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.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Bible Guy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.