humans are given control (Gen 1:26)
Reading through the story of creation
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.
The word is not as obviously a harsh one in the Bible; I’ve chosen the English translation “control” just to have something different to say than reign or rule, and to give it that slight possible extra harshness. The King James version, followed by many of the modern English translations, uses the expression “have dominion,” perhaps because it too is somewhat rare in English.
Now a moment of grammar, followed by a point about the significance of God’s saying this. The grammatical point is a subtle one, but it is clear. I said when I discussed the beginning of the verse that later in v. 26 we would find a grammatical clue that נעשה na’aseh here must mean “let us make” rather than “we will make.” That clue is right here in the verb וְיִרְדּוּ֩.
In Modern Hebrew yirdu would simply be a future tense verb. But in Biblical Hebrew putting וְ in front of one of those forms gives it a particular spin: It must be a “wishful” future (as one of my students once called it) — a jussive (2nd or 3rd person, like yirdu) or cohortative (1st person, like na’aseh). So it cannot be “they shall rule,” as the NJPS translation has it here. It must be “let them rule.” That nudges us in the direction of “let us make” for the preceding verb in the sequence.
Now for the larger point. We saw the sun and moon given governance over the world on Day Four, and suggested that this meant God was delegating some of his power and responsibility to them. Here too it seems we must view this final step of creation as God giving human beings day-to-day control over the living things on the planet.
It makes sense that an animal created in God’s image and according to God’s likeness would be the one given that responsibility. We are not told anything like this about the sun and moon, but then we are told as little as possible about the things that belong in the sky. When God appears on earth he is, like the sun, too bright to look at, so perhaps there is a sense in which the sun, too, was created in God’s image — God’s viceroy in the Sky as humans beings are on Earth.
the animals, the beasts, and all the things that creep over the ground.
וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּבְכָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶ֖מֶשׂ הָֽרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃
I’ve put the end of the verse in a separate section here to explain that I am emending the text in order to translate it. That is, I’m assuming that the original Hebrew did not say what we read in our Bibles now — וּבְכָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ “and all the earth” — but ובכל חית־הארץ “all the beasts.” BHS (Biblical Hebraica Stuttgartensia), the Bible that scholars use nowadays, notes here:
𝔖 + ḥjwtʾ, ins חַיַּת
Translated into English, this note means: “The Syriac version of the Bible adds ḥjwtʾ here (but in the Syriac alphabet); we should insert the Hebrew word חַיַּת, which the Syriac translator must have had in his Hebrew version.” Here’s how it looks in that version, with the extra word, in the middle, in bold:
ܘܒܟܠܗܿ ܚܝܘܬܐ ܕܐܪܥܐ܂
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, and the Peshitta or Syriac Bible is the Bible of the Assyrian Orthodox Christians. Some scholars think that this was originally a Jewish translation; none of the Jewish Aramaic translations have this extra word in them, but it seems obvious it must have been in the original text.
I must confess that I’ve forgotten how to decode the two Syriac alphabets, which I learned years ago. Thanks to your tax dollars, however (via the National Endowment for the Humanities), there’s a web site that will give you access to the Aramaic and Syriac versions of the Bible, with clickable links that will take you to the necessary dictionary entries in the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon. Enjoy.
Next time, we will be created. Stay tuned!