E-TZ – ‘living substance’

The root עו or עי develps every idea of growth, excresence, tumour; anything which accumulates. This sign צ which terminates it, marks the aim, the end to which all things tend. Seeing only a tree, in the word עצ , as the Hellenists or as Saint Jerome who has copied them, testifies to a geat desire to suppress the truth or to show great ignorance…The Chaldaic reads אילן, which amounts to nearly the same. It is an extensive force, an invading power; in short, matter in travail…

The mistake that the translators committed here appears to me voluntary and calculated…After having seen a garden in an intelligible enclosure that we would today name an organic sphere of activity, it was quite natural that [they] should see sensual desire in what was sentient and temporal; morning, in what was anteriority of time; a tree, in what was matter in travail, etc., etc. (The Hebraic Tongue Restored, Fabré d’Olivet,, p. 77).

Determined matter offered to the senses, according to any mode of existence whatsoever. Hieroglyphically, substance in general; in the literal or figurative sense, vegetable substance, and the physical faculty of vegetation: in a very restricted sense, wood, a tree: that which is consolidated and hardened, which appears under a constant and determined form. (The Hebraic Tongue Restored, Fabré d’Olivet, p. 42)