Thursday, October 8, 2009

Multiply

1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 

 After all that dividing, we now get some multiplying.

"Them" is apparently "every living creature that moveth"; but now that seems to refer only to sea animals.  The phrasing is repeatedly very strange: living creatures excludes land animals, birds, and sometimes whales.

This passage may clarify the previous one.  It seems that the multiplying is still in the future, so the earlier "after their kind" was misplaced.  Also, "abundantly" is less than filling the waters.

The phrase "in the earth" I'll take just to mean "on dry land", not underground.  Although the phrase "fowl multiply in the earth" does make me picture chickens in a cave doing math homework.

For no particular reason, the fish are supposed to be fruitful, but not the birds.  But both should multiply.  More strange is that the fruit trees and grains, despite having their reproductive cycle described, are not even instructed to multiply.  Maybe God thought that telling the fruit trees to be fruitful would be too obvious.

God's blessing for fish and birds is instructions to have lots of descendants.  That's very Darwinian of him.  Anyway, this is the first blessing.  Apparently the stars, moon, sun, plants, heaven, earth and light didn't get blessed.

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