Expiration & Redemption (Gen 6:17–18)

The Flood

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¹⁷ All of it in the Earth shall expire. כֹּ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־בָּאָ֖רֶץ יִגְוָֽע׃

There is a nice parallelism between the two halves of this verse. In the first part, we saw God explain that he intended to ruinate all flesh from “under the Sky.” This second part repeats the same threat about “all” — presumably this is “all flesh” of vv. 12, 13, 17, and 19 — “in the earth.” There’s a certain mystery here too, however. Why are they going to “expire,” a verb that occurs just 24 times in the Bible?

Claus Westerman asserts:

The verb גוע is peculiar to P in the Pentateuch (7:21; 25:8, 17; 35:29; 49:23; 12 times in all); elsewhere it is found only in poetry. Its specific meaning is “to pine away, to languish.”

I don’t know where he gets the idea that this is its “specific meaning.” Perhaps from KB, the original German version of the standard HALOT dictionary that I like to quote, which notes the existence of an Arabic verb jāʿa ‘to be empty, hungry’. NJPS translates more neutrally as “breathe one’s last,” an appropriately rarer synonym of simple “die.”

Its use in Num 17:27–28 and 20:3 seems to refer to those who rebelled against Moses and Aaron in Numbers 16, none of whom died of starvation — some were swallowed up whole by the earth and 250 more were fried by a fire from the Lord. They all “breathed their last,” but that is not the flavor of what actually happened to them.