What Does Genesis 9:7 Mean?

"And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it." The covenant speech concludes, as it began, with the mandate to multiply. The repetition within the same address, first in verse 1, again here in verse 7, with the judicial and dietary provisions bracketed between them, is deliberate emphasis. Fruitfulness, increase, and the filling of the earth are not incidental aspects of the covenant; they are its central purpose. God kept eight people alive through the flood in order that the world might be repopulated, and he returns to that mandate with a doubled insistence at the close of this covenant speech.

The judicial provisions of verses 2-6 place the multiplication mandate within an ethical framework. The earth will be filled, but it will be filled with justice operating within it. Fruitfulness without the protection of human dignity would simply recreate the conditions of the pre-flood world: a populated earth, but one given to violence and the shedding of blood. The covenant pairs the mandate to increase with the laws that protect the lives of those who will be born, a recognition that a thriving human civilization requires both population and protection.

The doubling of the mandate, "increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it", has the rhetorical force of a blessing being released rather than a command being issued. God is not demanding multiplication as a tax; he is releasing the capacity for it as a gift. The same God who preserved the seed through the flood now urges it to germinate. The emptied earth is an invitation, and the eight people who received this covenant were standing at the beginning of a process that would eventually produce every person who has ever lived since.