Naming the animals: all in a day’s work for Adam
Could Adam have named all the animals in one day?
Genesis 1:24–27 states that God made the land animals, as well as the first man and woman, on
Naming the animals: all in a day’s work for Adam
Could Adam have named all the animals in one day?
Genesis 1:24–27 states that God made the land animals, as well as the first man and woman, on Day Six of Creation Week. Genesis 2:18–23 tells us that Adam named the animals before Eve was created. So how could Adam have named all the animals in one day?
The time factor
Day Six of Creation Week began at evening (Genesis 1:31), and so consisted of about 12 hours of darkness followed by about 12 hours of daylight. There is no reason why God could not have made the land animals, and Adam too, during the darkness period of Day Six, so that at first light there they all were!
If, however, God used the daylight period, there is no reason to suppose that His creative acts in making the animals and Adam took any longer than the instant for Him to command these events to happen.1 So either way it need not have taken any time at all beyond first light on Day Six for all the land animals and Adam to have come into existence.
Adam therefore had most of the daylight hours of Day Six in which to complete his task. Note that this task did not include his searching out the animal, because Genesis 2:19 tells us that God ‘brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them’. Presumably this was in some sort of reasonably orderly procession.
Naming the animals
The following points need to be noted:
1. Genesis chapter 1 says that the animals were created according to their kinds, rather than according to their species—the phrase ‘after his/their kind’ occurs 10 times in this chapter (referring to both plants and animals). Exactly what the term ‘kind’ (Hebrew min) corresponds to in terms of the modern Linnaean classification system is not clear, but it appears that sometimes the min corresponds to today’s species, sometimes to the genus, and sometimes to the family. It indicates the limitations of variation. What is clear is that numerically there must have been fewer kinds in Adam’s day than the number of species we count today. [Ed. note: for more information, see Ligers and wholphins? What next?]
For example, it is more than likely that there would have been no domestic dogs, coyotes, and wolves as such, but rather one ancestral kind containing the genetic information for all of these to appear under natural selection pressures.
This is not evolution, because no new information is added. In the same way, the mongrel dog population of a few hundred years back was able to give rise (under human selection) to the various modern breeds of dog—because the information was already there in that population, much more than in today’s specialized, genetically depleted breeds. That’s why you can’t start with a chihuahua population, and expect that breeding/selection will eventually produce Great Danes.
2. Today we divide the animals into those we call tame (mostly herbivores), and those we call wild (both herbivores and carnivores), but this distinction did not apply before Adam sinned.
Genesis 1:30 says, ‘And to every beast … I have given every green herb for food’, and Genesis 1:31, ‘And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.’ From these we conclude that animals did not kill each other for food pre-Fall, and they had no reason to fear man.
This means that we can regard them all as being tame at the time Adam named them. It also means that they would not have eaten each other, while taking part in any naming procession!
The animals which Adam named are specifically described in Genesis 2:20. They were the ‘cattle’, ‘the fowl of the air’ (birds), and ‘every beast of the field’. This classification has no correlation with today’s arbitrary system of man-made taxonomy (amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects), but is a more natural system based on the relation of the animals to man’s interests.
If we compare this naming list with the creation list in Genesis 1:20–25—birds and sea creatures (created on Day Five), beasts of the earth, cattle, creeping things—we see there are several very significant differences.2 Adam was not required to name any of the sea creatures, or any of the creeping things. And as the beasts of the field were not specifically mentioned in the creation list, we can regard them as being a subdivision of the beasts of the earth. That is, Adam was required to name only some of the total land animal population of his own day.
There is no suggestion that the naming was meant to be comprehensive. From this it follows that Adam’s task was not to provide a scientific taxonomy, but a set of general names of a selection of the animals, for the benefit of average human beings who would come after him.
So what animals were named?
1. The cattle (Hebrew: behemah)
The Hebrew term used here usually refers to animals which lend themselves to domestication—what we might call ‘domestic fauna’. Though no creatures were ‘wild’ i