Genesis 1:12

Psalm 104 gives a fuller picture of the same scene. The deep covered the earth like a garment (Psalm 104:6), and then “At thy rebuke they fled” (Psalm 104:7). They ran over the mountains and down the valleys to the place God had founded for them (Psalm 104:8), which the next verse of Genesis names Seas. The water was kept, moved and given a home.

These words report that the command was carried out at once and in full. God speaks to the greatest mass of water on the earth, and it goes where he tells it. In the thought of the nations around Israel the waters often stood for untamed power, and their gods made the world through conflict. Here one God speaks, and the waters obey. The psalmist praises the word by which the heavens were made and says that God spoke and it was done (Psalm 33:6, 33:9), and by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God (Hebrews 11:3).

“Unto one place” may suit that idea, yet the verse speaks only of the waters and leaves the shape of the land unsaid. It could mean one body of water beside one land mass, or simply that the water was sorted to one side and the land to the other, and Scripture leaves the question open. The same holds for plate tectonics, the modern account of how the earth’s crust moves. The verse tells us who brought the land into view, by what means and on which day: God, by his word, on the third day. Scripture also records a later upheaval, which in the view of many Christians changed the face of the earth, when “the fountains of the great deep” were broken up at the flood (Genesis 7:11). So today’s map may differ from the land that first appeared here.

God gathers the waters “unto one place”, yet he calls the gathering by a plural name. The word yâm means a sea or any large body of water and is often associated with the noise of breaking surf. In the Old Testament it can point to one particular sea, the Mediterranean, and here it covers all the gathered waters. “The gathering together” is miqveh, a collection, answering the command of verse 9. The one gathering has many parts and many shores, just as sailors and map-makers still give different names to waters that all join up.

Here God names the sea and calls it good, and Psalm 104 celebrates the great sea and all that lives in it (Psalm 104:25). After sin enters the world, the raging sea becomes an image of trouble and wickedness. Isaiah compares the wicked to a troubled sea (Isaiah 57:20), Daniel sees beasts come up out of the sea (Daniel 7:3), and in John’s vision of the new earth “there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1). Even at its most frightening, the sea stays inside the limit God gave it.

The three groups are the plant world as anyone sees it, from the ground up. “Grass” is desheʼ, a sprout, and so fresh green growth of every kind, broader than the lawn grass we might picture. “The herb yielding seed” is ʻeseb, green plants or any tender shoot, here the leafy and grain-bearing plants whose seed you can see. The “fruit tree” is the larger plant that holds its seed inside its fruit, and the word for tree, ʻêts, can also mean wood. The list moves from the simplest growth to trees that give food directly, and it describes plants the way people know them, apart from any scientific classification. The last two groups return when God gives man “every herb bearing seed” and every fruit-bearing tree for food (Genesis 1:29).

In verse 12 the earth “brought forth”, yâtsâʼ, the everyday word for going out or bringing out, here for plants coming up out of the ground. The earth did it because God told it to and made it able. The chapter shows the same pattern with the animals: God says, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature” (Genesis 1:24), and then “God made the beast of the earth” (Genesis 1:25).

Scripture is glad to say both things. Jesus says in a parable that “the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself” (Mark 4:28), and the psalmist says that God “causeth the grass to grow” for the cattle (Psalm 104:14). Land that bears a useful crop “receiveth blessing from God” (Hebrews 6:7). Isaiah speaks of rain that makes the earth “bring forth and bud”, and he likens God’s own word to it (Isaiah 55:10, 55:11). The ground’s fruitfulness has always depended on God, who is pleased to work through what he has made.

Verse 12 repeats verse 11 almost word for word because what God said is exactly what happened. Grass, herb and tree were commanded, and grass, herb and tree grew.

Each plant carries within it what it needs to produce the next generation, as you see whenever you cut open an apple or reach the stone of a peach. The word for seed, zeraʻ, comes from a root meaning to sow, and elsewhere it can also mean a person’s descendants. God made each plant once and made it able to go on producing more of itself, a sign of his foresight and his care for every creature that would depend on it. Every harvest since has come from this command, and after the flood God promised that “seedtime and harvest” would continue while the earth remains (Genesis 8:22).

The verse gives the plants, their seed and their kinds wholly to God’s word, so any account that leaves God out and credits chance describes something else. The chapter’s order also differs, since land plants come here, before the sea creatures of Genesis 1:20. Beyond that, faithful Christians read the phrase in two ways. Many hold that it sets boundaries God fixed at creation, so that variety within a kind is expected and the descent of all life from one common ancestor is excluded. Others hold that God may have used long processes and that the phrase describes what plants do without addressing how they came to be. Both agree that every living thing exists because God said so.

The second day closes (Genesis 1:8) without these words, and the reason is unstated. A likely one is that the work with the waters was unfinished until the waters under the sky were gathered, and on this day it is complete. The sky is as good as the rest, since Genesis 1:31 includes every thing. The third day hears “good” twice because it holds two works, and God approves each when it is finished. The sixth day likewise has two, over the animals (Genesis 1:25) and over everything (Genesis 1:31). The repetition follows the work, and the third day ranks with the others.

Verse 12 names grass, seed-bearing plants and fruit trees and calls them good. Thorns and thistles first appear when God tells Adam after his sin that the cursed ground will bring them forth (Genesis 3:18), and Paul says that the whole creation was subjected to futility and groans until now (Romans 8:20, 8:22). So harmful and choking plants belong to the world after sin. Whether God made them new then or existing plants became troublesome, Scripture leaves unsaid, and it is wise to stop where it stops.

God himself gave plants as food before sin, and this chapter treats them differently from animals. “Living creature” is used of sea life and land animals (Genesis 1:21, 1:24), and “wherein there is life” describes the beasts, birds and creeping things to which God gives “every green herb for meat” (Genesis 1:30). When Paul says that death entered by one man’s sin, he speaks of death passing upon all men (Romans 5:12), and a leaf being eaten is a different matter.

Genesis 2 narrows from the whole earth to the garden God prepared for man. Some wonder at Genesis 2:5, where the plants of the field have yet to grow for lack of rain and of a man to till the ground. Many understand those to be the crops that need a farmer, the kind Adam is told he will eat by the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:18). God put Adam in the garden to work it and keep it (Genesis 2:15), so tending growing things has been part of man’s calling from the start.

Read plainly, the plants grew at once or within the day. God speaks, “it was so”, and two verses later evening and morning close the day. The trees are already yielding fruit, and man is given that fruit three days later (Genesis 1:29), so it is natural to take them as made full-grown.

The word for day, yôwm, can mean the daylight hours, a full day from sunset to sunset, or a longer span, and believers differ on how long these days were. Many take them as ordinary days, because each has an evening, a morning and a number, and because Exodus 20:11 ties the six days to Israel’s working week. Others read them as long periods, which would allow the plants more time, or as a God-given way of ordering the account. The question is treated more fully at Genesis 1:5. On every reading, the land and the plants came into being by God’s word.

The New Testament never makes that connection itself. It says that Jesus rose the third day (Luke 24:7) according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:4), and the sign Jesus names is Jonah’s three days and three nights in the fish (Jonah 1:17, Matthew 12:40). Hosea speaks of God raising his people up on the third day (Hosea 6:2). We may gladly notice that the day life first sprang from the ground bears the same number as the day Christ rose, and praise God for it, holding it as a likeness.