All the paragraphs above start with “and”. As the most famous and widely read scripture, the Bible should possess the feature of musicality and especially rhythmicity, which is the basic and most obvious function of the frequent use of “and” in Genesis syntactically.

The anaphora used in Genesis 1 encourages the readers to form the inner logic of the Scripture and it inspires our hypotactic habits of mind – the desire to rank, order, build carefully from evidence to conclusion. With this simple, temporal, natural relationship of these sentences. It describes how God create the world form the light to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the earth (KJV Bible). The translator steered away from over interpretation of the scripture and the contrived, patterned, self-conscious style, the scripture can carry, an allegorical meaning of its own.

2.2 Function of “and” in the middle of one sentence.

The repeated use of “and” is an occasion of polysyndetic style that features a close succession of connections. Chronicle history provides the most obvious example of a polysyndetic style: first A happened and then B and then C, and so on. Genesis is a typical scripture of chronicle polysyndeton (The Oxford 

 Dictionary of English,2010). Polysyndeton is used extensively in the King James Version of the Bible, where “and” is used as a literal translation of the Hebrew waw-consecutive and the Ancient Greek particle. For example,

And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark (Genesis 7:22–24).

And Joshua, and all of Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had (Joshua 7:24).

Considering the syntactic style, the “and-then” pattern, though seemingly a monotonous structural repetition, adds to the musicality of the scripture. In reading, they can be converted to pauses or rests, and punctuations and suspense. The polysyndetic pattern, simple as it is, in skilled hands turns into a performative advantage, a discretionary opportunity to slow down the narrative or speed it up, to color it with intonation or pregnant pause. The connectors “and”, “then” often work in a polysyndetic style as much rhythmically as syntactically, telling the voice where to rise or fall, hurry up, or slow down (Lanham, 1988).

There are two different kinds of conjunctions in English. One links coordinators such as “and”, “but”, “or”, etc. and the others link subordinators such as “because”, “though”, etc. Coordinating conjunctions connect the sentences which have relative meaning and same syntactic styles. However, “and” has usually been classified to the other conjunctions with the unique features. “and” is the most special one in all the coordinating conjunctions. The sentences always have more than one semantic meaning and syntactic style when they are connected by ‘and”. “and” has the function of meaning extension, while ‘or’ carries the meaning of choice, and ‘but’ carries the meaning of turning point.

“‘And’ is the most important conjunction for meaning extension, including positive and negative meanings. The basic function of ‘and’ as a conjunction is the addition of the meaning”(Yang, 2005). For example,