What Does Genesis 7:21 Mean in the King James?
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 analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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.
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).
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 that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.THE THREAD
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.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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