Erasure Redux (Gen 7:23)

The Flood

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²³ He erased all existence that was on the face of the earth

וַיִּ֜מַח אֶֽת־כָּל־הַיְק֣וּם ׀ אֲשֶׁ֣ר ׀ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י הָֽאֲדָמָ֗ה

Gene Kelly — or was it Aristotle? — once explained his theory of dancing by saying, “Tell ‘em what you’re going to do, then do it, then tell ‘em what you did.” That’s exactly what YHWH does in our story:

^{Gen 6:7} YHWH thought: Let me erase from the face of the earth the earthy stuff that I created … ^7:4 “And I will erase all existence (which I made) from the face of the earth.”

Now — the climax of this great crescendo of death — v. 23 tells us that he has done so.

Or does it? Here are some translations that disagree:

• NJPS: All existence on earth was blotted out.

• KJV: And every living substance was destroyed.

• NIV: Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out.

• ASV: And every living thing was destroyed.

• BHS: וַיִּמָּח (ni)? [“Maybe we should read this as a Niphal, a passive?”]

All of them have what I call Elihu Syndrome. Elihu (good Bible readers will remember) pops up toward the end of the book of Job, asserting that the three friends who showed up in Job 2:11 — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite (the shortest man in the Bible), and Zophar the Naamathite — have failed to defend God’s honor. In our verse, many translators take on that task. For some reason, they just don’t want YHWH to do what he twice said explicitly that he would do: erase all existence from the surface of the earth.

Biblia Hebraica Quinta, in its textual commentary, criticizes this view, aiming its fire directly at the previous (4^th) and double previous (3^rd) editions of Biblia Hebraica, BHS and BHK:

7:23 וַיִּ֜מַח There is little justification for the emendation to the nifal וַיִּמַּח proposed by BHK and BHS.

I’ve omitted the following 150 words of explanation. To be fair to the translators I’m criticizing, let’s add Speiser’s explanation for the passive translation he offered in his old Anchor Bible commentary:

Taken literally, “he blotted out” would leave the pronoun without antecedent. [Neither God nor YHWH has been in the text since v. 16.] The passive form, however, would be made up of exactly the same consonants (wymḥ). Moreover, Hebrew often employs actives in an impersonal sense (cf. 9:6 [48:2 is a more convincing example]). Either way, therefore, the translation here given may be safely adopted.

It is safe enough, but is it correct? The one other plausible argument in favor of a passive translation is that the text itself has a case of Elihu Syndrome — and perhaps it does. The Masoretes, at least, did not.

from humans through animals through crawlers to Sky-birds.

מֵאָדָ֤ם עַד־בְּהֵמָה֙ עַד־רֶ֙מֶשׂ֙ וְעַד־ע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם

It is the same list we saw in v. 21, starting (rather than ending) with human beings. It is exactly the list we saw in 6:7, when YHWH first declared his intention to erase all living things, “because I have changed my attitude about having made them.” He had “changed his attitude,” of course, to one of regret.

The one other verse where all four of these groups of creatures are found is when God — sporting his original attitude — decided to create humanity in the first place:

^{Gen 1:26} God thought, Let’s make an earthling — in our image, according to our likeness. Let him control the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the animals, the beasts, and all the things that creep over the ground.

This is the verse, I suppose, that permits the notion that it was all right for the animals to die when human beings were wiped out, because they had been created for humanity’s sake. (That’s not really what this verse is saying, but let that pass.)

They were erased from the Earth. וַיִּמָּח֖וּ מִן־הָאָ֑רֶץ

It is the Earth with a capital E here because ארץ éretz is what the first verse of the Bible announces is going to be created. That is not precisely what happened, but it’s close enough for folk music. The small-e earth at the beginning of the verse is adama, the stuff Adam was made of — not the entire surface of the planet. Now, at least, we have an Etch-a-Sketch clean slate, a “palimpsest,” as I called it in one of those earlier posts, where Creation 2.0 can begin.

I also said that we would have to discuss the following sequence:

• גוע g‑w‑ayin ‘expire’ + subject “all flesh” (7:21)

• מות m‑w‑t ‘die’ + subject everything that breathes / on dry land (7:22)

• מחה m‑ḥ‑h ‘be erased’ + subject “all existence” (7:23)

You see in that last example that I was following the NJPS “Elihu Syndrome” translation, which I’ve now rejected after studying it myself. What’s really going on in this sequence? It is that crescendo I’ve been talking about. Just as the water rises to its greatest possible height in vv. 18–20, the destruction of life is presented louder and louder here in vv. 21–23, culminating with an active (not passive) verb erasing כָּל־הַיְק֣וּם kol ha-y’qum ‘all existence’.

Except … not quite. That’s what we’ll talk about next time.