Genesis 1:21 - Exposition

Day six . Like day three, this is distinguished by a double creative act, the production of the higher or land animals and the creation of man, of the latter of which it is perhaps permissible to see a mute prediction in the vegetation which closed the first half of the creative week. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind . In these words the land animals are generically characterized as nephesh chayyah , or animated beings; in the terms which follow they are subdivided into three well-defined species or classes. Cattle . Behemah ; literally, the dumb animal, i.e. the larger grass-eating quadrupeds. And creeping thing. Remes ; the moving animal, i.e. the smaller animals that move either without feet or with feet that are scarcely perceptible, such as worms, insects, reptiles. Here it is land-creepers that are meant, the remes of the sea having been created on the previous day. And beast of the earth ( chayyah of the earth) after his kind . i.e. wild, roving, carnivorous beasts of the forest. In these three comprehensive orders was the earth commanded to produce its occupants; which, however, no more implied that the animals were to be developed from the soil than were the finny tribes generated by the sea. Simply in obedience to the Divine call, and as the product of creative energy, they were to spring from the plastic dust as being essentially earth-born creatures. And it was so . Modern evolutionists believe they can conceive—they have never yet been able to demonstrate—the modus operandi of the supreme Artificer in the execution of this part of the sixth day's work. Revelation has not deemed it needful to do more than simply state that they were—not, by an evolutionary process carried on through inconceivably long periods of time, developed from the creatures of the fifth day, but—produced directly from the soil by the fiat of Elohim.