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.
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