to be fruitful: to bring forth offspring or produce in abundance
This is a farming word at heart. It pictures a vine or a tree loaded with fruit, and the Bible reaches for that image again and again to describe living things that flourish and make more life.
Its most famous use turns the picture toward people. In the opening chapters of Genesis God tells the creatures, and then the first humans, to be fruitful, and the word becomes shorthand for a household or a nation that grows large and strong. What a vine does with grapes, a people does with children.
Hebrew can also turn the verb around so that it means to make someone else fruitful, and almost every time the Bible uses it that way the one doing the making is God, promising to grow a single family into a nation. That is the language of the promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, where fruitfulness is a gift rather than an achievement. Joseph gives his second son a name built on this very word because God had made him fruitful in the land of his suffering (Genesis 41:52). The one place that breaks the pattern is a line in Hosea, where the same shape of the verb describes Ephraim himself flourishing rather than anyone making him so.
Because one word covers both a fruit tree and a growing family, it holds together two ideas English usually keeps apart. Its place among the words it stands beside is easiest to see side by side, with this word as the branch at the end of the season, bent under what it has grown:
- Its constant partner, to multiply (רָבָה), counts the result, a group becoming many, while this word names the producing itself.
- To sprout (צָמַח) is the plant first breaking through the soil, before there is anything to pick.
- To blossom (פָּרַח) is the bud opening into flower, the display that comes before any harvest.
- To yield (נוּב) is the produce a plant finally delivers, the nearest thing this word has to a true match.
Nuances
Whether the opening phrase of Genesis 49:22, בֵּן פֹּרָת יוֹסֵף, contains this verb at all. The traditional analysis takes פֹּרָת as a feminine form of פרה, "fruitful (bough, vine)," while an alternative redivides and revocalizes the consonants to פֶּרֶא, "wild ass," in keeping with the animal figures applied to Joseph's brothers throughout the chapter.
- majorityפֹּרָת belongs to the root פרה, so Joseph is a fruitful bough or vine beside a spring; the critical lexica file the form under this root, and the morphological tagging of the corpus follows them.; BDB, s.v. פֹּרָת; HALOT, s.v. פרה; DCH, s.v. פרה
- minorityThe phrase should be read as "wild ass" (פֶּרֶא), matching the animal imagery used of the other brothers in Genesis 49, in which case this verse is not an occurrence of the verb פרה at all.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964)