All Aboard! (Gen 7:14)
The Flood
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14 … they and all the wild animals of every species הֵ֜מָּה וְכָל־הַֽחַיָּ֣ה לְמִינָ֗הּ
and all the domesticated animals of every species וְכָל־הַבְּהֵמָה֙ לְמִינָ֔הּ
and all the crawlers that crawl on the earth of every species וְכָל־הָרֶ֛מֶשׂ הָרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָ֖רֶץ לְמִינֵ֑הוּ
and all the flyers of every species וְכָל־הָע֣וֹף לְמִינֵ֔הוּ
every bird, every wing כֹּ֖ל צִפּ֥וֹר כָּל־כָּנָֽף׃
Just who is in this box? Who’s going to survive this devastating Flood? Everyone who can cram in, that’s who:
two varieties of mammals, ḥayya and b’hema, both created on Day Six
the creepy crawlies created on Day Five
the animals that fly around, also created on Day Five
Fish and other sea-creatures were also created on Day Five, but they (of course) do not need to be rescued from an overabundance of water. They might be perfectly happy if Earth went back permanently to being a water-world. (Sorry, Charlie, that’s not going to happen.)
We’ll talk more about the things that crawl over the earth when we get to v. 21, where the crawlers of our verse are given a different name, and everything that dies is reduced to “crawling” status. For now, a few words about the mammals and the birds.
First, however, a quick reminder about the history of Biblical Hebrew. We have texts in the Bible that were written over the course of about 1,000 years, from perhaps the 12th century BCE up to the 2nd century BCE. As I like to tell students, if you roll English back a thousand years you more or less run into Beowulf, which is not at all in the English we speak and read today.
So it should not surprise anyone to discover words having different meanings in different places in the Bible. Here are the three examples of בהמה b’hema and חיה ḥayya being used together in a single verse that I presented when they were created on Day Six:
“These are the חיה that you may eat from all the בהמה on the earth” (Lev 11:2)
→ ḥayya refers to edible = domesticated animals, b’hema to the totality of animal life
“I will release among you חיה of the countryside … that will decimate your בהמה” (Lev 26:22)
→ ḥayya refers to wild animals, b’hema to domesticated animals
“The pastures shall belong to the Levites for their בהמה and all their other חיה” (Num 35:3)
→ ḥayya and b’hema both refer to different categories of domesticated animals
For understanding our verse, we don’t need to know exactly how our author understood these two words, no matter how much we would like to. It’s clear that between b’hema and ḥayya and rémeś all the earth creatures are taken care of. There’s a comparable multiplicity of words for the air creatures:
every kind of עוף ōph ‘flyer’
every צפור tzippor ‘bird’
every כנף kanaf ‘wing’
עוף ōph means “chicken” in Modern Hebrew. It’s tzippor — which we’re seeing here for the first time in the Bible — that is the standard word for “bird.” In the Bible, that’s also a name: Zippor is the father of Balak, the king of Moab who hires Balaam in Numbers 22 to curse the Israelites. (In my Hebrew course we read that chapter very carefully. The Hebrew will help you see the surprisingly many links between the story of Balaam and the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22.)
Having already bailed on the attempt to distinguish between b’hema and ḥayya, I’m not going to speculate on why we have waited until now to see tzippor. Some scholars even ask whether that word is really supposed to be here at all. Claus Westermann writes:
The last words of v. 14 are omitted in the Gk, and many exegetes follow it. But the MT is to be retained with U. Cassuto, W.M. Clark, S.E. McEvenue, and others.
That’s why BHS provides those last 4 words with a footnote:
aכֹּ֖ל צִפּ֥וֹר כָּל־כָּנָֽףa׃
14 a—a > 𝔊, dl
Get it? “Those words are missing in the Greek, so just delete them from the Hebrew text if you want to know what the writer originally wrote.”
Could be. Mistakes do happen; I pointed to one in 1:26. Why does Westermann rule that “the MT is to be retained”? He doesn’t explain. Who made you the home plate umpire, Claus? I’m willing to agree that the burden of proof lies on someone who wants to say the text is wrong and needs to be corrected. However, that kind of analysis is just a starting point. “MT is to be retained” — fine. Why did Mr. MT write those words?
Here’s what I think:
The earth animals fall into three categories: b’hema, ḥayya, and rémeś. Our author — since these categories are reminiscent of Version 1 of creation — is the organized, “taxonomic” priestly writer, who wants there to be three categories of air animals too: ōph, tzippor, and kanaf.
Those last four words, omitted in the Greek, also appear in Ezek 17:23 (and — almost — in Ezek 39:4 and 17). Moshe Greenberg, in his Anchor Bible commentary to Ezekiel, says that the phrase was “taken from the Flood story,” which at the very least would mean those words were there when the Ezekiel verse was written. Since the unusual “every wing” is also an exclusively Ezekiel phrase except for here, and since we know (thanks to the careful work of Avi Hurvitz) that Ezekiel’s language is like that of the priestly texts, this may point to a social or chronological location for our text — the final version of the Flood story — as well.
We’re not quite done with this verse yet, because next time, when we’ll move on to v. 15, we’re going to have to talk about the very first word of v. 14. See you then.