Genesis 7:3

Summary

The verse extends the instruction of the preceding verse to birds: seven each of every bird of the heavens, male and female, are to be taken so that offspring may survive on the surface of the whole earth. The syntax marks this as an addition ("also") to a command already given for other animals.

Key words

• gam ("also", H1571) — adverb placed at the very start of the clause, signaling that this instruction adds to what was just commanded (regarding land animals in the prior verse) rather than beginning a new independent topic.
• shiv'ah shiv'ah ("seven", H7651, repeated twice) — the doubling of the cardinal number functions distributively, meaning "seven by seven" / "seven of each," a Hebrew way of expressing a repeated quantity without a separate word for "each."
• chayyot ("to preserve alive", H2421) — Piel infinitive construct; the Piel stem here carries a causative-intensive nuance ("to cause to live" / "to keep alive"), and as an infinitive with the preceding le- it expresses purpose ("in order to preserve alive").
• zera' ("offspring", H2233) — masculine singular noun serving as the direct object of the infinitive, specifying what is being kept alive: not the birds themselves as individuals, but their reproductive continuity.
• penei ("face of", H6440) — masculine plural construct, part of the fixed expression "upon the face of," used with kol ha-aretz ("all the earth") to denote the entire terrestrial surface.

What the text says

The clause opens with gam ("also"), syntactically tying this instruction to what precedes it: the birds are added to the list of creatures being gathered, using the same distributive numeral pattern (shiv'ah shiv'ah, "seven seven") found for pairs elsewhere in the passage. The phrase me-'of ha-shamayim ("of the bird[s] of the heavens") is undifferentiated in the Hebrew of this verse — no clean/unclean distinction is marked here grammatically, unlike in the verse addressing land animals. The purpose clause built on the Piel infinitive le-chayyot zera' ("to preserve alive offspring") expresses the stated goal of the action: not simply saving individual birds, but ensuring continuity of their kind, phrased with the abstract noun zera' ("seed/offspring") rather than a term for the animals directly.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text (TAHOT) and the Vulgate both describe a single category of birds, taken in sevens ("septena et septena," "shiv'ah shiv'ah"), without specifying clean or unclean status in this verse. The LXX, however, introduces a distinction not present in the Hebrew data given: it renders two separate groups — birds "τῶν καθαρῶν" ("of the clean ones"), taken seven by seven, and birds "τῶν μὴ καθαρῶν" ("of those not clean"), taken two by two (δύο δύο). This LXX expansion adds a clean/unclean split and a second numerical pattern that the Hebrew and Vulgate texts as presented do not contain.