Begin Again

Noah's Blessing to be Fruitful and Multiply

God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth.” (Genesis 9:1)

Jacob was incensed at Rachel, and said, “Can I take the place of God, who has denied you fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:2)

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good…(Genesis 1:11-12)

When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the soil. (Genesis 4:3)

God blesses Adam and Eve with the blessing to be fruitful and multiply (pru u’rvu). Why then, does God bless Noah and his sons, again, with this same blessing? Is it not redundant?

The command to be fruitful, pru, shares a root with the word fruit (pri) that is a leitmotif in the Creation story as a whole. God creates a vegetative world that offers fruit good for eating, but God also forbids Adam and Eve from eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and exiles them from the Garden of Eden, lest they eat from the fruit of the tree of life. The text makes an associative parallel between the metaphoric fruitfulness of humanity via reproduction and the literal fruits of the garden. The first sacrifice mentioned in the Torah is Cain’s “fruit of the earth” offering.

God signals to Noah that He’s not just saving Noah, but the future of humanity; by blessing them with fruitfulness, God is saying He wants humanity to continue. Fruits begin as seeds; you don’t see them come to fruition right away. Thus, the instruction in fruitfulness is one of patience and preparation, of investment, of care for the future; it is a command to be minded to the long-term, to regard the world as a function of time and duration, not instant gratification. The path to a better world is cultivated over generations.

The repetition of the blessing is not redundant but restorative. After the flood has destroyed nearly all life, Noah emerges into a world that is both familiar and transformed. The blessing he received through Adam has been, in a sense, washed away. God must re-establish the covenant of life itself.

This renewed blessing carries a subtle but significant difference. To Adam and Eve, God says “fill the earth and master it; and rule” over all living creatures. To Noah, God says simply “Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth,” followed not by dominion but by the statement that “the fear and dread of you shall be upon all the beasts” (Genesis 9:2). The relationship between humanity and creation has been fundamentally altered. Where once there was harmony and stewardship, now there is fear. The blessing must be renewed because the world Noah inherits is not the world Adam knew.

Rashi notes the sexual impropriety of the flood generation, which involved bestiality and the blurring of boundaries via cross-breeding that God established in creation. As Rashi comments on Genesis 6:12: “Even cattle, beasts, and fowl would mate with those who were not of their own species.” God reminds humanity to direct itself toward fruitfulness via partnership rather than self-gratification via violence (Hamas). The blessing of pru u’rvu serves as the corrective to the corruption and violence that precipitated the flood.

Being fruitful and multiplying serves as a foil to eating the forbidden fruit. In the latter, you’re looking to find knowledge outside yourself, via a kind of drug or simulation. In the former, within the context of a real relationship. The connection is even more direct because the text says Adam “knew” his wife (Genesis 4:1). This knowing is distinct from the knowledge of good and bad. Martin Buber would offer this distinction: one is relational knowledge, the other objective knowledge. God does not bless humanity with knowledge—knowledge is taken. Rather, God blesses humanity with partnership and knowledge of the Other. That is because, it is the latter, not the former, which is the fundamental condition of human flourishing and continuity.

The forbidden fruit promised to make Adam and Eve “like God, knowing good and bad” (Genesis 3:5)—a knowledge grasped from without, taken rather than given. But the knowledge that comes through procreation, through the intimacy captured in the verb yada, is a different kind of knowing entirely. It’s embodied, relational, creative rather than extractive. When Adam “knows” Eve, the result is not shame and exile but life itself, however complicated that life becomes.

This suggests that the blessing to be fruitful is, in part, an invitation to a different epistemology. Don’t seek to become like God by consuming what’s forbidden; become partners with God by creating what God invites you to create. The fruit you’re meant to produce is not plucked from a tree but born from your own being.

After the flood, Noah needs to relearn this lesson. He has witnessed the end of the world, seen the consequences of a humanity that pursued every desire without boundary. The renewed blessing reminds him: there is a way forward, and it lies in the creative, generative act of building a future.

The blessing to be fruitful and multiply also provides a foil to the transgression of the Tower of Babel Builders who seek immortality in building the inanimate world up rather than in preserving life and humanity as expressed by pro-creation. This same theme recurs again in the beginning of Exodus, where Pharaoh combines an anti-natalist policy with an emphasis on hard labor. Viewed through the lens of short term optimization, having kids is a distraction from building the pyramids.

Noah’s blessing is not simply objective; it’s psychological. Noah needs to hear it.

Imagine Noah’s state of mind. He has watched the world drown. He has heard, perhaps, the cries of those left outside the ark. He has spent nearly a year in a floating box with his family and a menagerie of animals, waiting for the waters to recede. He beholds a scene of cosmic wreckage.

In this moment, God effectively tells Noah, you have work to do. The world needs you to believe in the future enough to re-create it.

The trauma of the flood could easily have left Noah paralyzed, unable to imagine bringing children into a world he’d seen destroyed. Noah needs permission to hope again, and the blessing provides it.

The original blessing to Adam was given in a world of abundance. Noah receives his blessing in a diminished world, one where human life will be harder, marked by toil and fear. The restatement acknowledges this new reality while insisting that the mission remains. Even in a broken world—perhaps especially in a broken world—we are called to create life. The blessing of new life is a blessing, irrespective of the state of the world.

We might also note what comes immediately after the blessing to Noah: God permits humans to eat meat (Genesis 9:3), something not mentioned in the original Eden. The boundaries have shifted. What was once forbidden is now allowed, but within limits—the blood must be drained, and murder is absolutely prohibited. The blessing of fruitfulness exists now in tension with the permission to take life for sustenance. Noah must navigate a more morally complex world than Adam did. But ironically it was the morally simple world that led to corruption.

Noah’s blessing teaches us that in every generation, and perhaps especially in our own, the choice to create life, to invest in the future, to know and be known by another, is an act of restoring faith in the world.