God blesses them (Gen 1:28)

Reading through the story of creation

28 God blessed them, and God said to them  וַיְבָ֣רֶךְ אֹתָם֮ אֱלֹהִים֒ וַיֹּ֨אמֶר לָהֶ֜ם אֱלֹהִ֗ים

Here we have the verse that matches v. 22 on Day Five, after the Sea and Sky creatures are made. There are a few significant differences that are worth mentioning.

First, this one. In v. 22, God blesses the new creations לֵאמֹ֑ר lemor — that is, with the following instruction to reproduce and proliferate as a quotation directed at them. As we noted, lemor introduces quoted language. But it seemed clear that God was not speaking to these creatures in some language that they might comprehend (let alone Hebrew). The instruction was metaphoric: I am building into you the capability to reproduce, as I did for the plants on Day Three.

Now, instead of lemor, “God said to them,” speaking directly to the new human creatures. It still seems unlikely that we are to imagine that God is giving them instructions; if you take that notion literally, it is easy to picture the absurdity of the scene.

Nonetheless, I think what we have here is a progression similar to what we’ve seen in other threads of the story:

• plants reproduce automatically without blessing

• fish and birds are blessed with the ability to reproduce

• humans are told that they are blessed with that ability

Genesis 1, as I read it, assumes the following, some of which is being challenged by the science of our own day: Plants are not self-aware beings. There is no “I think, therefore I am” in the world of flora. Fish and birds can move on their own and we observe them moving in ways that seem self-directed; they are self-aware, even if they have no language. Human beings clearly are self-aware and can communicate abstract ideas with words.

The big question here is why the animals are not blessed and instructed or commanded to reproduce. The ancient translations, as far as I am aware, preserve no evidence of any such instruction in v. 25 where the animals are created. We’ll talk more about this before the end of today’s post.

 Reproduce, proliferate, and fill the earth and subdue it פְּר֥וּ וּרְב֛וּ וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ

Here we have another addition/alteration to what we saw on Day Five. Added to “reproduce, proliferate, and fill the earth” is the further instruction to “subdue it.” We saw in v. 26 that God’s intent was for humans to control the other living things, and we will see that verb again in a moment. But before controlling them, they must first “subdue” them.

The Hebrew verb כבשׁ k-b-sh is often translated as “conquer.” It’s not as common a verb in the Bible as you might think, occurring just 14 times. It is sometimes used, as we might expect the English word to be, for conquering territory in war. Yet 5 of the other 13 examples of the word point in a different direction that seems more applicable here.

Two of them are found in Jeremiah 34, when King Zedekiah, newly installed as King of Judah by the Babylonians, begins his reign, as ancient Near Eastern kings often did, with an economic reset. In this case, the reset involved the people of Jerusalem setting their Hebrew slaves free. Soon afterward, however, they reversed the process and “forced them into slavery again” (NJPS, Jer 34:11) — וַֽיִּכְבְּשׁ֔וּם לַעֲבָדִ֖ים וְלִשְׁפָחֽוֹת. The key word here is va-yikhb’shum, “they כבשׁ’d them.” (See also Jer 34:16, Neh 5:5 [twice] and 2 Chr 28:10.)

The sense of the word in our verse too must, I think, be that human beings are to be masters of the Earth. All the other animals will be subordinate and can be put to use as the humans desire. (It goes without saying that this applies to plants as well.) As we saw last time, human beings are essentially God’s viceroy on earth; implicitly, then, if not explicitly, the use to which they put the other animals must conform to the purposes for which God made them.

so that you control the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and every beast that creeps over the ground. וּרְד֞וּ בִּדְגַ֤ת הַיָּם֙ וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וּבְכָל־חַיָּ֖ה הָֽרֹמֶ֥שֶׂת עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

This was God’s stated intention in v. 26 and comes as no surprise. What’s different here is that something is missing: the domesticated animals.

They are in the LXX, but in this case the Greek text seems obviously wrong. The phrase that is added here is the same phrase that both MT and LXX have in v. 26, the one we suggested was mistaken there; the Greek translator presumably saw that the animals were missing here in v. 28 and simply copied that not quite coherent phrase from v. 26.

We might simply assume that the “animals” were mistakenly omitted from this verse, as the “beasts” were from v. 26. But the beasts and creeping things are not two separate items in v. 28; instead, they are “the living things that crawl.” The words חיה and רמשׂ and ארץ are all here, but rephrased in a way that makes them into a single category. It could be that this is an all-encompassing category; if so, it is surprising to see the word בהמה left out.

So I’ll add a speculation here that seems somewhat off-the-wall. I take the liberty to do so because, in the unlikely event that I’m correct, it would solve two problems at once. The domesticated animals are left out of this phrase because their relationship with human beings is different from that of the rest of nature.

They do serve humanity, and even more directly than wild animals do. But they also (1) share companionship with human beings, and (2) are bred to reproduce as humans want them to (as Jacob breeds sheep and goats in Genesis 30). This potentially explains both why they are not “subdued” and “controlled” and why they are not “blessed” and told to reproduce earlier on Day Six.

The flaw here is that the wild animals and creeping things are also not blessed and told to reproduce. So I seriously doubt my answer is the correct one. A possible alternative is that Gen 1:28, or perhaps all of Day Six, is deliberately blurring the line between humans and (other) animals. This would fit nicely with some of the speculative thought of our own day — and with Eccl 3:21.

I will leave the final decision on that to you. Meanwhile, God has even more instructions to give, which we’ll turn to next time.