[b-hebrew] Genesis 2:5
Vadim Cherny
VadimCherny at mail.ru
Thu Sep 29 07:22:07 EDT 2005
>>> Gen 2:5 seems to describe the reasons why there were no cultivated
>> Cultivated? This is your imagination at work. The text says nothing of
>> the sort.
> Maybe it does:
>1. The context implies that whatever is meant by שיח השדה and עשב השדה,
>they require work from the man and water to grow.
Siah is universally shrub, wild plants, not cultivated.
> 2. Why are שיח and עשב qualified here when they need not be?
Elsewhere they appear alone, so it seems likely that adding השדה
modifies the meaning in some way.
Parallelism, a common occurence, is one explanation.
My reading, however, is that siah is "talk": "there was no [farmers'] talk
in the field, and no plants grew".
Vadim Cherny
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