lᵉ- that I prefer ‘become’ to ‘be’.
25. And they were both naked, the man and his wife. As in this English translation, the Hebrew first says “they were both naked”, and then circles back to specify clearly who ‘both’ refers to.
25. they were not ashamed. Making ‘they’ explicit is a judgment call, simply based on style considerations.
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