Let him control the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם
The rest of the living things are included too; we’ll get to them shortly. The point I want to make quickly here, before discussing the verb “let him control,” is that the list begins with the creatures of Day Five. Two things to note:
The structure of Creation Week that has the first three days corresponding to the next three days is not a rigid one. Like the actual world we observe, it is a pattern imposed on complexity. I expect to have more to say about this at the end of Day Six or Day Seven.
Human beings are not to “control” the plants. That’s another reminder for us that plants are not “life” in the biblical perspective. They don’t eat or breathe (not in the obvious ways that animals do) and, perhaps most important for this verse, they don’t move around. It’s not that humans can’t or shouldn’t control the plants. Evidently there is just no need to.
And now that pesky verb, וְיִרְדּוּ֩ v’yirdu ‘let him control’. We have already spoken about the verbs מלך m-l-k ‘reign’ and משׁל m-sh-l ‘rule’. This is yet a third verb, רדה r-d-h. It’s not a common verb. It occurs just 22 times in the Bible. The one aspect of its distribution that jumps out at me is that 4 of the 22 appearances of רדה are in Leviticus 25-26, at the end of the Holiness Code. Three of the four add בפרך b’farekh, the same word that Exodus employs to describe the harsh treatment the Egyptians inflicted on the Hebrew slaves. Perhaps that is why רדה means “tyrannize” in Modern Hebrew.
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