"God blessed them" (Gen 1:22)
Reading through the story of creation
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.
Traditionally, English versions of the Bible turn this word into “saying.” Grammatically it is the infinitive form of אמר and you would expect that means “to say” (as in “I just called to say I love you”). But though you will find it some 900 times in the Bible, it doesn’t actually occur with that infinitive meaning. Instead, as my teacher Mayer Gruber likes to say, it is really used to mean “comma, quotation marks.”
So (I hear you asking), where are the comma and quotation marks? Good question. If our text had read “God spoke to them lemor ‘reproduce’” (and so on), it would be obvious that these were the first words God actually speaks in the Bible. But he is not in fact commanding them to reproduce, just as he is not asking them to “let the birds proliferate.” Instead, God is still blessing them with this capability. At this point, we are still reading words that verbalize God’s thought process, not words that were spoken out loud.
You can be sure that we’ll come back to this verb אמר before Day Six is over.
Reproduce, proliferate, and fill the water in the Seas
פְּר֣וּ וּרְב֗וּ וּמִלְא֤וּ אֶת־הַמַּ֙יִם֙ בַּיַּמִּ֔ים וְהָע֖וֹף יִ֥רֶב בָּאָֽרֶץ
Yes, God’s blessing the animals is intended to give them – without quite specifying how – the ability to “be fruitful and multiply,” which is how the first two words of this phrase are often rendered.
Though I have avoided that translation, there is certainly nothing inaccurate about it. But (1) it always makes me think of Mel Brooks’s take on the story of Onan (“he was fruitless and subtracted”); and (2) as you know, I sometimes like to choose an unfamiliar translation in order to be able to do some fresh thinking about a subject. I’ll admit that I don’t much care for the Latinate, multisyllabic words I’ve actually chosen; they reflect the sound and feel of the Hebrew even less than “be fruitful and multiply” does. As I’ve explained, the actual words of this new translation are not the real point of the blog.
פְּר֣וּ p’ru is unquestionably related to the fruit trees (עֵ֣ץ פְּרִ֞י etz p’ri) of v. 11. Both the noun and the verb come from the root that appears in dictionaries as פרה p-r-h. (See Lesson 20 of my Biblical Hebrew course to learn or brush up on the grammar of such roots.) So it’s not as if “be fruitful” is an incorrect translation of p’ru.
In fact, it confirms our realization that the blessing God is invoking here for the animals is exactly what was missing from the verse in which they were created, and which the plants had: fertility. With the blessing God gives them now, they too will be able to “fruit,” that is, metaphorically, to reproduce.
Now we turn to רְב֗וּ r’vu, from רבה r-b-h ‘to be much / many’. What I understand from it is another difference between plants and animals. The plants must have seeds so that more plants can grow after the original plants have withered (we would say “died”). The creatures of Sea and Sky, it seems, will not merely be able to replace those who die but – since they can move about – will spread farther and farther through the world.
It is that combination of p’ru and r’vu that will enable these creatures to “fill the water.” Remember what Isa 45:18 tells us: “[God] did not create the world as tohu but formed it to be inhabited.” These commands are aimed at achieving that purpose.
and let the birds proliferate on earth
וְהָע֖וֹף יִ֥רֶב בָּאָֽרֶץ׃
In the previous clause, פְּר֣וּ וּרְב֗וּ וּמִלְא֤וּ are three imperative verbs, just as I’ve translated them. With the exclamation point that grammar textbooks use to show that a word is in the imperative or command form, we can list them like this:
Reproduce!
Proliferate!
Fill the water!
The birds, however, are not given commands. It almost sounds like an afterthought: “Oh, yes, let the birds proliferate too.” (The grammatical term for the verb form yírev, which of course also derives from r-b-h, is the jussive; see Lesson 25 of the Hebrew course for details.)
Why are the sea creatures commanded to proliferate, while the air/earth creatures are, as it were, merely given permission to do so? I have no idea. Leave a comment below if you have any thoughts.
23 There was an evening and then a morning, a fifth day.
וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם חֲמִישִֽׁי׃ פ
Why the פ at the end of the verse, and in fact at the end of each of the days of Creation Week? Thanks for asking. I’ll discuss that in a post on my WordPress blog, which I’ll link to here when it’s ready. And now this message:
♫ Sunrise … sunset … ♫
Yes, there’s a sun now, so these are the natural evening and morning that we all know and love. Get a good night’s sleep, because tomorrow – Day Six – is a big day.