Rooted in Deep Waters
“In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert” (Isaiah 35:6).
In the biblical narrative, the word yuval (Strong 2988) which appears three times in the Bible seems to have lost its original nuance and it is recognized as meaning a stream of some kind.1 In modern Hebrew, it refers to a perennial stream, and so it has generally been understood by commentators and translators. But two of the passages in which the word appears refer to trees whose deep roots allow them to draw water from the water table.2 All three passages make more sense if a yuval is the sudden flood that appears in a dry wash after a storm.
ISAIAH 44
Rereading the Bible with this knowledge, we find that in the arid to semi-arid environments of the Kingdom of Judah, there was a good understanding of desert hydrology. For example, Isaiah 44:3-5 may 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 grass like
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 immediately recognizes the image of willows growing among the grass along washes. After most storms, precipitation is retained in soil near the surface and evaporates. Water table aquifers are recharged by major storms that deliver so much water that the upper soil is saturated and the excess infiltrates into underlying rocks. The recurrence interval of such storms can be years. The deep-rooted tree remains green when the grass that sprouted up so quickly after the flood has long since turned brown. The simile can then be paraphrased as follows:
I will pour out My spirit as suddenly and overwhelmingly as a rainstorm in the desert. After such a storm, the willow does not fade like grass, but is kept green for many years by the ground water that recharges in the storm. Your offspring will be like the willow and not the grass; they will draw spiritual sustenance from that sudden outpouring for years afterward and remain faithful to Me.
JEREMIAH 17
A yuval appears also in Jeremiah 17:5-8, again associated with deep-rooted trees.
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.
Trees in the Desert
This passage is well known to English speakers from the King James version where the tree is planted “by the waters” and “spreadeth out” its roots. But translators working in 17th-century England might easily have overlooked nuances of desert hydrology. In the arid to semiarid environments of Judea, surface water supplies are generally vulnerable to drought, and fresh leaves and fruit in years of drought summon the image of a phreatophyte, which draws its water from below and not (or not directly) from the flood that passes by. Taken word by word, 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” communicates a picture that is more consistent with the environment.
The phreatophyte is contrasted with the arar, a plant of some kind that grows in the Arava, the rift valley between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. One would hope to find usable water beneath such a topographic low. But the near-surface ground water of the Arava is often saline, requiring desert vegetation to survive on precipitation extracted from the soil zone after rainfalls.
The person who turns away from God, the prophet suggests, will suffer similar disappointment.
ISAIAH 30
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 [yuvals] – on a day of heavy slaughter, when towers topple. And the light of the moon shall become like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall become sevenfold, like the light of the seven days, when the Lord binds up His people’s wounds and heals the injuries it has suffered.”
This passage is not intended as an account of natural phenomena; all that can be said is that a sudden flood fits in with the cataclysmic events it describes. Linguistic evidence supports the interpretation of these verses as referring to phreatophytes and ephemeral watercourses. The word yaval/ yuval seems linked to the Akkadian (Mesopotamian) verb abalu, used regularly to denote the flow of water, generally in reference to a flood or ephemeral flow.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Roth 2005) gives 16 examples of the use of abalu to denote flow; 11 refer explicitly to flood or ephemeral flows, and none refers unambiguously to base flow. This word also may be echoed in the Arabic verb wabala (“to shed heavy rain, cloudburst”) and the nouns wabl and wabil (“cloudburst”). More distant cognates include the Hebrew root abel (Strong 58) which means “to dry out” or “to become a desert” (Isaiah 33:9, Jeremiah 12:4), the noun mabbul, which is the biblical term for the deluge in the time of Noah, and the Akkadian noun babil, meaning flood.
This evidence, while admittedly sparse, points more to a yuval as a flood in a normally dry stream bed than as a perennial stream. Phreatophytes make other appearances in the Bible, where the yuval is not mentioned. On the feast of Sukkoth, for example, Jews take leaves of three trees: the palm, the myrtle, and the willow. All three are phreatophytes; the holiday comes at the end of the dry season, when in the desert only phreatophytes would have green leaves. The willow, indeed, is specified in Leviticus 24:40 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 those who study the desert and its water resources was the everyday life of the farmers and herders of ancient Israel. A careful reading of the Bible shows how much of the hydrologic cycle could be deciphered by those who observed their surroundings as carefully as Isaiah and Jeremiah.
– Richard Doctor
- Ross, Benjamin, “Phreatophytes in the Bible,” Ground Water Journal, Volume 45:5 (September-October 2007), page 652-654.
- The technical designation for such deep rooted trees is “Phreatophytes” from the Greek “well” and “growth.”
Blessed is the man [whose] … delight is in the law of the LORD … he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
(Psalms 1:1-3)