fish & birds (Gen 1:21)

Reading through the story of creation

and all the crawling life with which the water swarmed

וְאֵ֣ת כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה ׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת אֲשֶׁר֩ שָׁרְצ֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם

At the beginning of v. 21, “God created [ברא] the sea-serpents.”  Now, ואת v’et ‘and’ + the direct object mark would seem to be telling us that the rest of these Day Five creations are also objects of bara. They too were “created,” using that special verb that only God can do.  I take the implication to be that it is not enough to “make” living things; they must be “created.” Let’s keep that on the table and see whether it continues to be true as we read on.

I’ll remind you that “life” (חיים, ḥayyim) is not something that plants have in the Bible, let alone נפשׁ (nefesh).  Perhaps that is the reason for “creating” the Sea and Sky creatures?

I discussed the slightly creepy word “swarm” (from the root שׁרץ) when we looked at v. 20.  But now that the sea creatures have been created, a second, similar word is also applied to them: they are “crawling”: כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה ׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת kol-nefesh ha-ḥayah ha-romeśet (the ś indicates that the s sound comes from the letter שׂ sin, not the letter ס samekh (the equivalent of Greek σ sigma).  The grammatical forms are singular because the text is continuing to refer to life forms with collective nouns.

According to Jacob Milgrom (in his Anchor Bible commentary to Lev 11:44), this is a “counterpart to and synonym of” שׁרץ.  However, 11 of the 34 occurrences of this root are found outside the “species-centric” texts of creation, Flood, and food classification, so it is not as restricted a root as שׁרץ.  I’m going to go partway out onto a limb here and guess that it is related to רמס (with ס / σ rather than שׂ), a root that means “trample” (see Isa 1:12).  There are sea creatures that have various kinds of limbs and claws, so perhaps this is meant to include them along with the schools of fish that “swarm.”

by species לְמִֽינֵהֶ֗ם

Most of the rest of this verse is more or less what we would expect.  Both sea creatures and sky/earth creatures are created in a wide variety of species.  (The sea-serpents, it seems, are a species unto themselves.)  The word I have translated as “species” is מין min.  The dictionaries like to translate this word — in Biblical Hebrew, at least — with the English word “kind,” but they all add that what it really means is “species,” since the various kinds of plants and animals are the only things the word refers to anywhere in the Bible.

In fact, as we saw when we summed up Day Three, the word only occurs once outside the stories of creation and the Flood and the rules about which species of animal can be eaten.  That’s in Ezekiel 47:10, explaining how many different kinds of fish will flourish in the water that springs from beneath the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.

It is only in post-biblical Hebrew that מין can refer to other kinds of “kinds.”  That should be a good reminder to us that Genesis 1 is operating on a very scientific level.  Even though the repetition of similar phrases in a pattern has a genuinely poetic effect, this is not a literary description of creation; it is more like a lab notebook.

and every winged bird, by species וְאֵ֨ת כָּל־ע֤וֹף כָּנָף֙ לְמִינֵ֔הוּ

The instruction in v. 20 simply called for “birds [to] fly” (ōph ye’opheph).  Now they, like the sea creatures, are “created,” and they are called by a slightly different name: ōph kanaph.  This is not a case where I attribute a profound difference in meaning to the switch in wording.  As a writer, I would like to think that the author of Genesis 1 was toying with both those phrases, liked the sound of both, and decided to use each of them.

and God saw that it was good וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב׃

Really?  Isn’t there something missing here?  Something that happened on Day Three before the second creation of that day, the plants, could be called “good”?

What’s missing is that we are not told that these creatures have “seeds” in them.  It is pretty clear by now that the procedure of Creation Week is for the creations to be made in such a way that they then continue the work of creation on their own. That way, God is not simply making more work for himself by creating all this stuff.  But we do not yet know how the creatures of sea and sky are to reproduce.  This seems to be an unfinished creation, one that ought not yet be called “good.”  As we’ll find out on Thursday, though, God does indeed have a plan for this.