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| PentecostalTheology.com
When God began creating things he took it upon himself to name the things he had created.
KJV Genesis 1:5
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
KJV Genesis 1:8
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
But when he created the animals/birds/creatures he gave this task to the man
KJV Genesis 2:19-20
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.
20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him.
Did this point to some special connection between human beings and animals since he was the one who had named them?
Why did God give this specific task to man?
Daniel Pech
Genesis 1 reports only five things God names. It is not of everything that the account reports that God names. One five things. Not light. Not the whole Earth, but, rather, land mass as such. Not water, but, rather, Seas as such. Not the cosmic heavens, but, rather, the atmosphere. Vv. 5, 8, 10.
These five things are analogous to Woman. For, they are the five of the Earth’s own ‘feminine’ subsystems for its handling light energy for its thermal-exchange ‘engine’ that drives its water cycle. In other words, God names the kinds of particular basic parts of the Earth that allow its wealth of water to keep its biological life to thrive. No global tepid stinking swamp, this. Rather, an ever-refreshening water cycle. God names the five (or three) dynamic subsystems of the Earth that, together, drives the water cycle.
That said, Genesis 2 is a ‘highest points’ Condensed Account, not a blow-by-blow, detail-by-detail narrative. For example, it does not outright tell us that Eve breathed (v, 22b). Yet, OF COURSE she breathed.
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The inheritance of a particular language is not a foundational factor of human language agency. The foundation factors are things such as the drive and capacity to develop a language as needed. Two prime examples of this are 1) the drive and capacity to come up with names for things, and 2) the capacity to create a language from context-topic-based, two-way, informally intitiated conversational scratch.
Of course, it is normal for a human population to possess and employ a fully developed language. But the foundational way in which any such a language is possessed TO BEGIN WITH is by factors such as 1) and 2).
Adam and God, and, in her turn, Eve and God, most naturally and easily could, under five combined hours, have developed the first human language from factors such as these. God simply can have initiated this by indicating to either of them some life-critical function or object of the Earth and named it in their hearing, so that they would have replied in kind by indicating and naming some basic related thing. And so on.
If we had had all of these principles in the fore of our minds the first time we had begun to read through Genesis 2:7+, it would have allowed us to PREDICT the one peculiar bit of information in v. 19b: that God wanted ‘to see’ what names Adam would call the animals. For, there is NOTHING in ALL of Scripture that would compel us to conclude that God must have outright told Adam, even commanded him, to come up with names from the animals (‘commanded’, says Morris, page 20, second-to-bottom line).
In fact, Adam’s act of coming up with names for these animal kinds is a prime example of Adam’s drive and capacity to DEVELOP a language from a naming-based conversational scratch.
And, it would be only humanly normal to assume that Genesis 2:7-15 implies that God and Adam walked to the garden, so that there was actual time and travel involved, and by which the two could have conversed about the basics of Divine Design in Nature.
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Of course, Scripture does not outright indicate that God and Adam had any two-way conversation during that time and travel. Nor does to outright inform us that their mode of travel was the normal human mode involving time and walking. Nevertheless, both God and Adam were genuine language agents. And God normally would have ‘come down’ into Adam’s humanly normal realm, not remaining ‘immaterially’ aloof and insensible to him. So, the wider passage implies that God is a genuinely relational being, whose characteristic way of interacting with His unfallen living creatures is that according to how He designed them normally to function. So, He would not have had a command-and-control, and otherwise aloof, relation to Adam. He did not, for example, command Adam to walk. Rather, he let Adam intiate his own walking actions.
Therefore, it seems only right to assume that God and Adam had a two-way conversation while they were traveling to the garden. Indeed, despite that the text does not outright indicate their manner of travel, there is nothing normal about presuming that the manner was that of God picking Adam up bodily, like an inanimate plastic Ken doll, and placing him down into the garden.
God, in His pure transcendence, is timeless and ‘immaterial’. But God’s transcendence is not that according the hard dichotomy of Deism. That dichotomy presumes to philosophically treat the material world as more real than God’s being, rendering God as an ineffective ‘nothing’ in relation to that world. But the Biblical Creator is not precluded a materially sensible interaction with His creatures. Indeed, a plain, humanly normal reading of Genesis 2:7-23 finds that Adam actually heard God speak, likely in the sense in which God was, at some later events, manifest in angelic, human-like form (ex: Genesis 18:1-33).
So, it seems only right to assume that Genesis 2:7-23 presupposes that things for Adam obtained in all the self-evidently good, and foundationally humanly normal, functions and conditions. Not only elbows, hair on his head, and water-based biological functions, both chemically and macromechanically; but ALSO, a genuine, and active, agency of language.
So, if the Genesis 2:7+ passage intended anything to the contrary of the humanly foundationally normal, we would expect it to provide explicit information to that effect. For, it surely easily could have said, say, that God was glowering down at him to cause him to be too afraid to speak during that initial time and travel. Or, it could have said that God had, at the outset, commanded him not to speak. Or, it could have said that Adam, during all that time prior to God supposedly commanding him to name the animals, was too drowsy even to think of speaking.
In other words, whatever we may be pleased to suppose was the non-normal case for Adam’s initial relation to his own language agency, the passage could have told us. It does not.
And, this kind of ‘silence’ is even more obvious regarding the portion that tells of God’s time exclusively with the living Eve (v. 22b). For, that portion does even outright inform us so much as that she breathed. But, of course, she breathed.
And, the same applies for her speaking, and for her having a meaningful two-way conversation with God. Further, the reader ought to assume nothing short of the following set of ideas as that on which God and Eve had conversed while walking to the garden.
1. The general, ‘masculine’ cosmos and the special, ‘feminine’ Earth (Gen 1:1);
2. The Earth, as its own general subject, and its special kind of material wealth: its abiding maximal abundance of open liquid water (v. 2);
3. That water, in general, and its cycling (the water cycle, vs. 3-10);
4. The water cycle, in general, and its beneficiaries: biological life (vs. 11-12);
5. Biological life, in general, and its special category, animal biology (vs. 20-25);
6. Animals, in general, and its special category, humans (vs. 26-29);
7. The general human and the special…woman (Genesis 2:7-25).