Genesis 8:1

Summary

The verse marks the narrative turning point of the flood account: God "remembers" Noah and the animals in the ark, and then causes a wind to pass over the earth, resulting in the subsiding of the waters. Two consecutive verbal actions by Elohim are reported, followed by the resulting state of the waters.

Key words

• va-yizkor ("and he remembered", H2142) — qal narrative verb (vav-consecutive), placing the act of remembering as the first event in the narrative sequence.
• Elohim ("God", H0430G) — masculine plural noun (grammatically plural, though functioning as the subject of a singular verb here), appearing twice, once as subject of each verb.
• va-ya'aver ("and he made to pass", H5674A) — hiphil (causative) narrative verb, indicating that God caused the wind's movement rather than the wind moving on its own.
• ruach ("wind", H7307H) — feminine singular noun, the object caused to move by God's causative action.
• va-yashoku ("they subsided", H7918) — qal narrative verb, third person plural, describing the waters as the grammatical subject of the final action.

What the text says

The verse is built on a chain of three narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — va-yizkor, va-ya'aver, va-yashoku — each advancing the story one step: remembering, causing-to-pass, subsiding. The first two share Elohim as their subject, repeated rather than left implicit, which in the Hebrew syntax reinforces that both actions (remembering and sending the wind) belong to the same agent.

The object of va-yizkor is introduced twice with the object marker 'et (H0853): first 'et-Noach ("Noah"), then ve-'et kol-ha-chayah ve-'et kol-ha-behemah ("and all the chayah ['animal', H2416C] and all the behemah ['livestock', H0929]"). Both chayah and behemah are governed by the construct noun kol ("all/every", H3605), and both are qualified by the relative clause 'asher ito ba-tevah ("which were with him in the ark"), specifying that only the creatures inside the ark are in view.

The third verb, va-yashoku, shifts the grammatical subject to ha-mayim ("the waters", H4325G), described in the plural, marking the waters as the entity undergoing change of state as a consequence of the causative action of the previous clause.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Καὶ ἐμνήσθη ὁ θεὸς τοῦ Νῶε...) expands the list of creatures beyond the Hebrew text: it adds "birds" (πετεινῶν) and "reptiles" (ἑρπετῶν) alongside "wild animals" (θηρίων) and "cattle" (κτηνῶν), where the Hebrew names only chayah and behemah. The Vulgate (cunctorumque animantium, et omnium jumentorum) follows a scope closer to the Hebrew, naming "living things" and "beasts of burden" without the added categories of the LXX. The Vulgate also renders va-ya'aver...ruach as "adduxit spiritum" ("he brought/led a wind"), which softens the causative-passage sense of the Hebrew hiphil ya'aver ("made to pass") compared to the LXX's ἐπήγαγεν ("led/brought upon").