Genesis 2:5 - Exposition

And every plant of the field before it was (literally, not yet) in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew (literally, had not yet sprouted). Following the LXX ; the English Version suggests an intention on the writer's part to emphasize the fact that the vegetation of the globe—here comprehended under the general terms, shiah , shrub, and eseb , herb—was not a natural production, but, equally with the great earth and heavens, was the creation of Jehovah Elohim—a rendering which has the sanction of Taylor Lewis; whereas the writer's object clearly is to depict the appearance of the earth at the time when the man-ward development of the heavens and the earth began. Then not a single plant was in the ground, not a green blade was visible. The land, newly sprung from the waters, was one desolate region of bleak, bare lava-hills and extensive mud-fiats. Up to that point the absence of vegetation is accounted for by the circumstance that the presently existing atmospheric conditions of the globe had not then been established, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth , and the ordinary agricultural operations on which its production was afterwards to depend had not then been begun, and there was not a man to till the ground .