the green, seed-bearing plants of the ground: herbs, low growth, and field crops, as opposed to trees
This word names the soft, leafy plants that spring up from the ground, the kind that bear their own seed rather than growing into wood. It covers the whole low layer of plant life, from wild herbs and pasture growth to the grain a farmer plants. The one fixed contrast is with trees (עֵץ): the world's plants divide into the woody kind and this softer, seed-bearing kind, and this word is the second of the two.
Because that range is so wide, the exact shade depends on the verse.
- In the creation account it is one of the great classes of plant life God brings forth and gives as food.
- In farming settings it slides toward either the crops people grow to eat or the grass animals graze.
- In the prophets and Psalms it becomes a picture: green (יֶרֶק) that shoots up fast and just as fast dries out, so it stands for how brief and fragile human life is, or, turned the other way, how quickly people can flourish when conditions are good.
What holds all of this together is a single idea the biblical writers keep returning to: every living thing, beast and king and farmer alike, depends on God sending the rain that makes this green growth rise from the ground. The same plants that feed the world in blessing wither to nothing in judgment.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether Genesis 1:11-12 lays out plant life in two classes or three. The older reading takes the verse as three coordinate terms (sprouting growth, seed-bearing herbs, and trees); the now-dominant reading treats the first word as a general heading and this word plus trees as its two real subcategories, the only two that carry the according-to-its-kind formula and reappear in the diet of verses 29-30.
- majorityA two-part taxonomy (or a cognate-accusative heading): the first term is an umbrella, and this seed-bearing herb plus the fruit tree are the two genuine classes. The Septuagint, Vulgate, and most modern grammarians read it this way.; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC 1; Word, 1987), 21; Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1990), 125-127; Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I (Magnes, 1961), 40-42
- minorityA three-term taxonomy of distinct plant classes, read by parts of the older source-critical tradition as priestly botanical precision.; John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (ICC; T&T Clark, 1910); Hermann Gunkel, Genesis, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Mercer University Press, 1997)
Whether the phrase rendered herb of the field in Genesis 2:5 and 3:18 keeps the broad sense of the creation account or narrows specifically to cultivated cereal crops, the grain a farmer grows by hard labor after the Fall.
- majorityIt narrows to cultivated field crops, especially cereals, anticipating the toilsome farming of Genesis 3 and the bread of 3:19.; Mark D. Futato, Because It Had Rained, Westminster Theological Journal 60 (1998): 1-21; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC 1; Word, 1987), 58; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS; Jewish Publication Society, 1989), ad loc.
- minorityThe difference from the broad creation sense reflects a stylistic distinction between two literary sources rather than a fixed narrowing of the word.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1984), 199