Flesh & Spirit (Gen 6:17)
The Flood
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17 to ruinate all flesh that has a life-spirit in it from under the Sky.
לְשַׁחֵ֣ת כָּל־בָּשָׂ֗ר אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ֙ ר֣וּחַ חַיִּ֔ים מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם
At first glance, we’ve already seen everything in this phrase, so it seems like there should be little to talk about. A second glance, though, shows us that everything old is new again. We shouldn’t simply pass them over with a wave of the hand. Here’s what I’m looking at:
שׁחת The theme verb of the introduction (and the outroduction, too) of the Flood story is used here for the fifth time. However, the others were in the Niphal (vv. 11 and 12) and in the Hiphil (vv. 12 and 13). Now, for the first time, we see God’s intent to do this verb in the Piel.
⇥ See Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course for details about these Hebrew verb conjugations. ⇤
רוח חיים We see רוח here for the fourth time and חיים for the seventh, yet they have somehow never appeared in combination.
תחת השמים These are both reasonably common words as well. The only place we’ve seen them in combination, though is on Day Two of creation. Some things we said there rather superficially need to be fleshed out.
My understanding is that at least these latter two seemingly minor details are being used by the author to focus us on the deeper meaning (pun intended) of the story we’re about to read. Let’s start with שׁחת, the first of the three, to see whether it, too, is pointing us in the same direction.
HALOT gives us the numbers without providing a great deal of information about the precise distinction of the Piel form:
שׁחת:
nif. (6 times): to be (become) ruined, spoiled
pi. (39 times):
—1. to ruin, destroy, annihilate.
—2. to bring ruin upon.
hif. (115 times): 96 times as a vb., 19 times with substantivised partiple [i.e. המשׁחית ‘the Destroyer’]:
—1. to ruin, destroy.
—2. to annihilate, exterminate.
Two of the six Niphal forms are in our chapter, and a third is in Exod 8:20, where the ארץ of Egypt is ruined because of the plague of insects. It also seems worth pointing out that there is a noun שַׁחַת, often translated “the Pit,” that refers to death or the underworld.
In Genesis 9, we find two more uses of this theme root, and both are Piel. Why not in Hiphil, as in Gen 6:12–13, where “all flesh” does this verb and God responds by announcing that he will do it back to the Earth?
If we stroll a little further along in Genesis, we find the same mixture of Hiphil and Piel used to describe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (and two other towns not always considered important enough to mention). Then we get to the last occurrence of שׁחת in the book of Genesis:
Gen. 38:9 But Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to wasteb [שִׁחֵ֣ת אַ֔רְצָה] whenever he joined with his brother’s wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother. [NJPS]
That note b says, “b Lit. ‘spoil on the ground.’” HALOT is even more “literal” in explaining:
שִׁחֵת אַרְצָה “to ruin to the earth”, of human semen, meaning to allow one’s semen to spill on to the ground and be ruined.
It seems unlikely to me that our author really had this meaning of שׁחת in the Piel in mind in using it here, let alone expected us readers to be thinking of it. Nonetheless, it has a certain resonance with what is about to happen.
As for “ruinate” (don’t try to look it up), I’m just coining an English form that will let me distinguish between the Hebrew Piel and Hiphil forms.
Now our next new phrase, רוח חיים ruaḥ ḥayyim ‘wind/spirit of life’. We saw ruaḥ as early as the second verse of the Bible, where it is remarkably difficult to translate (see also pp. 28–29 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices and listen to Episode 5 of the short-lived companion podcast). In 3:8 it refers to movement of the air, but in 6:3, where YHWH’s “wind [רוח] will not remain in the humans forever,” it must certainly be getting closer to the meaning of the phrase in our verse.
As Job said in 1:21 of his book, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Given that in some sense the ruaḥ ḥayyim is God’s own spirit animating the bodies of the various animals (including us), he’s entitled (in some sense) to reclaim it, and with it the lives of “all flesh.” There are two points of interest here:
One is our regular reminder that “life” and “death” in the Bible apply to fauna, not flora. Plant life may wither; Israelite agriculturalists certainly experienced what a 21st-c. farmer would call a crop “dying.” Nonetheless, the Bible views plant “life” as something very different from animal life. Unaware that (as we now know) plants can do the botanic equivalent of making decisions, recognizing relatives, and so on, the Bible does not think of them as “living” in the same sense that animals live — and certainly not in the sense of having God’s ruaḥ inside them.
That brings us to our second point. “All flesh” implicitly includes animals, who must also — like human beings — have a ruaḥ ḥayyim in them. When exactly did that happen, though? Let’s look at the timeline:
- God decides that earth should bring forth animal life (1:24).
- God actually makes the animal life himself (1:25).
- God creates human beings (1:27).
- YHWH God molds a human being and blows the breath of life (נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים) into him (2:7).
- YHWH God molds all the other animals, who evidently come to life without our being told anything about breathing (2:19).
- YHWH God builds a joist taken from the earthling into a woman; again, apparently without breathing (2:21).
Yet somehow “all flesh … has a life-spirit [ר֣וּחַ חַיִּ֔ים],” which now, paradoxically, condemns them to death.
I conclude — leaving aside for the moment the details of our particular story — that the Bible follows the same line of thought that most of us do: animals are kind of like us and kind of not. We too are animals, except when we aren’t.
We’ve pointed to this conundrum before, when we discussed YHWH’s saying of humanity “that they are meat too” (6:3), and we find the same puzzle all the way at the end of the Bible, when Qohélet wonders:
Eccles 3:21 Who knows if a man’s lifebreath [רוּ֚חַ בְּנֵ֣י הָאָדָ֔ם] does rise upward and if a beast’s breath [ר֙וּחַ֙ הַבְּהֵמָ֔ה] does sink down into the earth?
After all, ruaḥ is ruaḥ, isn’t it?
Next time, we’ll turn to the one remaining phrase we pointed to at the top of this post — a phrase which will also lead us to the book of Ecclesiastes.