It includes the area’s natural flora and fauna and a few human inhabitants whose traditional land-uses have not disturbed the equilibrium … his region is valued for its physical, mental, and spiritual experience. In Israel, the desert and the Negev region meet this definition. Untouched, undisrupted large area, where dimensions are part of its identity. In 1968, one of the first Israeli environmentalists, Abraham Shaked, described the land of Genesis as an Eretz bereshit is associated with wilderness, yet the noun of wilderness still refers mostly to a desert land. In a more sentimental and romantic way, an undisturbed area could be described as eretz bereshit, or the land of Genesis. Intuitively, I would substitute “wilderness” by praee (פראי), which might be translated back into English as “the wild.” In addition, when defining an “undisturbed” area, a Hebrew speaker would say ezor lo mufar (אזור לא מופר), an unaltered space. In the Hebrew mind, wilderness suggests an uninhabited place lacking any water.
The absence of humans is a secondary characteristic of Hebrew wilderness. While the English concepts of “wilderness” focus on wildness, or perhaps rich biodiversity and the quality of being unmodified by civilized human activity, wilderness counterparts in Hebrew mostly emphasize dryness. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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