M. L.
Glikman, Israel
The
ancient people used to find the Shoham stone in the land of Havillah along with
gold and bedolach. The color of bedolach
and the seed of gad had served as some kind of identification marks for the
manna.
In the book
of Exodus (Shemot) 16:31 we read the following: “And the house of Israel called the name thereof manna: and it was like gad seed white…”
The second time we see the combination “manna – gad” in the book of
Numbers (Bamidbar) 11:7: “Now the manna was like gad seed, and the appearance
thereof as the appearance of
bedolach.”
We have made small changes in the translation. In both cases the translator used the word coriander
as the name of the plant instead of the
word גד – gad. We felt it was appropriate to use the
original Hebrew word but in its English transliteration.
The first sentence in the original text does not provide a clear
answer to the following question: To which of the two nouns does the definition
“white” relate to? The reference is
either to the white gad or to the white manna. Unfortunately, a survey of a small number of
Torah scholars and students in the town of Bnei Brak has revealed differences
of opinion, and yet, the majority of respondents adhered to the traditional
view: gad is the coriander and the manna is white.
Various ethnic groups have almost identical names for
coriander. In Akkadian the
name is kisibirru,kisibirritu(m), in Sanskrit - kustumbari,
in Telugu – kustumburu, in Urdu –kothamir, in Tamil – kotamali,
in Arabic – al-kuzbara, in Latin – celiandrum. The most
often used Russian name is kinsa.
The history
of translation of the word gad as coriander dates back to the Septuagint
and continues in translations of the Holy Scriptures into other languages. Due to the color difference between the coriander
seeds, which are of dirty yellow/ brownish color, and the whiteness of the
manna, the Torah commentators made some amendments. According to the Babylonian Talmud (Yoma, page
75), Rav Asi (אסי ) said that the manna was round
like gad and white like margalit (this word is usually defined as
a pearl or a precious stone). RASHI
supported such interpretation: “….a herb
, the name of which is coriander ; its seed
is round and is not white, whilst the Manna was white." (
Pentateuch. Exodus. London, 1930 ,p. 87
).
In the
same section of the Babylonian Talmud (see also the commentaries Sefer Ein
Israel, also called Ein Yaakov) it had been suggested for the first time that gad
is pishtan (פשתן ) – flax.
However, this idea did not get a momentum due
to the red color of flax seeds, which contradicted the accepted notion about
the color of manna. S. Landersdorfer (1916), F.X. Kortleiter
(1930) and Moshe Raanan ((ד"ר משה רענן had proposed
that the possible explanation for comparing gad with flax may be found
in the Sumerian language, where the word gad means flax (http://www.daf-yomi.com/DYItemDetails.aspx?itemId=8058). Unfortunately these
authors did not go beyond simply stating the fact.
Thus,
we have two possible concepts for the etymology of the word gad - גד. The first one is based on the assumption that
the word is derived from the Phoenician language, as the Carthaginians,
according to Dioscorides (1st century AD), used the word goid for the African coriander (J. Parry,1858; I. Low,
1881).
The
second concept is based on the cuneiform writing. The Sumerian word gish GADA
corresponds to the Akkadian word kitu meaning flax, linen (gish
being an indicator of flora). The
earliest records on the clay tablets about flax date back to the third
millennium BC (http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/egi-bin/epsd ). (See also R.C. Thompson. A Dictionary of Assyrian
Botany, 1949, p. 113).
The
word gad in the Torah is used together with the word zerah – זרע (seed). In the Sumerian-Akkadian the word seed is
written as SHE.NUMUN = zerum (B. Kienast, W. Sommerfeld, 1994), while the expression zer
GADA- Leinsamen (the flax seed) can be found in the dictionary АНw II. 495.
The Wikipedia
article “Common Flax” indicates that there are several colors of flax
seeds. The colors vary from pale yellow to
dark brown. The seed capsules have either
flattened spherical or ovoid spherical shape, while the seeds are of either
ovoid or elongated elliptical shape.
The flax variety with pale yellow seeds is called “white flax” or Linum perenne
"Alba". The flowers of common
flax are blue (blue flax), while white flax has white flowers. Can this be the biblical “white gad”?
W.H. van
Soldt (1990) has published the names for flax in the Ugaritic language: pttm
= GADA –flax, linen. Besides that, there are two more words for
flax in this language: ktn and qt. The last word even falls into the same pattern
as gad. One of the words for flax
in the Ancient Egypt was psd (sounds similar to the Hebrew pshtn).
In the
Dravidian language the word gaddi means grass, straw, hay ( T. Burrow, M.
Emeneau, 1961).
Continuing
the search for white flax we discovered GADA BABBAR - white linen (M. Silver,
1992) on the lists of goods arriving
from Tilmun (Dilmnun, Bahrain). The
word BABBAR means white, while the collocation GADA BABBAR can be found in the" Lugalbanda in
the Wilderness" epos (H.L.J. Vanstiphout,
J.S. Cooper, 2003), as well as in the works of
A. Livingtone (2007), J.O. Nriagu,(1983), A. Berlejun (1998) and others.
We
assume that the phrase ki zerah gad lavan
כזרע גד לבן-from
the book of Exodus could be written in Sumerian as zer GADA BABBAR – the
seed of white flax. Therefore, גד לבן (gad
lavan) means white flax. Then
the manna is like the seed of white flax and does not have anything to do with
coriander. The heavenly manna is of the
light golden color. Continuing with this
train of thoughts we come to the conclusion that bedolach is of golden
color. But bedolach will be the topic of
the next article.
