Chumash Bereshit Sedra א Chapter 1 Verse 10

Genesis chapter 1 is my favorite chapter of the Bible.  Everything is fresh, new, and exciting!  I am reading from this website, so you can follow along. 

https://www.chabad.org/library/bible

Verse 10, is very interesting.  Tradition tells us that the universe and our world was created with 10 ""speakings."   This is usually thought of as the word אמר - to say.  Our verse doesn't have the word say, but it does have the word קרא  .  This word appears twice.  

קרא is a very interesting word. There aren't very many homophones in Hebrew, that is like the word "read" in English which is spelled the same, but prounced differently depending uopn which tense you   On page 207, of this wonderful book that i am using to teach beginning students, we see the two uses of this important word:  לקרא ספרת עתון   (to read a newspaper or book), and the other use which is?איך קראים אותך  (How are you called?)

When we read this verse most scholars use the second sense of the word קרא

   "And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas, and God saw that it was good. "

We could use the other meaning and "read" the dry land and the seas. This is what we do whemn we look at the geology, we read the story of the land by the way that the rocks are deposited, and we read the seas by the way that the sea floor has developed.  

Names in the bible are also very important.   ארץ Land is the foundation of our world, it is strong, we as people are very xconnected to the land, we use the land for our needs.  

ימים Seas, is the water, it is always moving, taking the nutrientsfrom one place to another. The sea is where life first started,  then slowly, the animals moved from the sea onto the land.  We owe the ocean a great debt, as the beginning of all life. 

All the opinions in this blog are my own, I take all responsibility for all the content, if you want, feel free to comment in a respectful way and we can have a nice dialog. 

Rachael Alice Orbach