Journal: Interdisciplinary Journal on Biblical Authority
Volume: IJOBA 01:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Whom, Where, Or What Could “All The Earth’ Mean? A Case Study In The Implications Of Context And Intertextuality For Translating And Interpreting כל הארץ In The Pentateuch
Author: Douglas K. Smith, Jr.

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Whom, Where, Or What Could “All The Earth’ Mean? A Case Study In The Implications Of Context And Intertextuality For Translating And Interpreting כל הארץ In The Pentateuch

Douglas K. Smith, Jr.

Adjunct Professor
Graham Bible College

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The phrases כל הארץ and כל הארצות occur 144 times in 142 different verses of the Hebrew Bible.1 The Pentateuch contains thirty of those occurrences, which I wish to examine in this article as a case study, offering an assessment of the sufficiency of contextual and intertextual clues to grasp the meaning of a potentially ambiguous phrase and suggesting strategies for those seeking to read, translate, and interpret the text. The phrase is particularly important in passages such as Genesis 8:5 and Genesis 11:1, where various claims have been made about the identification of “all the earth” with place or people, and whether the correct identification is universal, figurative, or all of a certain subunit.

Lexical Elements

The Hebrew phrase כל הארץ is a construct consisting of three parts: a quantifying indefinite pronoun (כל), the definite article prefix ה, and the singular noun ארץ. This paper will also consider the phrase with the plural variations

IJOBA 1:2 (Fall 2020) p. 136

ארצות and ארצת. Before treating the phrase in context, an examination of its lexical components is in order.

The word כל is an indefinite pronoun with a quantifying function.2 It expresses the idea of “totality”3 and is common in other Semitic languages.4 This word occurs 5,422 times in the Hebrew Bible, usually preceding the phrase it quantifies.5 It can govern indefinite singular and plural nouns and noun phrases, or, as in the specimen paper will examine, definite singular and plural nouns and noun phrases. When used in construct with a definite singular noun, it often carries the idea of “the totality of the individual unit of the specific entity.” Following Naude, van der Merwe...