Naming of the animals
Ge 2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought [them] unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that [was] the name thereof.
Adam records that God brought all the animals to him to name. [1]
Archeologists [2] found clay tablets which suggest that the phrase "these are the generations of" is actually an author's signature on a clay tablet. The first instance of this after Adam naming the animals is here:
- Ge 5:1 ¶ This [is] the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
This suggests that Adam recorded the event. [3] It is exciting to consider that Genesis was written by eyewitnesses to the events rather than being generated by oral tradition and not recorded until Moses. The tablets would have been passed from father to son, surviving the flood, and the scrambling of languages at Babel, all the way to Jacob who carried them into Egypt and handed them to Joseph. Joseph would have put them in the great library of Pharaoh, where they got transcribed onto papyrus; retaining the signature lines of the authors as the tablets were copied end to end. Later Moses, raised in Pharaoh's home would have had access to them, and likely carried a papyrus copy to the desert with him.
Adam records that he named the animals. What can we learn from this? Adam had language, it was Hebrew. God spoke to Adam in Hebrew. The words in Hebrew had intrinsic meaing. He called them by their 'reputation'. In Hebrew 'reputation' and 'name' are the same word. How could he have made a name which has no intrinsic meaning and assigned it to an animal saying that the word represents the animal's behavior? Being called a Christian does not make you one unless you also have the reputation of Christ. Adam called them by their reputations. This took more than a day to observe them and come up with a name. Fortunately he was likely in a state of timelessness. Oh I know there were six days of creation and one of rest. But read Genesis 2:4 carefully.
- Ge 2:4 ¶ These [are] the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,
God created the heavens and the earth in a day and all seven days were in one day. This is only possible if there was no time.
Adam observed the darting fish and called him dag דג which in Hebrew, by the letters means 'commanded ד to pursue ג. He observed the massive sides of an ox and called him showr שׁור which also means 'wall' [4]
Being able to interpret the names of the animals is just one proof of the metaphoric meaning assigned to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. [5]- ↑ Ge 2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought [them] unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that [was] the name thereof.
- ↑ "Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis", P.J. Wiseman, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985.
- ↑ Wiseman
- ↑ 07794 ref. 07792
- ↑ They are validated by the strokes, by the order of the letters in the alphabet which is a message of Christ, and by demonstrating that all words derive their meaning from their metaphor.