Everything That Moves (Gen 9:3)
The Flood
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As always, a close reading of our verse will give us plenty to talk about. First, though, I want to take advantage of this free Sunday post to say a few words about the bigger picture.
Last time, we saw Ronald Hendel (in his new Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis 1–11) citing the late Jacob Milgrom (known primarily for his mastery of the priestly material in the Bible). Milgrom pointed out that the shift to eating meat is reminiscent of Enkidu, in the Gilgamesh epic. At the beginning of his tale, Enkidu lives with the animals. Once he becomes civilized, they flee from him. Here’s how that’s described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as translated in Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament by none other than E. A. Speiser, one-time professor of Bible at Penn and the writer of the original Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis:
Aruru washed her hands,
Pinched off clay and cast it on the steppe.
[On the step]pe she created valiant Enkidu,
Offspring of . . . , essence of Ninurta.
[Sha]ggy with hair is his whole body,
He is endowed with head hair like a woman.
The locks of his hair sprout like Nisaba.
He knows neither people nor land;
Garbed is he like Sumuqan.
With the gazelles he feeds on grass,
With the wild beasts he jostles at the watering-place,
With the teeming creatures his heart delights in water.
Then he falls in love with a human woman, spends “six days and seven nights” with her, and (as women try to do) she civilizes him. What happens then?
On seeing him, Enkidu, the gazelles ran off,
The wild beasts of the steppe drew away from his body.
Startled was Enkidu, as his body became taut,
His knees were motionless—for his wild beasts had gone.
Enkidu had to slacken his pace—it was not as before;
But he now had [wi]sdom, [br]oader understanding.
There is no such story in the Bible, unless you’d like to consider the man in Genesis 2 who names the animals but cannot find a mate until the woman is created from his own body, after which the two of them gain wisdom. My point is not that everyone had the same stories — a man made of mud and a Flood — but that the Bible, particularly in its Primeval History (as scholars call Genesis 1–11), is trying to cope with some of the same ideas that the other ancient Near Eastern writers were. The Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths in particular, and to some extent also the Egyptian ones, were in the cultural background when Israelite authors created their own writings.
The shift from eating only plants to eating meat is implicit, not explicit, in the Gilgamesh epic, where Enkidu is shunned by the animals because he has formed a human relationship. Some other things he does are …
he becomes like a god
he puts on clothing
he drinks alcohol
We’ve seen, or will see, those three things in the Bible as well. Don’t let the resemblance of the Flood “plot” in ancient Near Eastern tellings to the one in the Bible lead you into assuming that people were merely copying from each other. The ancient writers were thinking in similar ways about similar ideas by telling similar tales, just as most of our music uses the basic do‑re‑mi scale rather than any of the other possible modes.
And now, back to our story.
3 Every moving thing that is alive is yours to eat.
כָּל־רֶ֙מֶשׂ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר הוּא־חַ֔י לָכֶ֥ם יִהְיֶ֖ה לְאָכְלָ֑ה
A רֶ֙מֶשׂ֙ rémeś should be something that creeps or crawls. In 1:24–25. these creatures are distinguished from the two larger categories of wild and domesticated mammals; in 9:2, we suspected this word of referring to all the creatures on land, as distinguished from those of air and sea. Here, the word apparently takes in all the creatures that move under their own power — except, of course, the human ones. Speiser translates רמשׂ simply as “creature”:
Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat.
The NJPS translation (in which Speiser was involved) uses the same phraseology, and Nahmanides (quoting it to explain it) says clearly what calling them “moving” means:
Every creature that lives. Animals, birds, and fish—for each of them is a “moving thing” (OJPS), the flying and swimming creatures as well (see 1:21).
Here (hat tip to stepbible.org) are some other translations of that phrase:
And every thing that moveth, and liveth (Douay-Rheims)
Every moving thing that lives (ESV)
Everything that lives and moves (NIV)
Every moving thing that is alive (NASB2020)
Every moving thing that liveth (KJVA)
any moving thing that lives (NET2)
Every living creature (HCSB)
Everything that lives [and] moves (BSB)
Every moving thing that liveth (ASV)
And everything that moves and lives (CPDV)
Every moving thing that liveth (OJPS)
The strange, seemingly unnecessary additional phrase in our verse is אשר הוא חי asher hu ḥai ‘which is alive’. In a world before roombas and grocery store robots, what exactly creeps or crawls around the planet that isn’t alive? What is that phrase adding that we wouldn’t already understand?
You remember that just as Creation 1.0 was about to be updated to Creation 1.1, we read this:
Gen 3:20 The earthling named his woman Ḥavvah — for she was the mother of all life [אֵ֥ם כָּל־חָֽי eim kol ḥay].
All I can think of now is that we are implicitly being told:
Eve (Ḥavvah) ≠ אם כל חי
Not any more, she isn’t. A clear line is now being drawn between humans and animals, one that did not exist in Version 2 (where they, like ha-adam, were formed out of adama in 2:19) or in Version 1 (where they were formed earlier on the same day, Day Six, as humans, and where the blessing to reproduce is implicitly given to them, too, in 1:28).
When we continue, next time, we’ll see precisely how the demotion of the (other) animals is expressed.