"life" (Gen 1:20)

Reading through the story of creation

20 life  נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה

Some of you may be thinking right now, Something’s wrong here.  How can it take two words to say “life”?  “Life” is one of the few Hebrew words I actually know!  Doesn’t l’chayim mean “to life”?

Uh … yes, it does.  But Hebrew חַיִּים ḥayyim really means “life” as opposed to “death,” or refers to one’s “life” in the sense of “life span.”  It’s not used in the Bible to refer to animal as opposed to vegetable or mineral – and remember that plants are not “life” from a biblical perspective, not in the same sense that (we) animals are.  What comes into being for the first time on Day Five is animal life.

What we have here instead of ḥayyim is a two-word phrase.  By now, it should not surprise you to see an English translation that doesn’t map onto the Hebrew words on a one-to-one basis.  Here are two other translations of the beginning of Gen 1:20 to compare, both of them trying their best to make the English words reflect what the Hebrew literally says:

KJV: Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life

Fox: Let the waters swarm with a swarm of living beings

We talked last time about the verb + cognate accusative שׁרץ, “swarm with a swarm” in Everett Fox’s translation.  “Swarm” is not really a transitive verb in English, so those of us who choose to use it must add the preposition “with.”  It is actually quite common for Biblical Hebrew to omit prepositions even when they seem necessary, so adding “with” is easy to justify here.  But what is this a swarm “of”?

The second word of our phrase, ḥayah, is the “easy” one to translate: it is the adjective that means “living,” that is, “alive.”  As a verb, this root works exactly like היה hayah (note that חיה “to live” has a guttural ḥ, while היה “to be” has a regular h).  Compare these two examples:

וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר va-yehi or ‘and there was light’ (Gen 1:3)

וַיְחִ֤י יַעֲקֹב֙ va-yeḥi ya’akov ‘and Jacob lived’ (Gen 47:28)

But even the verb חיה does not map perfectly onto the English verb “to live.”  You can’t say va-yeḥi ya’akov at 1234 Main St.; that would mean that “Jacob was alive” at that address, not that he resided there.  So it’s clear that our phrase nefesh ḥayah is talking about something that is “alive.”

And now that I’ve beaten around the bush for a while, we must come to grips with the thing that is “alive,” the living thing that the water will swarm with: nefesh.

The easy translation of this word, out of any particular context and particularly in post-biblical Hebrew, is “soul.”  But it has other meanings too, and other Hebrew words are used for “soul,” so the automatic translation that people who know just a little Hebrew often want to make for this word in the Bible is really almost never correct.

In Modern Hebrew the adjective form of this word, נפשי nafshi, can mean “mental”; ba’ayat guf-nefesh is the famous “mind-body problem.”  Meanwhile, you can also find the words ruaḥ and neshamah translated as “soul.”  In Gen 2:7 (we will get there), we will see God breathe a neshamah into a lump of clay and bring it to life.  It is breath, but also something more than breath.

Like ruaḥ and neshamah, which have something to do with the movement of air, nefesh too is actually a quite physical word.  The related word in Akkadian – the ancient Semitic language we know from cuneiform tablets, used in Babylonia and such countries – is napishtu.  I’ll let the Chicago Assyrian¹ Dictionary present the wide variety of meanings that word can have, almost all of which correspond to meanings of the Hebrew word nefesh:

napištu (š is technical transliteration for Hebrew שׁ / English sh)

1. life, vigor, vitality, good health,

2. living beings,

3. person, somebody, (negated) nobody,

4. capital case,

5. personnel, persons of menial status, animals counted in a herd,

6. body, self,

7. breath,

8. livelihood, provisions, sustenance,

9. throat, neck.

10. opening, air hole,

11. neckerchief.

I don’t think meanings #10 and #11 work with nefesh in the Bible, but the others definitely do.  In poetry nafshi ‘my nefesh’ is sometimes used just to have a different way of saying “I.”  But it can be a very anatomical word as well.  Some of you may have sung (as I have) a choral setting of Psalm 69:2, “the waters have reached my neck,” where the word translated “neck” is nafesh, the pausal form of nefesh.²

Its basic meaning literally is “throat” (CAD #9), the place where air, water, and food enter your body to keep it alive.  Exod 31:17 (we may get there), describing what happened on Day Seven of creation, tells us that God “caught His breath” with a verb made from this word nefesh.

Lev 17:11 (we hope to get there) tells us that “the nefesh of the flesh is in the blood,” and Lev 17:14 phrases it slightly differently: “the nefesh of the flesh is its blood.”  So nefesh is, somehow, that quality that animates dead matter and gives it – gives us – the ability to move around, to be the “moving creature” of the King James translation of v. 20. (I’ve heard that ayurvedic medicine has a principle that “blood is life,” and the same may be true for many other cultures.)

Is נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה ‘a living nefesh’ a redundant phrase?  Evidently not, since Lev 21:11 and Num 6:6 both refer to such a thing as a “dead nefesh,” that is, a corpse.  I wonder whether one of these verses gave Gogol the idea for his novel Dead Souls.  (The only Russian Bible I could find does not use that language there, however.)

The bottom line is this:  If we think of Creation Week in two parts, we are now in the second part, the new and improved version of Days 1-3.  According to that pattern, Day Five is corresponds to Day Two and, apparently, the first “good” thing of Day Three, the good thing that was missing on Day Two.  Just as the light of Day One was supplanted by the sun, moon, and stars moving through the Sky, now Sky (Day Two) and Seas and Earth (Day Three, part one) will be filled with nefesh ḥayah – a two-word phrase that I have chosen to translate simply as “life.”

However, that will not happen in a simple “let it be … and it was” way.  V. 21 will provide us with two more words that will require some discussion.  So we’ll look at  them in Sunday’s post.

1. “Assyrian” was the name used for this language back when this multi-volume dictionary was started.

2. Hebrew words sometimes change their sound at the end of a phrase.  For more on such “pausal” forms, see Lesson 12 of my Biblical Hebrew course.