Earthy Stuff (Gen 6:7)
Adam’s Aftermath
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7 Let me erase from the face of the earth the earthy stuff that I created.
אֶמְחֶ֨ה אֶת־הָאָדָ֤ם אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֙אתִי֙ מֵעַל֙ פְּנֵ֣י הָֽאֲדָמָ֔ה
Wait, what?
You may have been waiting for YHWH to say, at this point in our story, that he was going to “destroy man” (KJV) or “blot out … the human beings” (NRSV). Isn’t it all about killing off humanity because of how sinful they are?
Uh, no.
It’s true that YHWH (who is said in Ps 44:22 to know “the secrets of the heart,” that is, unspoken thoughts) has announced that “all the mental schemes humanity molded were nothing but evil all day long.” However, we have seen just two questionable actions performed by any human beings since the story got underway:
The first two human beings ate some fruit they’d been told not to eat.
The third human being killed the fourth.
Now, ten generations later, YHWH wants a restart. True, “10 generations” comes to us courtesy of the P source and YHWH (in Genesis) is the star of the J source; I’ll have more to say about that before the end of this post (and next time too). First I want to spend some time explaining why I’m translating האדם ha-adam here as “the earthy stuff.”
אדם is Adam, the husband of Eve, isn’t he? And בני-אדם b’nei adam ‘the sons of Adam’ has been the expression Hebrew has used for millennia to name what we call in English “human beings.” Isn’t that what YHWH is about to destroy? He is, of course — but that’s not all that will be destroyed. Let’s read on.
from humans to animals, through creeping things, to the birds in the Sky
מֵֽאָדָם֙ עַד־בְּהֵמָ֔ה עַד־רֶ֖מֶשׂ וְעַד־ע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם
We’ll see this combination again in 7:23, when we’re told what has happened in the Flood. We saw all these same categories of living things also back in 1:26, where we read this:
God thought, Let’s make an earthling [אָדָ֛ם] — in our image, according to our likeness. Let him control the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky [ע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם], the animals [בְּהֵמָה֙], the beasts, and all the things [רֶ֖מֶשׂ] that creep over the ground.
The “beasts” are not actually in the Hebrew of that verse, which I emended based on the Septuagint and on the fact that the Hebrew as it exists there now doesn’t seem to make sense. Our verse suggests that perhaps I should have emended it differently; I will have to think about that another time.
For now, my first point is that according to 6:7 everything in the Earth realm is toast — not just humanity but all life on dry land. Even birds, created along with the sea creatures (and the creeping things) in 1:21, are now going to be wiped out. Despite the midrash that the seas came to a boil during the Flood (as the Talmud says in b. Zev. 113b), the Bible itself does not say anything about the sea creatures dying.
It does say that all the Earth creatures died. (Note that in 1:22 the birds are told to “proliferate on earth”; they are Earth creatures too, it turns out.) It is not hard to imagine a way to have all the human beings die and leave the animals alone. There are a number of times when God loses his temper with the Israelites and sends “a plague” (נֶ֖גֶף négef) against them, so killing just the humans and not everything else should have been easy enough to do.
I deduce that someone is trying to frame us.
As we’ve seen, other ancient stories explain the flood as a result of the gods’ irritation with the noise human beings were making, or their reaction to the human population getting out of control. These verses at the beginning of Genesis 6, leading up to the Bible’s Flood story, fall into two groups of four. The first four are a mishmash of verses, and perhaps of voices, implying humans need to be limited in some way because the sexual mixing of humans and gods is getting out of control.
Did you notice, by the way, that it is strictly the “sons” of the gods and the “daughters” of the humans, not vice versa? (Shades of “Mars Needs Women.”) We aren’t told whether that’s because …
There are no “daughters of the gods.”
The female gods weren’t interested in the human men.
They got pregnant but gave birth at home, in heaven, so it’s not an earth problem.
I will leave further speculation about that to you. In these next four verses, Gen 6:5–8, the problem the Flood is intended to solve is presented not allusively but quite straightforwardly: Humans beings can’t think of anything but evil. Yet, as I’ve pointed out today, it is not humans alone who will die but all the Earth creatures, everything brought forth by the adama.
One way to look at this is the way I’ve discussed (in my original “Bible Guy” blog) about how Genesis leads up to the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt. Genesis “knows” that this happened but doesn’t really know the historical reasons for the enslavement, so it combines three literary reasons for it into a historical narrative that leads inevitably to it.
Similarly, everyone “knew” there had been a worldwide flood that killed off most of humanity. All the stories telling of such a flood, from Greece east to Mesopotamia, told that story in their own language and from a perspective that worked in their particular place and time. (The real flood that spawned all those stories? Perhaps a tsunami, like the one that killed a quarter of a million people in one day 20 years ago.)
The Bible too has more than one version of what happened in the Flood. (I’ll explain the capital letter when we get to v. 9.) That’s no surprise, since we’ve spent the last couple of years talking about Version 1 and Version 2 of the creation story. The two versions of the Flood story, though, are much more interleaved than the creation stories were, and we are already seeing some of that interleaving now.
As I said near the beginning of this post, “10 generations” comes from The Generations of Adam, understood to be part of the P source, yet that source does not use the name YHWH in Genesis. The “earthy” creatures that will die in the Flood, according to what YHWH declares in our verse, are those whom God decided to create in 1:26. Our verse uses the verb ברא, the creation-verb that only God can do, the feature verb of Version 1 of the creation story and of v. 1 of the entire Bible; yet the issue (per v. 6) is the יצר of humanity, from the same root with which YHWH God molded [וַיִּיצֶר֩] the earthling of dirt from the earth in 2:7.
What we’re seeing, I believe, is the work of the literary genius who subtly moved the reader’s perspective from earth to heaven in the course of Genesis 3 and then jostled us — to make sure we would notice — when we read 3:20. Two previous accounts of this mythological beginning of humanity are being woven together to create a new work of art.
Something similar will happen in Exodus 19 (Chapter 2 of Ben Sommer’s Revelation and Authority describes it in detail). Something similar also happened when J and P (to speak familiarly) were created, since each of them also incorporated earlier materials: P, The Genealogy of Adam; J, the snake story (which begins in the middle of a conversation) and the Cain story.
We’ll finish v. 7, and talk more about this literary mixing, next time.