to bring something under control by force; to tread down, subdue.
The picture behind this word is a foot pressed down on something to hold it in place. From that one physical image, treading down or pressing underfoot, the word reaches out to every kind of forced control: conquering land, subjugating nations, enslaving people, and even violating a woman.
What makes the word striking is that its harshness is fixed but its rightness is not. The force is always there; whether the force is good or evil depends entirely on what is being pressed down. The Bible's own pattern is consistent:
- when the thing subdued is a fellow human being, the word is condemned (re-enslaving freed servants, seizing sons and daughters as slaves, forcing the queen);
- when the thing subdued is rightly opposed, the word is approved (enemy nations in war, and God himself trampling his people's sins underfoot);
- and in one unique place the thing subdued is the earth itself.
That one place is the opening blessing over the first human pair, spoken before anything has gone wrong and while people are given only plants to eat. There the word stands beside a gentler word for ruling (רָדָה), and readers have argued for centuries over how hard to press it.
Nuances
How forcefully to read the command to "subdue" the earth in Genesis 1:28, and whether it grants humanity a licence to exploit nature.
- majorityIt commissions humanity to occupy and cultivate the earth as God's responsible representatives, not to exploit it; the exploitative reading is a modern, post-biblical imposition rather than the text's own sense.; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (1989); James Barr, "Man and Nature: The Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 55 (1972); Jeremy Cohen, "Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It": The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Cornell UP, 1989); Norbert Lohfink, "'Subdue the Earth?' (Genesis 1:28)," in Theology of the Pentateuch (1994); J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (2005); Richard Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (2010)
- minorityThe verb keeps its inherently forceful edge here: humanity must bring a resistant earth under control by hard effort, softened only by the setting before the fall and by human accountability to God.; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, WBC 1 (1987); Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, NICOT (1990)
- minorityThe verb carries a genuinely domineering, human-centered force that the text does not restrain, and the command does stand behind later exploitation of nature.; Norman C. Habel, "Playing God or Playing Earth? An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1:26-28" (2006); Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (1967)