Kosher Animals (Gen 7:2)

The Flood

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² From all the kosher animals, get yourself seven husband-and-wife pairs of each;

and from the animals that are not kosher, [get] two: a husband and a wife.

מִכֹּ֣ל ׀ הַבְּהֵמָ֣ה הַטְּהוֹרָ֗ה תִּֽקַּח־לְךָ֛ שִׁבְעָ֥ה שִׁבְעָ֖ה אִ֣ישׁ וְאִשְׁתּ֑וֹ

 וּמִן־הַבְּהֵמָ֡ה אֲ֠שֶׁר לֹ֣א טְהֹרָ֥ה הִ֛וא שְׁנַ֖יִם אִ֥ישׁ וְאִשְׁתּֽוֹ׃

Last time, discussing just the first half of the verse, I called these animals “ritually pure.” Now (as promised) I’ve changed my translation of טהור tahor to “kosher.” Before I go on to explain that translation, let me point quickly to two linguistic features of the second half of the verse, which we’ve now added:

• The instruction in v. 2a to “get” (תִּֽקַּח tiqqaḥ) seven pairs of each kosher animal on board is not repeated in v. 2b with the non-kosher animals. Instead, to use some terminology I learned from Stephen Geller at Brandeis University, it is “gapped” in the second half of the verse. That is, we instinctively understand that it applies there too even though it is not repeated. The class I learned it in was a class on Biblical Poetry. Our verse is not poetic — yet it does have parallelism, a basic feature of biblical poetry. This is rhetoric, not an instruction manual.

• Our verse uses the singular word b’hema as a collective noun for “animals.” (We saw that same usage in Genesis 1.) The feminine singular pronoun referring to it is היא, but in the Pentateuch that word is almost always spelled as if it were the masculine הוא, something we’ll need to talk about later.

Now for my new “kosher” translation. We saw two verses last time, both in Deuteronomy 14 (the chapter about what you can eat and what you can’t) where “pure” birds could be eaten. The chapter in Leviticus corresponding to Deuteronomy 14 is Leviticus 11. There, we read this: