From the blog author’s commentary, it sounds like they chose to translate “ocheia” as “covering,” as an alternative to the more common translation “pollination.

From the blog author’s commentary, it sounds like they chose to translate “ocheia” as “covering,” as an alternative to the more common translation “pollination.” The blog author worries that even that choice might incorrectly imply that the original writer spoke from a theory of sexual reproduction. The specifics of that idea didn’t come along until much later [0], while of course people have bred animals and plants for much longer [2] based on the simpler theory of “when a mommy cow and a daddy cow love each other very much, the baby looks like them.” Even today I think of “covering” in an agricultural context as a euphemism for “making the boy thing mount the girl thing so the babies we want turn up on schedule.” Whether they want to or not, if you’re the kind of person who thinks that matters for animals. Kind of an icky business, really, the first time you stop and think about it. But in any case, the translator seems to have chosen this very specific sense of the word. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531... if you’re curious [1] Of course hand-pollination still happens on an industrial scale, for example with vanilla - and more parochially amongst orchid enthusiasts, e.g. https://www.aos.org/orchids/additional-resources/pollinating-the-vanilla-flower.aspx https://www.aos.org/orchids/additional-resources/pollinating... [2] Recall that modern corn is so heavily selectively-bred from its wild ancestor teosinte, over so many millennia, that it can barely pollinate itself without human intervention! https://nebraskacorn.gov/cornstalk/research/history-of-corn-from-ancient-grain-to-modern-maize/ https://nebraskacorn.gov/cornstalk/research/history-of-corn-...