Metabiblical

I started with a review of Genesis 1 as found in the WEB, and then thought I should address five issues before moving forward: quotation marks, the capitalization of ‘God’, the translation of the name ‘Yahweh’, the question of gender, and the issue of register.

With some of those preliminaries out of the way, here is a chart showing differences of interest between the ASV and WEB for Genesis.

Genesis Verse	ASV	WEB
2:1	And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.	The heavens, the earth, and all their vast array were finished.
2:2	which he had made (2x)	which he had done (2x)
2:3	and hallowed it	and made it holy
2:4	because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.	because he rested in it from all his work of creation which he had done.
2:4	These are the generations	This is the history of the generations
2:4	earth and heaven	the earth and the heavens
2:7	of the dust	from the dust
2:9	the tree of life also	including the tree of life
2:10	became four heads	became the source of four rivers
2:11	that is it which compasseth	it flows through
2:12	there is bdellium and the onyx stone	Bdellium and onyx stone are also there
2:13	the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Cush	It is the same river that rivers through the whole land of Cush.
2:14	that it is which goeth	This is the one which flows
2:15	dress it	cultivate it
2:18	a help meet for him	a helper comparable to him
2:19	beast of the field … bird of the heavens	animal of the field … bird of the sky
2:20	cattle … birds of the heavens … beast of the field … a help meet for him	livestock … birds of the sky … animal of the field … a helper comparable to him
2:21	And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and he took …	Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took …
2:22	and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman	Yahweh God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man
2:24	shall cleave unto	shall join with

Comments

Verse 1 presents a difficult puzzle for the translator. The heavens and the earth are finished, and all their ṣabaʾ. In its most usual sense, a ṣabaʾ is an army, but in an extended sense the heavenly bodies are thought of as the ṣabaʾ of the sky. Consider Nehemiah 9:6 — “But you are Yahweh, you alone; you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their ṣabaʾ, the earth and all the things that are upon it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve them all, and the ṣabaʾ of heaven worship you.”

In the mouth of the Levites of Nehemiah, it would seem, the word ṣabaʾ may describe the heavenly bodies, but it is not used to describe the things that fill the earth and sea, for which alternate phrases are found “the earth and all things that are upon it”, “the seas and all that is in them”.

However, in Genesis 2:4, and only here, if I recall correctly, the things of both earth and sky are spoken of as a ṣabaʾ. That is, in some extended metaphorical sense, the heavenly bodies and the creatures dwelling upon the earth are the “army” of heaven and earth. The ASV’s “all the host of them”, though perhaps difficult for the average English reader, does stick very close to what the Hebrew text is doing here. I am not sure that “all their vast array” serves the reader any better.

In Verse 2, it seems to me that there is not much difference between reading, with the ASV, “which he had made”, or with the WEB’s “which he had done”. The replacement of v. 3’s “hallowed it” with “made it holy” seems appropriate. In v. 4, the syntax of the Hebrew is unusual, and very different from English syntax, in such a way that nothing like a literal rendering is possible. The ASV and WEB renderings both seem reasonable.

Verse 4 introduces another of the difficult phrases of Genesis, in this case the famous elleh toldot, commonly translated “these are the generations”. It does not quite have any easy English equivalent, but it generally introduces a genealogy or a narrative about the descendants of some person. It must be used in somewhat of a looser sense in this particular verse, where it introduces the things that followed the creation. The problem the translator faces is that “These are the generations” does not quite grasp the meaning of the phrase in English. But what the WEB has done here is simply to add some words, and read, “This is the history of the generations …” This leaves the original problem unsolved — what does “generations” mean here? But it also adds a second problem. It adds the highly loaded term “history” as the description of a text which is very much unlike what is meant by “history” in the usual sense. It would be better to leave the wording as is than to load additional irrelevant and misleading wording on top of it.

In the same verse, it is a step in the right direction to replace “earth and heaven” with “the earth and the heavens”, because the “heavens” here are the sky, not a post-mortem dwelling place for human souls. But it would be better if the WEB were simply to be consistent with its usual practice throughout Genesis 1, and read “earth and sky”.

In 2:9, most translations read something like this: Out of the ground the LORD God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; also, the tree of life was in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because the word “was” is not (as it typically isn’t) present in the Hebrew text, it is also possible to read the last two trees as objects of the verb “made … to grow”.

In that case, we would read something like this: Out of the ground the LORD God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As of December 4, 2003, the WEB read this verse in a pretty conventional way.

Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This continued to be the reading until at least November 20th, 2011. However, by February 8, 2012, a change had occurred:

Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

I am not sure what justifies sticking the word “including” in here.

In verse 10, the ASV’s “became four heads” sticks literally to the Hebrew text. The WEB’s “became the source of four rivers” explains what is meant. Throughout the depiction of the four rivers, we are in a world where the normal rules are suspended. Rivers, for example, join as they go downstream. Four rivers might conceivably become one. In Genesis 2, a single river becomes four!

As the rivers go out from Eden into the world, their movement is described with the verbal root sbb, which has something to do with circular motion.

We read in Genesis 2:10

shem he-ehad pishon hu hassobeb et kol erets ha-hawilah …

As far as I know, there are two ideas of what is meant by the verb here. First is that sbb means to “encircle” a given area. Thus the ASV reads

The name of the first is Pishon: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah …

The WEB, however, takes sbb as referring to the way a river winds back and forth, producing half-circles and it crosses land. Thus the WEB gives a very different picture of the relationship between Pishon and Havilah:

The name of the first is Pishon: it flows through the whole land of Havilah …

If we are the take the WEB’s tack, I would prefer something that preserves the sense of circular movement, such as saying it winds through Havilah rather than simply flows through it.

Two verses later, wording appears which is very similar to that of 2:10:

we-shem ha-nahar ha-sheni gihon hu hassobeb et kol erets kush

The WEB translates this inconsistently with 2:10. We would expect

The name of the second river is Gihon: it flows through the whole land of Cush.

However, the WEB reads instead

The name of the second river Gihon. It is the same river that flows through the whole land of Cush.

All this extra wording (“the same river that”) is unnecessary.

In 2:14, a third river appears, with a parallel wording.

we-shem ha-nahar ha-shelishi hiddeqel hu haholek qidmat ashur …

For parallelism, we would expect the WEB to read hu as a simple it, but here it expands to “This is the one which”. Meanwhile, the verb in the Hebrew is now different. While the last two rivers sbb, “wind through” or “encircle”, this river just hlk, “goes” east of Assyria. Unfortunately, the WEB has flattened all three (two instances of sbb and one of hlk) to read “flows”.

In Genesis 2:15, the newly created human is placed in the garden to ʾbd it, that is, to do work there. The ASV reads this as “dress”, and it seems reasonable that the WEB would change this to “cultivate”.

In Genesis 2:18, we come to a difficulty. God is not happy with the lonely state of the human he has created, and declares that he will make an ezer kenegdo. An ezer is someone who provides aid or support, and most commonly God is described as ezer when he intervenes to save a human’s life.

Exodus 18:4 … for the god of my favor was my ezer, and delivered me from Pharaoh’s sword …

Deuteronomy 33:7 … Hear, O Yahweh, Judah’s voice … and be an ezer from his enemies.

Psalm 33:20 Our soul waits for Yahweh; he is our ezer and our shield.

In any of those passages, it would be very odd to translate ezer as “helper”, as though YHWH is an excellent domestic assistant, helping Israel to keep a clean house and cooking delicious meals for Israel’s children while Israel is off at work. And a look at other passages in which the term ezer appears will confirm this general impression. An ezer certainly does “help”, in the sense of saving life and so forth. But an ezer is not a “helper”. Something more like partner better fits the sense of the passage.

In verse 19, we find the ASV’s phrase “beast of the field”, which implies wild animals of some size. The WEB’s “animals of the field” seems to me to miss the point somewhat. However, the WEB’s “bird of the sky” does improve upon “bird of the heavens”. And in verse 20, the WEB’s “livestock” is a better translation of behemah than the ASV’s “cattle”.

In verse 21, a deep sleep, a tardemah, is put onto the man. In several passages, God places a tardemah, perhaps something like a supernaturally-induced trance or slumber, upon a human being, in order to accomplish some object. The ASV reads literally when it says, “And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man.” It seems to me that the WEB subtracts something from the passage when it transforms it into something more mundane: “Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep.”

In verse 22, we find literally that “Yahweh God fashioned the rib which he had taken from the man into a woman.” The ASV follows pretty closely: “and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman”. The WEB, as in verse 21, re-arranges the verse: “Yahweh God made a woman from the rib.” I don’t think we need to go this far from the literal structure of the Hebrew here.

In verse 22, I have no objection to the WEB’s replacement of “cleave” with “join”.

A Proposed Text

1 And the sky, and the earth, and all their host were finished. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. 3 And God blessed the seventh day, and made it holy, because he rested in it from all his work of creation which he had done.

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

In the day that Yahweh God made earth and sky —
5 and no wild shrub of the field was yet on the earth,
and no crop of the field had yet sprung up,
because Yahweh God had not given rain upon the earth,
and there was no human to cultivate the ground,
6 but a mist would go up from the earth, and water the face of the ground,
— 7 Yahweh God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,
and man became a living being.

8 And Yahweh God planted a garden eastward, in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground Yahweh God made grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; and the tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

9 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it was parted, and became the source of four rivers. 11 The name of the first is Pishon. It is the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are also there. 13 And the name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one that winds through the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel. It is the one which goes in front of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

15 And Yahweh God took the man, and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 And Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it, for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

18 And Yahweh God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a partner suited to him. 19 And out of the ground Yahweh God formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 And the man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field; but for man there was not found a partner suited to him. 21 And Yahweh God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. 22 And Yahweh God made the rib which he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man.

23 And the man said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. This will be called Woman, because this was taken out of Man. 24 This is why a man leaves his father and his mother, and joins to his wife, and the two become one flesh.

Further Notes

5. In this verse, the Hebrew siah ha-sadeh is “plant of the field” in both ASV and WEB, and both read eseb ha-sadeh as “herb of the field”. In general, I think the words themselves and the use of those words in this context lead to the idea that the siah ha-sadeh represent the sort of wild plants that spring up in a field with no other assistance that the rain which YHWH God provides, while the eseb ha-sadeh are those crops which are maintained by human cultivation.

9. In this verse, I am following the Masoretic cantillation, which divides the verse in half after “for food”.