plants & fruit trees (Gen 1:11)

Reading through the story of creation

In our last episode, God intended to have the newly surfaced earth produce greenery. V. 11 continues by telling us what that means:

plants producing seed עֵ֚שֶׂב מַזְרִ֣יעַ זֶ֔רַע       

fruit trees making fruit of their species עֵ֣ץ פְּרִ֞י עֹ֤שֶׂה פְּרִי֙ לְמִינ֔וֹ

with their own seeds in them אֲשֶׁ֥ר זַרְעוֹ־ב֖וֹ

on the Earth.  עַל־הָאָ֑רֶץ

As we said last time, now that Earth has been “created,” it is immediately instructed to produce plant life, to “sprout greenery” – and that instruction is expanded to include two separate categories of greenery: plants and trees.  The new aspect here is that the greenery will be able to create more greenery on its own, the fruit trees by making fruit with seeds, and the plants by “producing seed” (mazria zera), again a verb form with a cognate accusative (see the previous post) from the same root that produced the verb.  Literally they will be “seeding seed.”

The word zera is used in Biblical Hebrew both for “seed” in the literal sense – the thing you put in the ground to produce more plants – and also for “offspring.”  Human beings’ descendants are frequently called their “seed.”  The basic verb can mean to “sow” seed, but the unusual Hiphil form (more on Hiphil in Lesson 27 of my Hebrew course) used here, “seeding seed,” occurs only one other time in the Bible, in Lev 12:2, where it describes what a woman does before giving birth.

The verb that much more commonly precedes “give birth” is הרה ‘conceive, get pregnant’, so there is some mystery about what the verb mazria means.  That is perhaps appropriate for our context, where a new, biological phenomenon – the first – will come into being; why the same word is used in Leviticus is not clear.

It’s worth pointing out that the category of “plants” (as opposed to trees) is named here as עֵ֚שֶׂב ésev, “grass” in Modern Hebrew.  Though they are spelled quite differently, עֵ֚שֶׂב has a certain auditory resonance with the word אֵזוֹב ezov ‘hyssop’, the paradigmatically humblest of all plants.  It is paired with the cedar [אֶ֙רֶז֙ erez] as a merism,¹ encompassing all of the flora, when we are told about Solomon’s wisdom in 1 Kgs 5:13:

He spoke of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop growing out of the wall.

As you can see in the rest of that verse, Solomon goes on to talk about the animal life that we will encounter in our own chapter on Days Five and Six. Here in v. 11 we do not have hyssop and cedar, merely plants and trees, but I think there is at least an echo of that merism.

And it was so.  וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃

There is one more thing to notice. When God’s thought materialized, “it was so” – but, as you can see in v. 12, not precisely so.  It’s clear that in v. 11 the trees are being instructed to produce fruit of their own species [למינו l’mino].  The plants, though, as the punctuation makes clear, are given no such instruction – not, at least, in Hebrew.  But the Greek text does have it, adding the phrase κατὰ γένος καὶ καθ̓ ὁμοιότητα ‘according to kind and according to likeness’ in between the plants and the trees of the Hebrew v. 11.  (Yes, ὁμοιότητα is the same Greek word for “likeness” that will be used in v. 26.)

The translators of the Septuagint were not the only ones who noticed that the instruction to reproduce species by species was applied to the trees but not to the smaller plants.  The plants themselves – by now, a twinkle in God’s eye, but so far only a twinkle – noticed it, too.  The Talmud explains:

When the Holy One, blessed be He, enjoined “after its kind” (Gen 1:11) upon the trees, the plants applied to themselves an a fortiori argument:  “If the Holy One, blessed be He, desired a motley growth, why did He enjoin ‘after its kind’ upon the trees?  Moreover, is there not here an a fortiori argument?  If upon trees, which by nature do not grow up in a motley growth, the Holy One, blessed be He, enjoined ‘after its kind,’ how much more so does it apply to us!”  Immediately each plant came forth “after its kind.” [B. Hullin 60a, adapted from the Soncino translation]

And indeed that is what v. 12 tells us:

12 The earth brought forth greenery, plants producing seed of their own species, fruit trees making fruit of their own species with their own seeds in them. 

And God saw that it was good.  וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב׃

No wonder. God’s creation was beginning to operate on its own, and (if the Talmudic story is any guide) doing its best not only to operate properly but to improve things when necessary.

Now the work of Day Three is over.  We’ll sum up the day and compare it to Days One and Two next time.

1. A merism is a statement naming two things at opposite ends of a spectrum as a way of including all the variations in between. Here, the smallest plant and the largest define the plant kingdom. See pp. 24-26 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices for a longer discussion.