Historical Note/ David Deming, History Editor

Phreatophytes in the Bibleby Benjamin Ross

Not only has the Hebrew Bible had an enormousinfluence on Western civilization as a sacred text for Juda-ism, Christianity, and Islam but it also has value as a sourceof information on the culture of ancient times. Among thefields of knowledge about which the Bible provides histor-ical information is ground water hydrology.

Because the Bible was written with a religious ratherthan scientific objective, careful reading is sometimesrequired to extract what the text says about natural his-tory. The passage of time, with accompanying culturaland linguistic changes, poses additional difficulties. Inhis fascinating new book, The Natural History of theBible, Daniel Hillel (2006) writes that

the Hebrew language itself has metamorphosed overtime, so that many words no longer carry the samenuances as they did long ago, nor do the metaphorsconvey the same associations. As many of the meta-phors relate to what were then commonly experiencednatural phenomena, . . . it now requires a special efforton our part to resurrect the original setting in order tobetter understand the biblical narrative.

One word that seems to have lost its originalnuance is yuval or yaval, meaning a stream of some kind,which appears three times in the Bible. In modernHebrew, it refers to a perennial stream, and so it has gen-erally been understood by commentators and translators.But two of the passages in which the word appears referto phreatophytes (Figure 1), plants whose deep rootsallow them to draw water from the water table (Davis andDeWiest 1966; Meinzer 1927). All three passages makemore sense if a yuval is the sudden flood that appears ina dry wash after a storm. This meaning also gets supportfrom linguistic evidence. Rereading the Bible with thisknowledge, we find that in the arid to semiarid environ-ments of the Kingdom of Judah, there may have beena surprisingly good understanding of desert hydrology.

Of the three passages, the one most suggestive ofextensive hydrogeologic knowledge is Isaiah 44:3-5. Thismay be translated as:

Even as I pour water on thirsty soil,and rain upon dry ground,so will I pour My spirit on your seed,My blessing upon your offshoots.And they shall grow in among grasslike willows by yavals of water.One shall say ‘‘I am the Lord’s,’’another shall use the name of ‘‘Jacob,’’another shall mark his arm ‘‘of the Lord,’’and adopt the name of ‘‘Israel.’’

A reader familiar with the desert washes of thesouthwestern United States immediately recognizes theimage of willows growing among the grass along washes.The phreatophyte remains green when the grass thatsprouted up so quickly after the flood has long sinceturned brown.

The prophet, this passage suggests, had some under-standing of the mechanism of ground water recharge inthe arid desert as elucidated by recent research in thesouthwestern United States (Hogan et al. 2004). Aftermost storms, precipitation is retained in soil near the sur-face and evaporates. Water table aquifers are rechargedby major storms that deliver so much water that theupper soil is saturated and the excess infiltrates intounderlying rocks. The recurrence interval of such stormscan be years. (Such knowledge need not be ascribed tothe general population of ancient Israel; the author ofIsaiah may have been an unusually careful observer ofhis surroundings.)

The simile can then be paraphrased as follows: I willpour out My spirit as suddenly and overwhelmingly asa rainstorm in the desert. After such a storm, the willowdoes not fade like grass, but is kept green for many yearsby the ground water that recharges in the storm. Your off-spring will be like the willow and not the grass; they willdraw spiritual sustenance from that sudden outpouringfor years afterward and remain faithful to Me.

A yuval appears also in Jeremiah 17:5-8, again asso-ciated with phreatophytes:

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Cursed are they who trust in man . . .They shall be like an arar in the Arava,which does not sense the coming of good,it is set in the scorched places of the wilderness,in a barren land without inhabitant.Blessed are they who trust in the Lord,whose trust is the Lord alone.They shall be like a tree planted above water,sending down its roots by a yuval:it does not fear the coming of heat,its leaves are ever fresh;it has no care in a year of drought,it does not cease to yield fruit.

This passage is well known to English speakers fromthe King James version (1611), where the tree is planted‘‘by the waters’’ and ‘‘spreadeth out’’ its roots. But trans-lators working in 17th-century England might easily haveoverlooked nuances of desert hydrology. In the arid tosemiarid environments of Judea, surface water suppliesare generally vulnerable to drought, and fresh leaves andfruit in years of drought summon the image of a phreato-phyte, which draws its water from below and not (or notdirectly) from the flood that passes by. Taken word byword, the Hebrew is compatible with either translation(the preposition is equivalent to the English ‘‘by’’ or‘‘above’’; and the tree literally ‘‘sends out’’ rather than‘‘spreads’’ its roots, with the direction not specified), but

‘‘above water, sending down its roots . . .’’ communicatesa picture that is more consistent with the environment.

The phreatophyte is contrasted with the arar, a plantof some kind that grows in the Arava, the rift valleybetween the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. One wouldhope to find usable water beneath such a topographiclow. But the near-surface ground water of the Arava isoften saline, requiring desert vegetation to survive onprecipitation extracted from the soil zone after rainfalls.The person who turns away from God, the prophet sug-gests, will suffer similar disappointment.

A third appearance of yuval is in Isaiah 30:25-26,which might be translated as:

And on every high mountain and on every lofty hill,there shall appear channels [with] flash floods—ona day of heavy slaughter, when towers topple. Andthe light of the moon shall become like the light ofthe sun, and the light of the sun shall become seven-fold, like the light of the seven days, when the Lordbinds up His people’s wounds and heals the injuries ithas suffered.

This passage is not intended as an account of natural phe-nomena; all that can be said is that a sudden flood fits inwith the cataclysmic events it describes.

Linguistic evidence (Koehler et al. 2001; Roth 2005)supports the interpretation of these verses as referring tophreatophytes and ephemeral watercourses. The wordyaval/yuval seems linked to the Akkadian (Meso-potamian) verb abalu, used regularly to denote the flowof water, generally in reference to a flood or ephemeralflow. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Roth 2005)gives 16 examples of the use of abalu to denote flow; 11refer explicitly to flood or ephemeral flows, and none re-fers unambiguously to base flow. This word also may beechoed in the Arabic verb wabala (‘‘to shed heavy rain,cloudburst’’) and the nouns wabl and wabil (‘‘cloud-burst’’). More distant cognates include the Hebrew rootalef-bet-lamed, which means ‘‘to dry out’’ or ‘‘to becomea desert’’ (Isaiah 33:9; Jeremiah 12:4), the noun mabbul,which is the biblical term for the deluge in the timeof Noah, and the Akkadian noun babil, meaning flood.This evidence, while admittedly sparse, points more to ayuval as a flood in a normally dry streambed than as aperennial stream.

Phreatophytes make other appearances in the Bible,where the yuval is not mentioned. On the feast ofSukkoth, for example, Jews take leaves of three trees: thepalm, the myrtle, and the willow. All three are phreato-phytes; the holiday comes at the end of the dry season,when in the desert only phreatophytes would have greenleaves. The willow, indeed, is specified in Leviticus24:40 as arvei nakhal, which is usually translated as‘‘willows of the brook’’ but could equally well mean‘‘willows of the wash.’’

What is today the specialized experience of thosewho study the desert and its water resources was theeveryday life of the farmers and herders of ancient Israel.A careful reading of the Bible shows how much of thehydrologic cycle could be deciphered by those whoobserved their surroundings as carefully as Isaiah andJeremiah.

Figure 1. A phreatophyte (cottonwood) in Arizona (photoby Juliet Stromberg).

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AcknowledgmentsThis work would not have been possible without the

help of Rabbi David E. S. Stein who was very generouswith his time and attention. I also thank ProfessorS. David Sperling of the Hebrew Union College/JewishInstitute of Religion for his assistance in identifyingAkkadian and Hebrew cognates, and Juliet Stromberg ofArizona State University for the photograph.

ReferencesDavis, S.N., and R.J.M. DeWiest. 1966. Hydrogeology. New

York: Wiley.

Hillel, D. 2006. The Natural History of the Bible. New York:Columbia University Press.

Hogan, J.F., F.M. Phillips, and B.R. Scanlon, ed. 2004. Ground-water Recharge in a Desert Environment: The South-western United States. Washington, D.C.: AmericanGeophysical Union.

Koehler, L., W. Baumgartner, and J.J. Stamm. 2001. TheHebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 3rded. [Engl. Transl]. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Meinzer, O.E. 1927. Plants as indicators of ground water,USGS Water-Supply Paper 577. http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/usgspubs/wsp/wsp577. Accessed 29 June 2007.

Roth, M.T., ed. 2005. The Assyrian Dictionary. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

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