Excurses:
Pick-Axes
One of the most common translations
of גרזן is “pick-ax,” which is properly a tool whose head has two ends, one
pointed (the pick) and the other with a broad sharp edge parallel to the tool’s
handle (the ax). This tool does not seem to have existed in the Iron Age Levant.
“Proving that something did not exist at some time and place in the past is
every historian’s nightmare because there is always a nagging fear that
evidence of its existence may at some future date be found.” Rather than claim
badly that there were no pick-axes in the ancient Near East, therefore, it should
be said there is no evidence that there were pick-axes, and that their
existence is therefore suspect. There are no attestations of pick-axes within
the archaeological record of the Levant. In Egypt there are only a few
examples, and they are all very late. Mesopotamian examples do not seem to
exist at all. In Iran on the other hand, pick-axes certainly did exist
beginning at least by the middle of the third millennium.
There are literary passages in Sumerian,
Egyptian, and Akkadian that have been taken as mentioning pick-axes, but on
closer inspection all turn out to be unreliable. The Sumerian text that used to
be known as the “Myth of the Pickax” (Sum. gišal[a-no]), of which a
partial translation appeared under that name in Kramer’s Sumerian Mythology,
is now known as “Creation of the Hoe,” and the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary
does not even mention the possibility that Su. al could be anything other than “Hoe.”
(Aaron J. Koller, The Semantic Field of Cutting Tools in Biblical Hebrew:
The Interface of Philological, Semantic, and Archaeological Evidence [The
Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph 49; The Catholic Biblical Association of
America, 2013; repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2023], 140-41)
This fits another biblical
attestation of the גרזן in Isaiah’s rhetorical question (10:15): הֲיִתְפָּאֵר֙ הַגַּרְזֶ֔ן
עַ֖ל הַחֹצֵ֣ב בּ֑וֹ “shall the garzen glorify itself over the one who
wields it?” The collocation of the tool with the verb חצ"ב is noteworthy,
since this indicates that the context is one of hewing stone. Nothing can be
extracted from this text regarding the morphology or use of the tool, however. (Ibid.,
140 n. 44)
