You wrote:
“Good teachers that I trust because their own history of rightly dividing the word - by not the church - as well as my own reading, has led me to disagree with your interpretation. For one thing, you equate the Lord’s blessing with His command to the animals.”
The word is an imperative. Imperatives are commands. End of story. No good teacher would tell you an imperative is NOT a command. Only someone who wanted you to be ignorant of the truth would tell you that.
You can’t rightly divide the word by ignoring what it actually says. I like how the Stone Edition of The Chumash puts it, “Later (v.28), with relation to Man, it was also a commandment that he engage in procreation.” (page 7).
The Word explicitly reports that the Lord “blessed” them.
The rest is disputing over the form of a verb rather than the verb, itself.
It is a sad shame to call “ignorant”.