Let the Dry Land Appear – Genesis 1:9-10

Water covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface.  97% of that water is salt water, found in the seas and oceans of Earth.  The other 3% is fresh water, water with less than 1% salt, and only a third of that water is useful to humans since two thirds of it is frozen at the polar ice caps.  Fresh water freezes at 0 degrees centigrade, salt water at -1 degree centigrade.  But when a body of water freezes, it freezes from the top down, a factor that permits more organisms to survive in it and for it to thaw much quicker as the atmosphere warms up.  Earth is unique in our solar system in that it is cool enough to keep this water from vaporizing (as on Venus), but not too cold to freeze (as on Mars), both of which lead to dead planets.  As Wikipedia notes:  “Earth‘s major landmasses all have coasts on a single, continuous World Ocean, which is divided into a number of principal oceanic components by the continents and various geographic criteria.”  God designed our planet perfectly to sustain organic life.

9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.  11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. (Genesis 1:9–13, ESV)

In the creation stories of the Ancient Near East, like in Babylon, the victorious god killed the seemingly superior god and used that god’s body to form the sky and the land and oceans.  Often in these stories, fresh and salt water were an eternal substance that created the gods and all else that exists.  But Genesis tells us that the eternal God spoke the formation of the dry land out of the water that covered the earth.  This is the last part of His work to make the earth productive and habitable; this is the work of the first three days.  The next three will be making inhabitants for the world.

God gives names to the dry land and to the waters.  The dry land He calls ha eretz, alternately translated “land” or “earth.”  We use the term “earth” in much the same way as the Hebrew, ha eretz, sometimes using it to refer to our whole planet, as Genesis 1:1 does, or to dry ground in particular.  By giving names to the waters and the dry ground, God demonstrates His sovereignty over them and His purpose for them.

The term for “seas” in Hebrew is yam (singular) and yammim (plural, which is used here in this verse).  This was also the name of a god in ancient near eastern mythology.  But God makes clear through Moses that Yam is not a god but a thing created by the true God, Yahweh, to serve His purposes.

Simply to have this land separated from the sea is not enough to make it productive.  God does that by causing the earth to bring forth vegetation. Though some might argue that God is giving the earth generative powers, it is safest to take what is said here as God doing the generating of vegetation in the earth.  And the kinds of vegetation focused on are plants and trees that will provide food for animals and humans, though probably all kinds of vegetation is implied.  The plants produce after their kind.  Though humans have figured out ways to make hybrid versions of many such plants, the plants themselves only produce the same kind of plants as themselves.  This has been used to suggest that natural evolution is thus ruled out as a means of producing all the plant life we have on earth, though it is possible that mutations of plants might lead to new versions of these plants with different properties.