Charles Ellicott Commentary Genesis 1:24

"And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind: and it was so." — Genesis 1:24 (ASV)

Let the earth bring forth. —Neither this, nor the corresponding phrase in Genesis 1:20, necessarily implies spontaneous generation, though that is its literal meaning. It does not need to mean more than that land animals, produced on the dry ground, were now to follow those produced in the waters. However they were 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 that God had created; and the fourth assigns the vegetable world to both man and animals as food.

The creation of man is thus made a distinct act; for though he was created on the sixth day (because he is a land animal), this occurred in the latter part of the day and after a pause for contemplation and counsel.

The reason for this, we venture to affirm, is that in man’s creation we find a far greater advance in the work of the Almighty than at any previous stage. For until this time all has been law, and the highest point reached was instinct; now we have freedom, reason, intellect, and speech. The evolutionist may give us many an interesting theory about the development of man’s physical nature, but the introduction of this moral and mental freedom places as wide a chasm in his way as did 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, that 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 speaking, the word refers more 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 carnivores. 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 on fish and on one another, the record seems to point to a closer relation between man and graminivores than with these fierce denizens of the forest.

The narrative of the flood proves conclusively that there were no carnivores in the ark; and immediately afterwards, beasts that kill men were ordered to be destroyed (Genesis 9:5–6). It is clear that from the first these beasts lay outside the covenant.

But as early as the fourth century, Titus, Bishop of Bostra, in his treatise against the Manichees, showed, on grounds other than geological, that carnivores existed before the fall, and that there was nothing inconsistent with God’s wisdom or love in their feeding on other animals; despite their presence, all was good.

The evidence of geology proves that in the age when carnivores were most abundant, graminivores were represented by species of enormous size, and that they flourished in multitudes far surpassing anything that exists today.