Genesis - Chapter 01 - Line 00024

Contemplative Summary

And God said: Let the earth bring forth living soul according to its kind — cattle, and crawling things, and the wild animal of the earth according to its kind. And it was so.

The earth, long shaped and blessed, now becomes mother again — not passive soil, but active field. The command totze ha-aretz — “let the earth bring forth” — grants agency to the ground itself, as if the divine word reverberates through the body of the planet, awakening what was already latent within. From her depths arise the nefesh chayyah — living souls of many kinds: the behemah, gentle companions of order and home; the remes, quick and subtle movers across thresholds; and the chayto-erets, the fierce and free ones of the open wild. Each according to its kind, yet all sharing the same breath of aliveness.

This verse is the birth of terrestrial vitality — multiplicity emerging through coherence. The divine will no longer forms directly; it invites the earth to generate, to echo the Creator’s own creativity. “And it was so” seals not a mechanical result but a moment of resonance — the earth answering in kind. To contemplate this line is to feel creation as collaboration: divinity entrusting matter with memory, calling life to rise from within. Every wildness, every creeping persistence, every tamed grace carries the same pulse — the earth bringing forth its living soul.