22 God blessed them: וַיְבָ֧רֶךְ אֹתָ֛ם אֱלֹהִ֖ים
In v. 21, we at last saw God doing a new verb, one that we had never seen him do before, the verb that was the campaign promise of Genesis 1: ברא bara ‘create’. God created the sea-serpents along with all the other things that live in Seas and Sky. Now we have yet another new verb performed by God: ברך b-r-k ‘bless’.
What does “bless” actually mean? In English, we say “[God] bless you” after someone sneezes, but why? Whatever the origins of the expression, it must somehow result from the feeling that a sneeze leaves a person in need of some positivity, which “bless you” somehow provides. There is no real need to be more specific. An amusing remark from a New York Times article on the subject:
[D.A.], a New York publicist, is one of those people who finds it rude if she sneezes and someone goes on with a conversation as if she hadn’t just sneezed. She always says “bless you” to anyone who sneezes, even her dog.
Hebrew ברך is in some ways an equally undefined positive expression. My sense of it is that it is used in two general ways in the Bible:
to express positive feelings, mostly of praise and/or gratitude
to invoke a wish that good things should come to the person or thing being blessed
When God is invoking such a wish, as he is here, that of course ups the ante. We presume that with God the wish is father to the deed – the blessing that God invokes will certainly come to pass. Since this blessing is woven into the fabric of Day Five of Creation Week, it must certainly be something more than just “Have a good time, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” In fact, it is.
As you remember from the previous post, we noticed that something seemed to be missing from the creation of life – that is, animal life, which is what nefesh ḥayah means in the Bible. When the Earth brought forth plants, on Day Three, we saw that each species carried within it the seeds to produce future plants of the same species. God did not merely create plants, but created them in such a way as to remove any further need to create more plants. He created himself out of a job by turning the Earth into a perpetual plant-producing machine, leaving God himself free for other tasks, like creating animal life.
When God actually did create the animals (at least those of Seas and Sky) on Day Five in v. 21, there were no “seeds” incorporated into the plan – at least, not as far as we were told. That lack is what this blessing is meant to offer the animals, as we’ll see in just a moment. But first …
לֵאמֹ֑ר lemor
Did you notice? I did not translate this word.
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