Like a Garden (Gen 13:10)

¹⁰ like the garden of YHWH, like Egypt — over to Zoar.

כְּגַן־יְ׳הוָה֙ כְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם בֹּאֲכָ֖ה צֹֽעַר׃

There are three topics to discuss that I see here immediately:

• What on earth — if that is the correct expression to use — is “the garden of YHWH”? (I know you are guessing already.)

• What could be gained by comparing that fabulous-sounding garden to Egypt?

• Where is Zoar, and why should we care, when we are reading about these lush gardens?

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If you think these six words begin with something lofty and end with a thud, you are not the only ones who think so. The NJPS translation of our verse rearranges the word order:

^{Gen 13:10} Lot looked about him and saw how well watered was the whole plain of the Jordan, all of it—this was before the LORD had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah—all the way to Zoar, like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt.

Really I’m pretty sure what the verse is trying to express is this:

^{Gen 13:10} Lot looked about him and saw how well watered was the whole plain of the Jordan, all of it, all the way to Zoar—like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt. (This was before the LORD had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)

When I put this whole verse back together in the index to Genesis 13, I’ll translate it that way.

The standard commentaries that are careful to separate the J and P voices don’t quite know what to do with this sort of phrase (more on that below). Words that seem to be misplaced in a biblical verse are not that uncommon. A possible explanation, which is perhaps more likely in some cases than in others, is that someone wrote them as a marginal note and a later scribe mistakenly inserted them right after the word they were written next to.

Before we put Zoar aside — don’t worry, we’ll retrieve it for chs. 14 and 19, the rest of the Lot story — we should mention one possible reason it was stuck in the Hebrew phrase immediately after Egypt: It sounds and looks an awful lot like צֹעַן ‘Zoan’, an Egyptian town mentioned in Num 13:22 as being almost as old as Hebron. A fun language fact is illustrated by the Greek transliteration of Zoar as Ζογορα ‘Zogora’. Aramaic on One Foot learners will remember that Proto-Semitic has two different letters that Hebrew represents with just ע: a softer guttural that turned עמוס into Amos, and a harsher one that turned עמורה into Gomorrah. Obviously צער had the harsher one, the ghayn of modern Arabic.

Now that “garden of YHWH.” We read in chs. 2–3 about a garden that YHWH planted somewhere in the east, apparently much farther east than the prairie of the Jordan. The phrase itself never occurs in those chapters; it is found, in fact, just once elsewhere in the Bible: