creatures of sea and sky (Gen 1:20)
Reading through the story of creation
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:
It is of grammatical interest to note that in Gn 1:20.21 Ex 7:28 Ps 105:30 the subject of the vb. שׁרץ meaning to teem, swarm is not the creatures themselves but the element in which the teeming creatures live, such as water, the River Nile, the land.
The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane is supposed to have said that God must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” because there are hundreds of thousands (!) of species of them. We will get to the insects and their own creepy word on Day Six, but it is clear that the many different creatures of the sea are understood as being somewhat strange. As with the plants (and unlike the trees), their various “kinds” are not mentioned here. The plants, at least, were called upon to be מַזְרִ֣יעַ זֶ֔רַע mazria zera ‘producing seed’, explaining how they would reproduce without God having to do any further work. But that is not called for in the case of the sea creatures.
As for those two words that I combined into one — “life” — as I said earlier in this post, they will require a longer discussion than will fit here. For today, I’ll conclude with the rest of v. 20. (A reminder that you can hear me read the Hebrew in the first Day Five post.)
and let birds fly over the Earth across the Sky cupola.
וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם
Like the sheretz that will fill the Seas, the birds too are a single, collective noun: עוֹף ōph (that’s a long ō and an f sound). They are to “fly” (יְעוֹפֵ֣ף), so ōph ye’opheph is another verb + cognate accusative pair; one might say that both sea and sky creatures are “doing what comes naturally” — fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. Since there is another reasonably common collective noun for birds, צִפּוֹר tzipor, it seems we are meant to focus here on their flight, the fact that they will fill the Sky as the swimming creatures do the Seas.
Birds are an interesting category in the pattern of creation week. As this verse tells us, they are to fly al ‘over’ the Earth but also al-p’nei ‘across’ the Sky cupola. Yes, that’s the same phrase that I translated twice in Gen 1:2 as “over.” Remember that the ruaḥ elohim in that verse might have been hovering in place, so “across” would not have fit that possible meaning. In v. 20, from our earthbound perspective, I cannot say that the birds would fly “over” the Sky. Birds, somehow, belong both to Sky and to Earth.
I will end for today by pointing out that the birds, unlike the sea creatures, are not even called upon to come into being. They are simply to start flying. As we’ll see in v. 21, this doesn’t mean that they were pre-existent, like the darkness and the water. But although they certainly can move, our text seems not to want to use the words I’ve translated as “life” with regard to them.
We’ll dive into those two words next time.