What Does Genesis 7:21 Mean?
And all flesh that crept upon the earth expired, the birds, the cattle, the living thing, and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all humankind.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:THE KEY
The Hebrew phrase behind “creeping thing that creepeth” is literally “the swarm that swarms,” and the verse says even this teeming life dies.
THE MEANING
The verse’s repeated “all” leaves no category outside death’s reach: every creature it names, human and animal alike, dies. The human remains within the same field of earthly life as bird, cattle, wild beast, and the creatures that swarm.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being human places a person beyond creaturely vulnerability: “every man” is included in the death that reaches every form of flesh.
THE ROOT
הַשֶּׁרֶץ הַשֹּׁרֵץ
ha-sherets ha-shorēts
GROWS FROM
שׁרץ
sh-r-ts
To swarm, teem, or multiply in abundance.
“swarming thing that swarms upon the earth” in this verse is ha-sherets ha-shorēts. The KJV renders the noun and verb as “creeping thing that creepeth,” obscuring the repeated Hebrew seed: “the swarming creature that swarms.” The word holds life’s teeming movement inside the very phrase that says it dies.
ALSO GROWS
sherets: Swarm; swarming creature.
שֶׁרֶץ
The noun names the small moving creatures included in the verse’s exhaustive list.
sharats: To swarm or teem.
שָׁרַץ
The verb shares the noun’s root, so the Hebrew phrase repeats the idea of swarming.
הָאָדָם
ha-adam
GROWS FROM
אדם
ʾ-d-m
The human and ground word-family: אָדָם (adam, human) is linked by biblical wordplay to אֲדָמָה (adamah, ground or soil).
“humankind” in this verse is ha-adam. The human word carries an earth echo. “Every man” is not treated as life standing outside the earthly creatures named here.
ALSO GROWS
adam: Human being; humankind.
אָדָם
The verse includes all humanity within the death shared by the living creatures.
adamah: Ground; soil.
אֲדָמָה
The related ground-word recalls humanity’s earth-formed identity and its place among earthly life.
THE PATTERN
Living creatures share a vulnerability to death that crosses the human and animal divide and reaches across domains of life.
For what meets the children of humankind also meets the beast, and one encounter is theirs. As this one dies, so that one dies, and they all have one breath. Humankind has no remainder above the beast, for all is vapor.You hide your face, and they are shaken; you gather in their breath, and they breathe out and return to their dust.The second messenger pours out his bowl upon the sea, and it becomes as the blood of a dead man, and every living soul dies in the sea.THE THREAD
And God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarming living soul, and let birds fly over the earth, upon the face of the expanse of the heavens."Genesis 1:20 uses יִשְׁרְצוּ (yishretsu, “they swarm”) and שֶׁרֶץ (sherets, “swarming creature”), from the same root שׁרץ (sh-r-ts, “swarm or teem”). There, the root names life multiplying in the waters; here, it returns in the swarming creature that dies.
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