"Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It": The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (review)

146 SHOFAR viewing survivors as a homogeneous group of irreparably damaged individuals. Norman Solkoff Department of Psychiatry State University of New York at Buffalo "Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It": The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text, by Jeremy Cohen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. 375 pp. $44.95. This book deals with Genesis 1:28, the blessing offertility and dominion conferred upon humankind in the Garden of Eden, and the history of its interpretation in the Jewish and Christian traditions from ancient times until the Protestant Reformation. The author, Jeremy Cohen, first became interested in the subject in the early 1970s when many ideologues of the ecology movement blamed the Judeo-Christian tradition, and this verse in particular, for giving human beings license to exploit the environment for their own benefit without regard for the consequences (see Tikkun 5:2 [March/April, 1990]: 74-77). The results of Cohen's investigation into the validity of this claim are laid out in this book. Cohen has left no stone unturned in his quest for references to our verse in Jewish and Christian sources. After a thorough discussion of the verse in its biblical context, Cohen discusses its use in the intertestamental and midrashic literatures, the halakhic tradition, and the exegetical and kabbalistic literature of the Middle Ages. He then turns to Christian literature, examining the patristic exegetical tradition, especially that of Augustine and his successors. In the last chapter he examines the relationship between Gen. 1:28 and the law of nature in a variety of sources including canon law, Jean de Meun's Roman de La Rose, and Chaucer's Canterbury TaLes. Very few scholars of Cohen's generation are equipped with the linguistic tools to undertake such a thorough and comprehensive study of two distinct yet interrelated religious traditions, and he has carried it out with commendable thoroughness and competence. This work is a scholarly achievement of rare quality which sets a standard of the highest level. Not onlydoes Cohen summarize the work of scholars in a dizzying array of disciplines, but he engages them on a variety of scholarly issues touching on his topic after a careful and judicious evaluation of the sources. Not content to rely on translations or printed sources, he has consulted the original Hebrew and Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 147 Latin works and in many cases gone back to the manuscript sources themselves. One of the most interesting findings of Cohen's investigation is that much less attention was paid to the second half of Gen. 1:28 than to the first. The blessing of fertility was apparently far more problematic than the conferral of dominion, and the latter was rarely if ever understood as giving man license to exploit nature solely for his benefit. He concludes that the blessing of fertility was consistently understood in a covenantal context as part of God's commitment to humankind, whose duty it was to civilize and inhabit the world. This duty was expounded upon by the Rabbis, who conceived of the blessing "Be fertile and increase" as a commandment (incumbent on men only!) and worked out all the details as to how, where, and when this commandment should be fulfilled. Indeed, the commandment, whose biblical foundation was very weak, came to be regarded as halakhah le-Mosheh miSinai , or an ancient oral tradition of Mosaic origin. In the literature of the kabbalah, especially the Zohar, the reproductive act took on cosmic significance, facilitating the integration and conjunction of the sefirot in the divine realm and perfecting the covenant between God and his creatures. The Christian tradition, owing to the value it ascribed to celibacy and sexual abstinence, was much more ambivalent as to the virtue of sexual reproduction and the advisability of being sexually active throughout one's life. While recognizing the value of the blessing of fertility for the first inhabitants of the earth, many felt that now that the earth was sufficiently populated, it was no longer necessary for everyone to be sexually active, and a life of abstinence was to be valued more highly than the married life. However, mainly thanks to the...