This week, I’d like to talk about rivers.
I’ll start with the conclusions of an article by Yoel Elitzur, originally presented at the 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, in 2005. It's an article about the Hebrew words נהר nahar and נ֫חל náḥal. These two words might look very much the same, but náḥal is a segholate noun, so it’s accented on the first syllable, not the last, as is otherwise expected in Hebrew. (See Lesson 12 of my Hebrew course to learn more about segholate nouns; watch Lecture 1 for free here.)
In my fancy biblical dictionary, both of these words can be translated as stream. But even the dictionary points out a difference between them, and Elitzur goes a little bit farther than the dictionary. The dictionary says nahar occurs 120 times in the Bible; the primary definition of that is river or stream. You can use it of course also with particular names. At the very beginning of Deuteronomy, we heard that the “Big River” was not the Mississippi but nahar p’rat, the Euphrates.
The other word, náḥal, occurs even more often, 140 times. Here, stream is the second definition; the first definition is river valley or wadi, a “stream” with a perennial supply of water, “more often only in winter.” That’s not a translation, of course, it’s an explanation. By the way, for some reason people seem to think Arabic wadi is an English word. In fact, there is actually a pretty good English word for this Hebrew word náḥal. Maybe if more Jews lived out in the American southwest, we would use it: it's a wash or, if you prefer, a dry wash. When the rains come, of course, a wash is no longer dry but fills with a torrent of water. Careful! People can even be killed in those torrents.
So a náḥal is a wash or, if you want something a little bit more colorful without having to go too far from English, you can call it an arroyo, a word they also use out there, though that's originally a Spanish word. Fun fact, completing the circle: the Guada- of Spanish names like Guadalajara comes from Arabic wadi, since Arabic was spoken in Iberia for some eight centuries until 1492.
Elitzur says something a little bit more than the dictionary does, not just that a nahar is a river and a náḥal is a wash (though he wrote his article in Hebrew so he obviously did not translate the words into English). He says that a nahar is always full of water and a náḥal is often dry; a nahar is big and a náḥal is small. And there’s one more thing.
Everything we’ve said so far applies to biblical prose; in poetry the difference between the two words more or less disappears. In prose, however, at least in Standard Biblical Hebrew — the Hebrew of Genesis through Kings — a nahar refers to water outside of the land of Israel, and a náḥal is almost always inside the land of Israel, the one possible exception being náḥal mitzráyim ‘the Stream of Egypt’, Wadi El-Arish. In Joshua 15, this is the southern border of Israel, but Akkadian, which obviously doesn’t care whether a náḥal is in Israel or not, also calls Wadi El-Arish naḫal māt Muṣur.
When you see náḥal in the Bible, however, you are looking at something smaller than a river, you are inside the land of Israel, and unless they tell you something different, there's no water in the thing.
Why am I mentioning it this week? Obviously, because the word náḥal occurs in this week’s reading:
From there they proceeded to Guggōd and from Guggōd to Yot’vat, a land with naḥalim of water.
That’s Deut 10:7. Two stops after the death of Aaron on the Israelite march to Canaan, the Israelites reached Yot’vat, a land with naḥalim of water. (In Num 33:33-34, in the complete list of the Israelites’ travels, the stop before Yot’vat is Hor-haggidgad, and nothing is said about naḥalim.) Most likely Yot’vat is at (or near) the modern kibbutz called Yotvata.
With 600,000 men (not to mention women and children) trying to get from here to there you don't really want streams full of water in the way. But the same expression occurs earlier in this week’s reading, in Deut 8:7, where these naḥalei máyim are part of a promise:
For YHWH your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with naḥalim of water, springs, and deeps, coming forth in the valleys and the mountains.
What is it that makes this such a good land? Quite simple: Your new home comes with free running water included. In both cases, Elitzur’s point would be that if they didn't tell you that these were naḥalei máyim, you would assume that they are dry. NJPS translates the phrase in 10:7 as “running brooks,” while in 8:7 they are simply “streams.”
Again, according to Elitzur, when you say náḥal, the assumption is that you’re talking about something that’s dry unless they specifically tell you that it has water in it. The whole point of this promise in Deut 8:7 is that these are not dry washes. Unlike what you would expect from a náḥal, these are always flowing with water. That's what makes this such a good land. And that's also why you have to learn biblical Hebrew and not just read your Bible in English. (End of commercial.)
You may be wondering one more thing; at least, it naturally occurred to me, and it occurred to Elitzur as well. If a nahar is outside of Israel and a náḥal is inside Israel, is הַיַּרדֵּן ha-yarden, the Jordan River (as we call it in English) a nahar or a náḥal? On one side of it you are in Israel and on the other you are outside of Israel.
Answer: the Jordan is just ha-yarden and nothing else. We’ll see it again almost as soon as next week’s reading begins, but there are no more naharim and no more naḥalim, dry or running, in the rest of the Torah.