Genesis 1:24

And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,.... All sorts of living creatures that live and move upon the earth; not that the earth was endued with a power to produce

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.

1. Those living creatures hereafter mentioned, whose original is from the earth, and whose habitation is in it. 2. Those tame beasts which are most familiar with and useful to men for food, clothing, or other service. 3. Creeping thing; to wit, of the earth, of a differing kind from those creeping things of the water, . 4. The wild beast, as the Hebrew word commonly signifies, and as appears further, because they are distinguished from the tame beasts, here called cattle.

Genesis 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.Ver. 24, 25. Let the earth, &c.] Lo here the earth, in itself a dead element, brings forth, at God’ s command, living creatures, tame, wild, and creeping. "Why then should it be thought a thing incredible," that the same earth, at God’ s command, should bring forth again our dead bodies restored to life, at the last day? Surely if that speech of Christ, "Lazarus, Come forth," had been directed to all the dead, they had all presently risen. If he speak to the rocks, they rend; if to the mountains, they melt; if to the earth, it opens; if to the sea, it yields up her dead; if to the whole host of heaven, they tremble and stand amazed, waiting his pleasure. And shall he not prevail by his mighty power, the same that he put forth in the raising of his Son Christ, to raise us from the death of sin; and of carnal, to make us a people created again? Doth he not "plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, that he may say to Zion, Thou art my people?" "Empty man would be wise," saith Zophar, "though man be born like a wild ass-colt." Man’ s heart is a mere emptiness, a very Tohu vabohu, as void of matter to make him a new creature of, as the hollow of a tree is of heart of oak. God, therefore, creates in his people clean hearts. And, as in the first creation, so in the new creature, the first day, as it were, God works light of knowledge; the second day, the firmament of faith; the third day seas and trees, that is, repentant tears, and worthy fruits; the fourth day, the sun, joining light and heat together, heat of zeal with light of knowledge; the fifth day, fishes to play, and fowls to fly, so to live and rejoice in a sea of troubles, and fly heavenward by prayer and contemplation; the sixth day God makes beasts and man, yea, of a wild ass-colt, a man in Christ, with whom "old things are past, all things are become new," and to whom, besides that they are all taught of God the very beasts and birds do read a divinity lecture. "Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, and the fowls of the air, they shall tell thee". The whole world is nothing else, saith one, but "God expressed," so that we cannot plead ignorance; for all are, or may be, book-learned in the creature. This is the shepherd’ s calendar, the ploughman’ s alphabet; we may run and read in this great book, which hath three leaves - heaven, earth, sea. "A brutish man knoweth not, neither doth a fool understand this".

(24) Let the earth bring forth.—Neither this, nor the corresponding phrase in Genesis 1:20, necessarily imply spontaneous generation, though such is its literal meaning. It need mean no more than that land animals, produced on the dry ground, were now to follow upon those produced in the waters. However produced, we believe that the sole active power was the creative will of God, but of His modus operandi we know nothing. On this sixth creative day there are four words of power. By the first, the higher animals are summoned into being; by the second, man; the third provides for the continuance and increase of the beings which God had created; the fourth assigns the vegetable world both to man and animals as food. The creation of man is thus made a distinct act; for though created on the sixth day, because he is a land animal, yet it is in the latter part of the day, and after a pause of contemplation and counsel. The reason for this, we venture to affirm, is that in man’s creation we have a far greater advance in the work of the Almighty than at any previous stage. For up to this time all has been law, and the highest point reached was instinct; we have now freedom, reason, intellect, speech. The evolutionist may give us many an interesting theory about the upgrowth of man’s physical nature, but the introduction of this moral and mental freedom places as wide a chasm in his way as the first introduction of vegetable, and then of animal life. The living creature, or rather, the creature that lives by breathing, is divided into three classes. The first is “behêmâh,” cattle: literally, the dumb brute, but especially used of the larger ruminants, which were soon domesticated, and became man’s speechless servants. Next comes the “creeping thing,” or rather, moving thing, from a verb translated moveth in Genesis 1:21. It probably signifies the whole multitude of small animals, and not reptiles particularly. For strictly the word refers rather to their number than to their means of locomotion, and means a swarm. The third class is the “beast of the earth,” the wild animals that roam over a large extent of country, including the carnivora. But as a vegetable diet is expressly assigned in Genesis 1:30 to the “beast of the earth,” while the evidence of the rocks proves that even on the fifth day the saurians fed upon fish and upon one another, the record seems to point out a closer relation between man and the graminivora than with these fierce denizens of the forest. The narrative of the flood proves conclusively that there were no carnivora in the ark; and immediately afterwards beasts that kill men were ordered to be destroyed (Genesis 9:5-6). It is plain that from the first these beasts lay outside the covenant.

Verse 24. Let the earth bring forth the living creature, c.] נפש חיה nephesh chaiyah a general term to express all creatures endued with animal life, in any of its infinitely varied gradations, from the half-reasoning elephant down to the stupid potto, or lower still, to the polype, which seems equally to share the vegetable and animal life. The word חיתו chaitho, in the latter part of the verse, seems to signify all wild animals, as lions, tigers, c., and especially such as are carnivorous, or live on flesh, in contradistinction from domestic animals, such as are graminivorous, or live on grass and other vegetables, and are capable of being tamed, and applied to domestic purposes. See Clarke on Genesis 1:29. These latter are probably meant by בהמה behemah in the text, which we translate cattle, such as horses, kine, sheep, dogs, c. Creeping thing, רמש remes, all the different genera of serpents, worms, and such animals as have no feet. In beasts also God has shown his wondrous skill and power in the vast elephant, or still more colossal mammoth or mastodon, the whole race of which appears to be extinct, a few skeletons only remaining. This animal, an astonishing effect of God's power, he seems to have produced merely to show what he could do, and after suffering a few of them to propagate, he extinguished the race by a merciful providence, that they might not destroy both man and beast. The mammoth appears to have been a carnivorous animal, as the structure of the teeth proves, and of an immense size from a considerable part of a skeleton which I have seen, it is computed that the animal to which it belonged must have been nearly twenty-five feet high, and sixty in length! The bones of one toe are entire; the toe upwards of three feet in length. But this skeleton might have belonged to the megalonyx, a kind of sloth, or bradypus, hitherto unknown. Few elephants have ever been found to exceed eleven feet in height. How wondrous are the works of God! But his skill and power are not less seen in the beautiful chevrotin, or tragulus, a creature of the antelope kind, the smallest of all bifid or cloven-footed animals, whose delicate limbs are scarcely so large as an ordinary goose quill; and also in the shrew mouse, perhaps the smallest of the many-toed quadrupeds. In the reptile kind we see also the same skill and power, not only in the immense snake called boa constrictor, the mortal foe and conqueror of the royal tiger, but also in the cobra de manille, a venomous serpent, only a little larger than a common sewing needle.

24–31. Sixth Day: (a) Creation of the Land Animals (Genesis 1:24-25); (b) Creation of Man (Genesis 1:26-30); (c) The End of the Creation (Genesis 1:31),

- VIII. The Sixth Day 24. בהמה behēmâh, “cattle; dumb, tame beasts.” רמשׂ remeś, “creeping (small or low) animals.” חוּה chayâh, “living thing; animal.” חוּת־חארץ chayatô-chā'ārets, “wild beast.” 26.

SIXTH DAY — ANIMALS AND MAN, Genesis 1:24-31. 24. Cattle… creeping thing… beast — As the sacred writer distributes the growth of the vegetable kingdom into three classes, (see Genesis 1:11-12,) so