Genesis 7:2

Summary

The verse instructs Noah to take seven pairs of every clean animal, each consisting of a male and its female, and one pair of every animal that is not clean, again male and female. The distinction turns on the adjective tehorah ("clean", H2889) and its negation.

Key words

• kol ("all", H3605) — construct singular noun opening the phrase "of all/every the livestock," setting up a comprehensive class rather than a single animal.
• tehorah ("clean", H2889) — feminine singular adjective agreeing with behemah ("livestock", H0929); repeated later in negated form (lo tehorah, "not clean") to mark the second category.
• tikkach ("you will take", H3947) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular, giving the instruction a future/ongoing force directed at Noah alone.
• shiv'ah shiv'ah ("seven, seven", H7651 repeated) — cardinal number doubled, a Hebrew distributive construction meaning "seven of each kind" rather than a single group of seven.
• 'ish ve-'ishto ("a male and its female," literally "a man and his wife," H0376/H0802) — construct noun with pronominal suffix; the term used for humans ("man"/"his woman") is applied here to animals, expressing paired sexes.

What the text says

The sentence is built around two parallel clauses, each governed by the same verb tikkach (understood in the second clause by ellipsis). The first clause specifies mi-kol ha-behemah ha-tehorah — "from all the livestock, the clean one" — using the construct kol to mark totality within the category of clean animals, followed by the distributive shiv'ah shiv'ah, "seven seven," a repetition pattern in Biblical Hebrew that conveys "seven of each kind" or "seven pairs," rather than a single group of seven individuals. The phrase 'ish ve-'ishto, literally "a man and his wife," is grammatically identical to language used for human couples, but here functions idiomatically to denote a male and female pair of animals.

The second clause mirrors the first structurally: u-min ha-behemah 'asher lo tehorah hi' — "and from the livestock which is not clean" — using the relative particle 'asher ("which", H0834) with the negation lo ("not", H3808) to define the second class by negating the adjective used in the first clause. Instead of shiv'ah shiv'ah, the number shenayim ("two", H8147, dual form) appears, again followed by 'ish ve-'ishto. The repetition of syntax between the two clauses places the quantities (seven pairs vs. one pair) in direct grammatical contrast tied to the single distinguishing feature, the presence or absence of tehorah.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'ish ve-'ishto ("a male and its female") as ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ("male and female"), and the Vulgate similarly as masculum et feminam, both losing the Hebrew's human-relational phrasing ("a man and his wife") in favor of neutral biological terms. The LXX preserves the distributive doubling with ἑπτὰ ἑπτὰ ("seven seven"), matching the Hebrew shiv'ah shiv'ah, while the Vulgate's septena et septena similarly retains the repeated form.