beasts and animals (Gen 1:25)

Reading through the story of creation

 25  God made the beasts of every species, and the animals of every species, and everything that creeps on the ground of every species. 

וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֩ אֶת־חַיַּ֨ת הָאָ֜רֶץ לְמִינָ֗הּ וְאֶת־הַבְּהֵמָה֙ לְמִינָ֔הּ וְאֵ֛ת כָּל־רֶ֥מֶשׂ הָֽאֲדָמָ֖ה לְמִינֵ֑הוּ

As we discussed last time, on Day Three God decided that the Earth should “sprout” greenery, but what actually happened is that the Earth “brought forth” greenery. Now, on Day Six — the day in the second half of Creation Week corresponding to Day Three in the first half — something even more surprising happens.

In v. 24 God thought, Let the Earth bring forth life. But v. 25 tells us that God must make the life that we had expected the Earth to somehow bring forth. Up to this point, the only things we have seen God make are things that belong in the Sky: first the cupola (on Day Two) and then the sun, moon, and stars (on Day Four).

Unless you want to imagine that God’s contract stipulates he can only “make” things on even-numbered days, we must recalibrate our ideas about how life came to be. To do that, I want to reverse course and first take another look at v. 20, on Day Five, when the decision to have life in Sea and Sky was announced.

I translated God’s thought in v. 20 this way:

Let the water swarm with life, and let birds fly over the Earth across the Sky cupola

That comma is “translating” the punctuation mark on חַיָּ֑ה, which indicates the end of the first half of the verse. (To learn more about biblical punctuation, see Lesson 34 of my Hebrew course.) If instead we continue reading straight through without making the pause at that point so strong, we might translate the King James way:

Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth

That is, the verse can be read in two different ways.

• the waters are to bring forth swarms of life and birds flying

• the waters are to bring forth swarms of life, and birds are to fly

The upshot, as you remember from v. 21, is that God created sea-serpents — the first time he actually performed that long-anticipated verb ברא — as well as the life with which the seas teemed and the birds. I think the text is being deliberately obscure about this process, with the implication that life is a mystery whose origin we are not supposed to, perhaps not even able to, understand.

Now, I believe, we are told that God made the living things on Earth because we are similarly not supposed to know precisely how they came to be alive. They certainly did not and do not grow out of the ground as plants grow; their existence is as mysterious as that of the Sky and the stars. Why did God not create them as he did the Sea and Sky life forms? I think it strengthens the likelihood that ברא was deliberately chosen specifically for the creation of the sea-serpents and not for the fish and the birds.

Before we can continue, I must go back to the teaser at the end of Tuesday’s post, where I said that we would need to talk some more about these land animals. As you remember, they fell into three separate categories:

• animals

• creeping things

• beasts

Here in v. 25, when God actually makes them, the beasts get boosted up ahead of the animals. I have no suggestion for why that is happening, but I do have a confession: Those English translations seem probable, but they are not certain. I have taken בהמה (b’hemah) to mean “[domesticated] animals” and חיה (ḥayyah) to mean “[wild] beasts” — but that is not how those words are used throughout the Bible.

Here, as examples, are three different verses that seem to use those words in different ways:

• “These are the חיה that you may eat from all the בהמה on the earth” (Lev 11:2)

  → ḥayyah refers to edible = domesticated animals, b’hemah to the totality of animal life

• “I will release among you חיה of the countryside … that will decimate your בהמה” (Lev 26:22)

  → ḥayyah refers to wild animals, b’hemah to domesticated animals

• “The pastures shall belong to the Levites for their בהמה and all their other חיה” (Num 35:3)

  → ḥayyah and b’hemah both refer to domesticated animals

I will simply add that wild animals can be called ḥayyah ra’ah (“evil” animals), and that Leviathan, God’s enormous sea-serpent pet, is matched by a giant animal on land (see Job 40:15 and 40:25): Behemoth. I can simply conclude, for our present purposes, that creation, at least in this version of the story, entails separation and differentiation, and it is therefore important for there to be different categories even within the overall grouping of land animals.

We have, of course, one more category of land animal to discuss, the second part of this day’s project. But first the end of v. 25:

God saw that it was good. וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב׃

The Greek text here has made a slight change, which it made in v. 21 with the plants as well. Hebrew tov is singular, evidently expressing the evaluation that the work of each day was good, or that the creation project was working well. But the LXX has switched in vv. 21 and 25 from singular καλόν kalon to plural καλά kala — God saw that they, the plants and animals, were good.

The end of the week is rapidly approaching, but Day Six still has one big project left to finish. We’ll get started talking about that on Sunday.