Why does Exodus 1 say Israel “was fruitful and multiplied”?

The phrase itself is ancient. God said it at the very beginning: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). He renewed it after the flood: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 9:1, 7). He promised it to Jacob at Bethel: “A nation and a company of nations shall come from you” (Genesis 35:11).

Every prior use had been a command or a promise. Then comes Exodus 1:7, and the tense changes. The narrative verbs shift into the past: they were fruitful, they multiplied. Promise becomes fact.

And the narrator does not stop at two verbs. He stacks five:

ובני ישראל פרו וישרצו וירבו ויעצמו במאד מאד ותמלא הארץ אתם

uvnei Yisra’el paru vayyishretzu vayyirbu vayya’atzmu bime’od me’od vattimmale ha’aretz otam

“And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew mighty, exceedingly exceedingly, and the land was filled with them.” — Exodus 1:7

The first verb, פָרָה (parah, H6509, “be fruitful”) and the third, רָבָה (rabah, H7235, “multiply”), are the paired words of Genesis 1:28 — the creation command. The fifth verb, מָלֵא (male, H4390, “fill”), answers the third imperative of that same command: “fill the earth.”

But the second verb is the surprising one. שָרַץ (sharats, H8317) means “swarm” or “teem” — and it is the verb the narrator used on Day Five of creation for the fish and birds: “let the waters swarm with living creatures” (Genesis 1:20–21). It is the word for life proliferating beyond counting. To say Israel swarmed is to read Israel as a living fulfilment of the creation command, multiplying in Egypt the way the creatures multiplied at the world’s beginning.

The combination of all four key words — parah + sharats + rabah + male — occurs in exactly one verse in the entire Bible. That verse is Exodus 1:7.

This is not an accident, and the narrator signals it with the adverb: בִמְאד מְאד (me’od me’od, “exceedingly exceedingly”). Genesis 47:27 had already said Israel multiplied מְאד מאד (me’od, once). Exodus 1:7 doubles the adverb. The fulfilment exceeds the baseline, which itself exceeded the promise.

The New Testament recognizes the same moment. Stephen, speaking from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, summarizes it as: “the people grew and multiplied in Egypt” (Acts 7:17). The Greek form drops the swarm-verb, but the point is the same — the multiplication in Egypt is the keeping of the promise to Abraham.

The prophets return to the same pair to describe restoration from later exiles. Jeremiah promises a gathered remnant: “they shall be fruitful and multiply” (Jeremiah 23:3 — the same H6509 and H7235). Ezekiel echoes it over the mountains of Israel: “I will multiply on you both man and beast, and they shall increase and be fruitful” (Ezekiel 36:11). Egypt is the prototype. Creation mandate fulfilled in exile is how God works.

Which made what came next — Pharaoh’s dread, and his plan to undo it — a direct assault on the creational purpose of God.

For the full argument, including how the swarm-verb tracks from creation through the frog plague to Ezekiel’s eschatological river, see The Midwives Feared God.