"Let the water that is under the sky gather into one place" (Gen 1:9)

Reading through the story of creation

9 Let the water that is under the Sky gather into one place

יִקָּו֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם מִתַּ֤חַת הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ אֶל־מָק֣וֹם אֶחָ֔ד

[Recording here.]

It’s time for a look at Biblical Hebrew punctuation.  Why?  Because my translation, like many other common ones, is going to ignore the punctuation of this phrase, and I’d like to explain why.  First, a short introduction to what I mean when I say “Biblical Hebrew punctuation.” Those who want a longer look and some instruction will find it in Lesson 34 of my Biblical Hebrew course for the Teaching Company.

While English has punctuation marks within the sentence (such as commas, semicolons, and dashes)—and modern Hebrew works the same way—in the Bible, every word has a punctuation mark. And these marks serve three functions: They indicate …

• where in the word the accent falls

• how to chant the biblical text musically, and

• how to group the words of each verse in a sensible way.

The traditional Hebrew text was originally written (like Modern Hebrew) with consonants only.  Ten or 12 centuries ago, a system of marks was developed that would indicate vowel sounds, to which was added a system telling you how to connect the words into phrases.  The simplest mark to recognize is the little wishbone under the שׁ of the word היבשה ha-yabashah ‘the dry land’ in the next phrase of our verse: וְתֵרָאֶ֖ה הַיַּבָּשָׁ֑ה.  That breaks the verse into two parts. I do the same thing in my translation by putting a period after the phrase “so that the dry land can appear.” (Subject and verb are reversed in English.)

I’ll describe this system in more detail some other time (and will link to it here when I do).  In the meantime, a quick look at the clause we’re examining in this post.

יִקָּו֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם מִתַּ֤חַת הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ אֶל־מָק֣וֹם אֶחָ֔ד

Those first two words, יִקָּו֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם ‘let the water gather’, have curves above them that tell us they go together as a phrase. The next clause all goes together, but the marks on הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ ‘the Sky’ tell us to make a slight pause after that word. So this part of the verse is broken up by the punctuation as follows:

Let the water gather /

From under the Sky, to one place.

The half dozen or so other modern translations I checked all do just what I’ve done.  Instead of connecting gather and water as the punctuation marks do, we’ve ignored the mark telling us to separate the water from what follows, and instead of minding the gap we have bridged it to create a phrase that reads against the traditional punctuation: הַמַּ֜יִם מִתַּ֤חַת הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ ‘the water under the Sky’.

Sometimes the biblical punctuation is clearly “wrong” (that is, it reads against the superficially obvioius meaning of the text).  In at least some of those cases, it’s clear that the punctuation does that deliberately — not to keep you from reading the obvious way, but to push you to also read it a different way that hints at some tradition now preserved in rabbinic literature. Those who are interested can find more about this in my scholarly article “Exegetical Implications of the Masoretic Cantillation Marks In Ecclesiastes.”

I’m not aware of any such tradition here and haven’t had the time to search for one.  Nor can I speak for any of the other translators.  But I’ve chosen to read against the punctuation for a particular reason.  Just as in the traditional Hebrew text (the Masoretic Text or MT) we are not told that God looked at the Sky and “saw that it was good,” so too we are not being told anything about the water above the cupola.  As we’ve seen over and over again just in our brief discussion of the first 8 verses of Genesis, the cupola blocks off God’s realm from ours, and it is not up for discussion. It is the water under the Sky that matters here, in contrast to the water above the Sky.

There’s an additional subtle difference between my translation and the other translations I checked. To provide an example, here is the King James Version’s translation of our phrase: not “Let the water … gather,” but “Let the waters … be gathered.” It’s “waters” because the Hebrew word מים is a plural, not a singular, but what I’m talking about now is the verb. In grammatical terms, “to be gathered” is a passive form, while “to gather” is what would be called a “middle.” Either is a legitimate translation of the Hebrew Niphal conjugation used here. (Ignore the grammatical terms or learn more about them in my course.)

Why have I made that choice?  To remind myself that our story is full of allusions to a different version of the story, one that we know not only from ancient Near Eastern literature but from elsewhere in the Bible, describing creation as the result of a battle between a land god and a sea god.  See our earlier discussion of “Deep” for more; and there will be even more to say about this as we continue.

Our Hebrew text does not say “Let me gather the waters” or “let there be an ocean.” But this grammatical usage — technically it’s called the jussive — is what a student of mine once dubbed “the wishful future.” God wants this to happen and the water is being instructed to “make it so.” (Spoiler alert: We are about to be told that “it was so.”)  Once again, we see no battle.  If there even was one, it is finished and the results are settled before the curtain goes up on our story. The primordial water knows who is boss.