20 God thought, Let the water swarm וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ
To expand on what I said last time, we are still following the plot of Days 1-3 but elaborating on them, as Mozart would have made the musical theme of a piano sonata much more intricate the second time he played it rather than repeating it exactly. We already saw on Day Three that creation is becoming far more complex, and on Day Four the “light” of Day One has been replaced with the sun, moon, and stars.
Now, the Sky of Day Two and the Seas of Day Three will be populated — in reverse order from how they were presented originally. I suspect the reason for this is that birds are also creatures of the Earth and belong more completely to the “dry land” of Day Three. Don’t forget that the water was even more prominent on Day Two than on the next day, when it unceremoniously moved aside to let the dry land appear.
More importantly, it is now that, for the first time, life will be created. As I mentioned last time, the concepts of “life” and “death” don’t seem to be used for plants in the Bible. (Do correct me in the comments if you have a counterexample.) I have combined two separate Hebrew words into the single English word “life,” and that will require a fairly extensive discussion. But I’ve also combined a verb and its cognate accusative into the single English word “swarm,” and that word requires discussion also.
As an example of a translation technique that’s essentially the opposite of what I’ve done, here is the King James translation of the phrase under discussion today:
Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life
“Waters” instead of “water” most likely results from the fact that the Hebrew verb in the phrase yishretzu hamayim sheretz is plural, since mayim ‘water’ is a plural word in Hebrew. It’s true that in Gen 1:1, shamayim becomes “heaven” in the KJV, not “heavens”; perhaps that is because it is not the subject of a verb.
In any case, when I try to reverse-engineer the KJV translation of our phrase, the words “bring forth abundantly” apparently reflect both the verb שָׁרַץ and its object, שֶׁרֶץ. That word שֶׁרֶץ is actually the beginning of a three-word direct object, sheretz nefesh ḥayah, but those last two words will demand a post of their own, on Thursday. (Those who know their biblical punctuation will see in the phrase at the top of this post, וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ, that מַּ֔יִם and שֶׁ֖רֶץ both have punctuation marks telling you to pause before continuing to read.)
What do these sheretz words mean? In v. 12, the Earth brought forth plant life abundantly, but neither the noun or the verb from שׁרץ appears.
I have used the word “swarm” (and I am not the only translator to do so) because the flavor of this Hebrew root is, excuse the pun, slightly creepy. It occurs just 29 times in the Bible, and in a very limited number of contexts:
creation, here in vv. 20–21
the destruction and then creation 2.0 of the Flood, in Genesis 7–9 (four times)
the creation language applied to the Israelites in Exod 1:7
the frogs of the 2nd plague (Exod 7:28 and Ps 105:30)
the unclean things of Lev 5:2 and 22:5
the unclean things that are prohibited to be used as food (15 times [!] in Leviticus 11 and once in Deuteronomy 14
yet another new creation, that of Ezekiel’s Temple vision, in Ezek 47:9
As the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament points out:
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