Before it grew

2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

This is a bit of a low point.  I can't quite figure out how to make grammatic sense out of this.  It seems to be saying that there were no plants, or that all of the plants were just seeds in the ground.  But it doesn't quite actually say that.

"And every plant of the field before it was in the earth."  Let's simplify that down.  First, we can drop the leading "And" with impunity.  The phrase "of the field" describes the plants, and doesn't seem that important.  Let's just use "there" instead of "in the earth" for now.  Then the phrase becomes "every plant before it was there".  There are two ways to interpret "before" in English.  One, it can mean "in front of", as in "all the papers before you".  Two, it can mean prior to, earlier in time.  If "before" means "in front of", then what is "it" referring to?  "Every plant in front of it was there."

The last verse ended in a comma, but going back to it doesn't help.  There's simply no referent for "it", if we interpret "before" as "in front of".  That leaves us with the temporal meaning of "before", and "it" refers to the plant.  So the phrase is something like "every plant, before arriving and every herb before growing".  But then we get to a colon, and don't have a real sentence yet.

The part after the colon seems like it's trying to explain the part before the colon.  It starts with "for" as in "because".  "Because no rain and no tilling."  (I'm being brief here; at least the actual phrase after the colon is grammatical.) Now, rain and tilling help plants grow.  So, the part before the colon should say "The plants hadn't grown yet".  Or, in the inimitable repetitive style we're getting used to "The plants before growing hadn't yet grown."  But just "The plants before growing" seems like not quite enough.

Let's just assume that the first part is supposed to say "At this time (ie, on the day that God made the earth and the heavens), the plants of the fields were still just seeds in the ground, as were the herbs of the field; and they had not yet grown."

Moving on.  There's a second "LORD God", so this verse is sounding like the previous one.  No real shock there, since the previous one ended in a comma.  But we'll count it as another small hint that this chapter has a different author than the first one.  That is, that the Rashomon Interpretation is true.

It sounds kind of like it's saying that you need two things to grow plants: rain and tilling.  This is pretty odd, since everyone knows that plants grow on untilled soil, although they don't take root as readily.  It does seem to be referencing some agriculture knowledge, and is farmer-oriented.  This gives it something in common with the first chapter.  This chapter also seems to be written by a farmer.  That would tend to undermine the Rashomon Interpretation and support the Repetition Interpretation.

Another way to read the "rain and tilling" is that you need either one or the other to get plants to grow.  Perhaps wild plants grow from rain, and domesticated one from tilling.  But tilling is no substitute for watering, and I'd think even early farmers would know that.  However, this interpretation puts man and God as equals, which is interesting.

It reads like God is the cause of rain.  I'd go with large bodies of water evaporating, temperature gradients in the atmosphere changing the ability of the air to hold water, and so on.  But that's just me.

If the Repetition Interpretation is true, this is specifying when exactly we're talking about.  This is after the dry land was separated from the water, but before the earth brought forth grass.  That's specifically part of the way through the third day.  In the first chapter, earth and seas were separated on the first part of the third day (1:9-1:10), and the earth brought forth grains and fruit trees on the second part (1:11-1:12).

The third day, then is "the day that the LORD God made the earth".  However, it's not the day God made the heavens; heaven was created on the second day, filled with stars on the fourth, and with birds on the fifth.  That's a strike against Repetition and in favor of Rashomon.