the first tender flush of fresh green growth that springs from the ground after rain.
This is not the everyday word for grass. It names the young, soft, brand-new growth that carpets the ground in spring once the winter rains have soaked it: the green that has just come up and is still too tender to bear seed. Ancient relatives of the word in neighboring languages mean both this fresh growth and the spring season itself, so a memory of springtime sits inside it. Hebrew writers keep it for poetry almost everywhere it appears, because it is a vivid, evocative word rather than a plain one.
Because it points to growth at its freshest, the word carries a built-in double edge, and biblical poets use it both ways. What springs up fast also dies fast. So in some passages it stands for God's generosity and the renewal he gives, the lush feeding-ground a shepherd leads his flock to, the bones that flourish like new grass. In others the very same image stands for how quickly living things fade: the tender shoots scorched by drought or trampled in war, here today and gone tomorrow. The word does not change its meaning between these uses; the poet simply chooses which half of its nature to highlight.
The Bible keeps it close to the act of sprouting itself. It is the green the earth is commanded to bring forth at creation, and the growth God sends even to empty wilderness where no one will ever see it. To picture it rightly, do not imagine a tidy lawn but the brief, mixed seasonal cover that greens the hills of the land for a short while each year and then is gone.
Nuances
Whether the word in this verse is an umbrella term for all vegetation or the first item in a threefold classification of plants.
- majorityAn umbrella term: the earth's general vegetation, which the two following phrases (seed-bearing plants and fruit trees) then specify. The absence of the phrase "according to its kind" on this word, where it does attach to the two sub-categories, is taken as a signal.; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (1989); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, WBC 1 (1987); Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, NICOT (1990)
- minorityThe first of three distinct plant categories (low plants, then seed-bearing herbs, then fruit trees), read as the priestly writer's classification of the flora.; Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, OTL, rev. ed. (1972); Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I (1961)
Disputed
Whether the word means specifically young, freshly-sprouted growth, or rather the collective carpet of green ground-cover regardless of its age.
- majorityIt names young, freshly-sprouted growth, distinguished from more mature herbage; this is the reading of the standard lexicons and of most medieval and modern commentators.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. דשא; W. Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, trans. S. P. Tregelles (1857), s.v. דשא; Ramban (Nachmanides) on Genesis 1:11
- minorityIt names the collective green ground-cover over the soil, in contrast to individual herb-species, rather than growth that is specifically young.; Rashi on Genesis 1:11; Rashbam on Genesis 1:11