the dry land appears & is named (Gen 1:9-10)

Reading through the story of creation

9 so that the dry land can be seen וְתֵרָאֶ֖ה הַיַּבָּשָׁ֑ה

Despite the darkness and water that were all that could be seen when Genesis began, apparently there were the makings of a planet hidden under that water.  The Sky (in the form of a sapphire cupola) had to be made, but the land was there all along.  When the water moves away, it will be able to dry out. As we’ll see shortly, this is the “creation” of Earth.

Many translations say that God wanted the dry land to “appear.” That’s a perfectly good translation. This is the same verb that one might use in Modern Hebrew to say, “It appears to me …” It is using the same verb conjugation as to have the water “gather.” The one person who will be able to “see” what will shortly “be seen” is God, who knows already that it is there, so “appear” makes good sense. Once again, however, I have changed the more usual translation to help me notice what is really being said.

And it was so.  וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן This time, “and it was so” seems to be in its natural place, in between God’s wish that it be so and the words telling us how it became so. Remember that in v. 7 “and it was so” followed God’s making the cupola; in the Greek, they introduced that action. But we are in for another surprise.

In the traditional Hebrew (the MT or Masoretic Text), “and it was so” is all we are told. We must take for granted that the water did gather into one location as God wanted. The Greek translation does show us that this happened:

And the water that was under the sky was gathered into their gatherings, and the dry land appeared.

καὶ συνήχθη τὸ ὕδωρ τὸ ὑποκάτω τοῦ οὐρανοῦ εἰς τὰς συναγωγὰς αὐτῶν, καὶ ὤφθη ἡ ξηρά.

I include the Greek for those who can read it; when I offer an English translation, I am taking it from the NETS, not doing it myself as I do for the Hebrew. It amuses me that the “gathering” of water is a συνᾰγωγή, the Greek word that gives us our English “synagogue” for a place where Jews gather to worship. Undoubtedly there were such locations, perhaps even called by that name, when the translation was written, but I am not going to guess whether this would have been on the writer’s mind.

Again we must ask: was this line …

(1) dropped from the MT by mistake?

(2) added by the Greek translator to “fix” a perceived error in the MT?

(3) translated into Greek from a Hebrew original that differs from the MT?

As far as I am aware, no Hebrew original of these words was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Conceivably, the writer did not want the water to actively perform a verb; as we have said before and will say again, in the ancient Near East, the water is a character in the story of creation..

10 God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of water Seas 

וַיִּקְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ לַיַּבָּשָׁה֙ אֶ֔רֶץ וּלְמִקְוֵ֥ה הַמַּ֖יִם קָרָ֣א יַמִּ֑ים

This first half of v. 10 is exactly parallel to the first half of v. 5 — there are now two new entries on the ledger of creation, and they are named simultaneously.  A couple of things to notice:

• the verb ויבדל does not occur here.  God “distinguished” between light and dark; God or the cupola “separated” the water into two realms.  Clearly such an act of separation has occurred here too, but it is all hidden inside the black box of “and it was so.” In the Hebrew text, at least, we can only presume the water went off to sit in the corner as it had been instructed to do. There is no phrase telling us so. Even God has no role here in “separating” the water from the land – or perhaps it did take a battle to do so, which is being quietly swept under the rug.

• When light was distinguished from darkness and both were named, one of the two was pre-existent and one had just come into being.  When the Sky separating the water into two was named, it had just been made.  This time, neither named thing, Earth or Seas, was new in quite that same way. The water simply concentrated itself into a smaller compass than it had previously occupied.

• The second of the two things our chapter is supposedly about has now appeared — Earth — and, like Sky, it too was not “created” (using the divine verb ברא) as we were promised in v. 1.

One thing that will be worth noting when we get to Gen 7:11 is that some of the water has apparently “gathered” under the land. Another is that the water has hardly gathered into “one” place, which was God’s original idea. If anything, it is the land that is in one place and the water that is everywhere else. Nowadays, the מקוה mikveh ‘gathering’ of water has given its name to the place where one goes to bathe ritually.

From the mythological perspective of creation as a theogony, a “battle of the gods” of whom one was the god of the water and the other the god of the land, what matters is not the balance between geography and oceanography, but the fact that the water has yielded its place and thus permitted the land, where humanity can dwell, to appear. One scholar goes so far as to say that the water is named Seas (yammim) because Yamm in the singular is the name of the Canaanite sea god.¹ I have my doubts about this, given that תְה֑וֹם tehom 'Deep' is named so prominently in v. 2, but it’s worth thinking about.

and God saw that it was good  וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב׃ Unlike in the LXX, the second of seven evaluations of creation as good has had to wait for the third day.  In the Hebrew Bible, we are not told what God thinks of the cupola, the one part of creation that he himself has made.

You might expect that the work of Day Three has now come to a close, but as we’ll find out next time, it is just getting started.

1. Gary Rendsburg, How the Bible Is Written, 24.