Creationists: Adam Named 3,500 Animal Kinds in 3 Hours and 45 Minutes

Oops! I see I mislabeled Genesis 2:19 as Genesis 2:18. (I had a senior-moment.) Sorry about that. Here it is corrected and expanded by an additional verse:

19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. — Genesis 2:19-20 (NIV)

With that correction behind us, I’ll consider some of your questions:

I may not be understanding your question well. Yes, labeling was important to the ancients—but it is also important to us today [Ask any taxonomist or a three-year-old child, both determined to name and classify everything.], and, apparently, to humans in virtually every culture we know about in every era. Rarely do humans allow something in their environment to be unlabeled for long. Humans are born communicators and we like to talk about (and write about) the things we observe in our environments. To do that, we create more and more nouns (or recycle old ones to new uses.)

Perhaps your question is focusing more on “labeling as an exercise of dominion.” Yes, in the ancient world—when dominating animals was not as simple as firing a gun, or herding with a helicopter, or catching them alive with a small animal trap ordered through Amazon—the concept of humans dominating animals was also aspirational and imbued with great pride, and certainly a favorite theme in folklore and mythology. (Consider how many ancient heroes were known for slaying or domesticating monsters and powerful beasts. For example, all but one of The Twelve Labors of Hercules involved “conquering” animals. In the Ancient Near East, heroes slayed dangerous animals of many varieties and in medieval Europe there were proud tales of dragon slayers.)

That’s a very good question. I can’t recall offhand any similar story of dominion-demonstrated-by-naming involving animals in the Ancient Near East—but I have very little background in folklore and mythology. I don’t have access to the JSTOR journal archives any more but that could be a good place to start such a search. Meanwhile, we can think of multiple examples in mythology/folklore where knowing the name of a human or animal was key to conquering them OR being conquered. Of that genre, I can only vaguely recall one from the ANE, where a goat assigned a name to himself which, if later used by the lion, would undermine his plans to eat the goat. There’s also the episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus tells Polyphemus the cyclops that his name is “Noman” so that Polyphemus 'request for help against “no man” will go unheeded. (That’s another case of power within a name.) Of course, in Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, the name/label Rumpelstilzchen must be guessed before the evil wizard will give up his claim of ownership to a child. (I’m not all that familiar with modern comic book mythology but I do know that there is a Superman villain can only be defeated by tricking him into saying his own name backwards.) Many cultures have considered the naming of a person to have a powerful influence over their life path, whether that be naming the child after a god/goddess who might thereby favor the child or, in the two thousands years of the Christian era, assigning them the name of some saint will (hopefully) cause that saint to watch over the child.

Obviously, my thoughts are rambling as I ponder your question. Clearly, your request is beyond my training and experience. A scholar of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology & Folklore could give you a much better answer.

A lot of people assume that the obvious “face value” reading is that God paraded every animal in front of Adam and he assigned species-names to each. But you and I certainly agree that the better “face value” emphasis of the pericope is just as you described it:

In my recollection, the rabbinical literature certainly favors the view that this pericope emphasizes that Adam did not recognize his MIN (“kind”) among the animals. He didn’t find a suitable mate among them because they were distinctly different in MIN, not just different individually. The story also appears to imply that other animals were paired up, mate with mate, while Adam was still unique in being alone. Thus, I would say that traditional Hebrew thought read the “face value” of the story as involving the naming of MINs (kinds) and not of individual animals (as an English Bible reading of the story might be construed.)

By the way, the Hebrew verb for the naming/calling in this pericope is YIQRA. It’s semantic domain is rather wide, much like the verb in these English examples: “He called his opponent a big chicken.”; “He called his friend ‘Lefty’ because he was left-handed.”; “He called his boss ‘Mr. Smith’.”; “He named his son, John, after his father-in-law.”; “He called his children to dinner.” Thus, “reading at face-value” is often much more challenging than we might wish.

Me too! It is indeed exasperating.

I wonder how much that naive tendency can be blamed on our monolingual society. Obviously, not everybody in America is monolingual but the USA is far more linguistically homogeneous over a vast land mass than is Europe, for example, where even in modern times one can find a very different dialect in a city just a short drive away, and an entirely different language just a few kilometers beyond that.

AN IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION

I should have more carefully worded and explained this comment, which several quoted in their own comments:

I should have used the word could instead of would, as in this rewording:

The Hebrew word 'OWPH basically means “winged creature” or “owner of a wing.” So that could include bats and dragonflies, among other diverse creatures, as well as feathered birds.

I’ve never tried concording all ancient Hebrew literature to see if dragonflies are ever mentioned, much less to see if the word 'OWPH is ever associated with them. Moreover, we must be very careful about being casually “technical” in applying “winged creature” too broadly. (In other words, we can’t go overboard in either extreme direction.) It is very difficult for us in modern times to know exactly what 'OWPH could mean in the mind of an ancient speaker of some three thousand years ago. Yes, concording the ancient literature (and consulting rabbinical commentaries) for all of the uses of 'OWPH can be very helpful in determining a word’s meanings—but we can’t do face-to-face interviews with ancient speakers of an ancient language and figure out every nuance of a word. Moreover, not every usage/meaning of every word in an ancient language has survived in the ancient documents which have been preserved for our study. (This problem is analogous to the plight of paleontologists, who will never have adequate fossil specimens for every species, or even every genus or family.)

As if that is not complicated enough, consider that language dialects and regional differences further multiply word meanings and usage. For example, in modern American English, a Coke refers to a particular brand of sweetened carbonated beverage, short for Coca-Cola™. Yet, in many areas of the American southern states, Coke/coke is a generic term for ANY carbonated soft drink, synonymous with the word soda as used in the Northeastern USA, but often called pop in the American Midwest. Thus, a thousand years from now, when no native speakers of 21st century English can be consulted, linguists at some academic conference may argue over this sentence from an ancient document: “Mary was tired after a long day and asked John for a coke.” Scholar X may claim that the beverage was a type of cola and therefore dark in color. Scholar Y disagrees and says, “No, a coke can be any color.” Even if future lexicographers discover the range of meanings for the word coke, they will have to determine if the sentence comes from a context in the southern USA—or if Mary and John were living elsewhere but both had come from the southern USA and still applied the southern sense of the word coke. [By the way, for those who will point out that the generic coke and Coke™ brandname are distinguishable by lower versus upper case, keep in mind that (1) linguists can’t always depend upon writers to apply perfect grammar, spelling, and punctuation in their writings, and (2) not all languages (especially ancient ones) have both lower-case and upper-case letters! Ancient Hebrew, for example, makes no such distinctions in its letters.]

My point in this tangent is that even though “the birds in the sky” is a very reasonable translation of the Hebrew word 'OWPH, and even though we know that 'OWPH probably included many other winged creatures within its semantic domain that we wouldn’t call “birds” today, we don’t have any ancient Hebrew speakers available for person-to-person interviews in order to discover exactly which winged creatures they considered 'OWPH. If we could go back with a time-machine, an ancient speaker might say, “Yes, a large dragonfly is an 'OWPH but a small mosquito is not, even though both creatures have similar wings.” Yet, if we could interview another native speaker, perhaps from another region of ancient Israel, they might say, “In my village we only apply 'OWPH to feathered winged creatures. The size of the creature doesn’t matter!” Who is distinguishing 'OWPH correctly? Both of those native speakers would probably be correct in their explanations—unless one was a very young child who didn’t yet have an adult’s command of the language. We often hear little children make small mistakes in their understanding of a word, and we chuckle at their misapplication. [“Jimmy, what does a yellow-light mean?” “I know! It means speed up now!”] What if a linguist who is a non-native speaker comes to a village compile a lexicon and doesn’t realize that he is interviewing a villager who learned the language as a second-language or grew up in another village where the word was used very differently? These are very real problems face by real-life lexicographers.

Ultimately, nobody today knows for certain the exact semantic range of 'OWPH in Ancient Hebrew. This is yet another reason why we must be careful about making overly exacting distinctions based on our favorite English translation—or even many of them taken together.

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You are missing the purpose of storytelling, especially when that storytelling is mythical. Of course, in an academic context, a myth is a term synonymous with “origin story” or “an explanation behind something familiar to us.” Among scholars of ancient literature, calling something a myth is not calling it false or even fictional per se. It simply regards it as an origin-or-explanation story.

That said, such a story is not about telling us that HAADAM was too dense to realize on his own that no suitable mate was to be found among the animals. It is employing a literary technique common among such genres, a way to emphasize something thematic to the tale. It is a precursor to the creation of Eve, a way to drive home to the audience just how well suited the woman is for a relationship with the Imago Dei Adam. Indeed, that is a theme throughout these chapters of Genesis, that Adam was created in the Image of God, and so only another Imago Dei creature is suitable for him. None of the animals Adam sees, even in a review of a great many animals, possess that Image of God attribute.

Arguing with such a literary genre is like trying to pick apart a classic poem or a much loved song lyric. When Juliet said “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” Should Romeo have replied: “Duh! Of course it would. Juliet, do you think I’m stupid?” (Hmm. Burt Bacharach asked, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” He wasn’t asking for directions.") Yes, various cultures use various genres and storytelling techniques to emphasize the central theme of a tale.

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Of course not. In the story, God is the dense one. Adam is just the passive judge of the animals God presents him with. I’m perfectly happy with the story not being true, of course. God didn’t actually make a bunch of animals and try them all out as Adam’s partner. Then again, God didn’t actually make Eve from Adam’s rib either. And there was no Adam anyway. How do you know where to stop when you decide that some part of Genesis is not intended literally?

@AllenWitmerMiller, thanks for your insight, I really appreciate it.