(BA) Genesis 1, animal categories

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31 July 2022 *Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.

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

The obsolete English translation here doesn't help, but there's the deeper issue that the account here thinks of animals differently than the modern biological classifications: mammals, reptiles, etc.

Let's work through them in order. living creature after its kind would be better rendered the various sorts of living beings. This is our broad category -- things that live on the earth. Then come three subcategories.

Cattle is not, as in modern English, a word for bulls and cows and calves. It is in Hebrew behemah, a more general terms for large quadrupeds, generally domestic quadrupeds: not only cattle but goats, sheep, and -- I don't know -- maybe horses too. I'd go with livestock here.

Creeping thing is basically unintelligible in modern English, but seems to refer to little animals that scurry and swarm about on the earth. Think of insects, mice, maybe rabbits. Those kinds of things.

Beast of the earth, or more literally, animal of the earth, is a term for "wild animals."

So the Hebrew Bible is dividing animals, roughly, into three groups: farm animals, wild animals, and little critters.

So we get something like this:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth every kind of living thing: livestock, and small creatures, and wild animals of every kind. And it was so.