Beasts and Birds (Gen 7:3)
The Flood
Last time we noted that v. 3a (the first half of Gen 7:3, marked as such by the etnaḥta on its last word) has a number of things in it that are quite confusing and/or difficult if you stop long enough to think about them. I promised we would talk some more about that, and we’ll do it. First let’s get some more data for our mini-course on Text Criticism of the Bible by adding one more word.
I remind you that in our context “criticism” doesn’t mean saying that something is bad. It means using “critical” thinking, that is, analyzing something carefully.
3 to keep … alive לְחַיּ֥וֹת
We saw the verb חיה ḥ-y-h ‘to live’ (in the sense of “to be alive”) many times when we read The Genealogy of Adam, because everyone in the list “lived” a certain number of years. We’ve seen it more recently, in causative form, in the narrative of the Flood story in 6:19 and 20, where I noted that we would see a different form here in 7:3 and would talk more about it then. Here we are. Yes, it is about the Piel and the Hiphil. ⇥ See Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course. ⇤
For those who are not ready to take the plunge and start learning Biblical Hebrew (from me or someone else), which I will keep nagging you to do, I offer this quick guide to the binyanim — the verb conjugations — using חיה as our example. Definitions are taken from HALOT, the Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament:
Qal (the “basic” binyan), as in Genesis 5: to be alive, to stay alive
Hiphil (the “causative” binyan), as in 6:19–20: to keep alive
Piel (the “intensive” binyan), as here: to let live, preserve alive
What’s the difference between “keeping” someone alive and “preserving” someone alive? Your guess is as good as mine. As a translator, I sometimes choose a synonym when there’s a different Hebrew word with no apparent difference in meaning, but I have to admit I’d be surprised and disappointed if that’s what the lexicon is doing.
Ronald Hendel (in his comment to 6:19) has a different explanation:
The form ləḥahayōt ("to save life") is a hiphil infinitive of the root ḥyh. The J story uses a piel infinitive of this root with the same meaning, ləḥayyōt (7:3). This difference between piel and hiphil indicates a difference in the dialects or historical phases of Hebrew represented in J and P. The movement of some verbs from piel to hiphil is a diachronic characteristic of language change in Biblical Hebrew.
Claus Westermann has a more stylistic than linguistic explanation for the language differences we see in this story (don’t worry, I’ll edit his 839 words down to just a couple of hundred):
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