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:
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