Bible Strands
Genesis 1:9
And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered into one place, so that the dry land may appear.” And it was so.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — God speaks alone; no addressee is named. This is the third day, immediately after the sky is named (v. 8) and before the land and seas receive their names (v. 10).
The words — יִקָּוּ (yiqaṿû, Hiphil jussive of קוה) carries the command: "let them be gathered," a causative voice that makes the waters the object of an act rather than the agent of their own motion. מָקוֹם (maḳôm) is singular and indefinite — "a place," not "their place" or "many places" — the waters are funneled into one undetermined location.
The thread — The pairing of sea and dry land as a created unit recurs in Jonah 1:9, Psalms 95:5, and 2 Peter 3:5, each treating the two as the defining pair of the inhabited world.
Why it lands — The verse presents the world as shaped by a speaker's word into a boundary, not as a process that arrived on its own. It asks the reader to accept that the distinction between land and sea is an act of direction, not a default state of matter.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Cross-references
- 2 Peter 3:5 But they deliberately overlook the fact that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water,
- Jonah 1:9 “I am a Hebrew,” replied Jonah. “I worship the LORD, the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land.”
- Psalms 95:5 The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land.
- Jeremiah 5:22 Do you not fear Me?” declares the LORD. “Do you not tremble before Me, the One who set the sand as the boundary for the sea, an enduring barrier it cannot cross? The waves surge, but they cannot prevail. They roar but cannot cross it.
- Psalms 33:7 He piles up the waters of the sea; He puts the depths into storehouses.
- Proverbs 8:28 when He established the clouds above, when the fountains of the deep gushed forth,
- Ecclesiastes 1:7 All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full; to the place from which the streams come, there again they flow.
- Job 26:10 He has inscribed a horizon on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.
- Psalms 104:5 He set the earth on its foundations, never to be moved.
- Job 38:8 Who enclosed the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb,