Taking this in terms of access that a farmer gets to the plants by dividing a garden into beds - ease of watering and tending - is “with aisles between them” a valid dynamic equivalence translation?
Noticed when reading
πρασιά, ᾶς, ἡ (πράσον ‘leek’ [prop. ‘bed of leeks’]; Hom. [πρασιή] et al.; PTebt 703, 198 [III B.C.: πρασιά]; BGU 530, 27 [πρασεά]; Sir 24:31) fr. the lit. sense ‘garden plot, garden bed’ it is but a short step to the imagistic πρασιαὶ πρασιαί group by group, picturing the groups of people contrasted w. the green grass Mk 6:40 (on the distributive force of the repetition cp. Hs 8, 2, 8 τάγματα τάγματα and s. B-D-F §493, 2; Mlt. 97; Rob. 673).—DELG s.v. πράσον. M-M.
Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., Bauer, W., & Gingrich, F. W. (2000). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature (3rd ed., p. 860). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The title and reference in the OP has been corrected.
Green grass? After a day of thousands of people in a desert(ed) place?
In my experience, garden beds have the bare earth between them, cf.
ἔρημος simply means deserted or uninhabited, Latin “campus” as opposed to “ager.”
Here is a hotlinked picture of Hippos (Sussita, Susita), a (not very green) location near Gallilee:
Which Latin word does “cultivated land” come under? My presumption is that the “good” land where plants grow well would be used by humans, and not deserted.
Ager is cultivated or developed land, inhabited territory. Campus is an open area that is not cultivated or inhabited.
Thanks for the Latin lesson.
As an observation, for the Greek, πρασιαὶ πρασιαί is an image from the inhabited world of the garden set in the uninhabited world of the ἔρημος.
It all depends on what time of year. Look at that same hillside around March-April and it will be very green. Do we know what time of year this event was? Any clues in the text?
This picture of סוסיתא taken on 15th April 2011 by AVRAM GRAICER (CC BY-SA 3.0) shows what you are saying.
Beautiful!