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Genesis 1:29-30 — Were
the pre-fall animals "wild"?
A reader asked us
about Genesis 1:29-30, the text of which reads in the ISV:
29God also told them,
“Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant that grows throughout the
earth, along with every tree that grows seed-bearing fruit. They will
produce your food. 30I have given all green plants as food for every wild
animal of the earth, every bird that flies, and to every living thing that
crawls on the earth.” And so it was.
According to the footnote in verse 30, 'animal of the earth' was
translated to 'wild animal'. Does this mean the animals were already wild
before Adam and Eve sinned?
The answer to this
question depends on how you define the term "wild". See our well known
policy about rendering biblical language ambiguities as ambiguities in
English. Two observations about this are relevant here.
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First, the events of
Genesis 1 are "observer true". They're written from the standpoint of
somebody standing on the earth, probably in the vicinity of the animal
preserve called "Gan Eden".
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Second, the events of
Genesis 1 are described by a post-fall author describing pre-fall events.
The "animals of the earth" in Genesis are rendered "wild animals" as
opposed to "domesticated animals", not "wild" as opposed to "vegetarian."
The text is talking
about "non-domesticated" animals versus those animals that would become
domesticated after the fall. We use the term "wild animals" (sometimes the
Heb. calls them "beasts of the field") in contrast to what would later
become domesticated animals, not in contrast to plant eating animals like
elephants, deer, antelopes, rabbits, and the like. We think you've decided
a priori that the ISV is referring to animals that ate other animals
merely because we used the term "wild" to describe them. We're talking
about "wild" animals in contrast to animals that would later be described
as being "domesticated."
Perhaps an analogy about "observer true" phenomena might be helpful, here,
too. I once knew a man who used to tell me, "I knew President Bush when he
served in World War II." Do you really think for a minute that the guy was
claiming that GWBush was serving as President of the USA in 1944 because
he said he knew President Bush in World War II? Of course not. He meant
that the person who would go on to become president was an acquaintance of
him back then. When he talked to me, he assumed I wasn't so naive as to
think that he was claiming that Mr. Bush was President way back then. It's
the same way with respect to the animals. The account in Genesis was
written after the fall, describing events that went on during that time.
The writer is describing animals that, at the time of their creation, were
neither "wild" (as opposed to "domesticated") or "domesticated" (as
opposed to "wild"). These technical distinctions would arise later, as
language evolved to describe the nature and relationship of these animals
to mankind.
There is no failure in our translation to call these animals "wild," as
opposed to "domesticated" animals, since, strictly speaking, there were no
"wild" or "domesticated" animals on the earth at the first. That
distinction is man-centered, and didn't become relevant until after the
rise of agriculture and the use of beasts of burden.
Please
use the literal because 'wild animal' could mean some animals were already
predators before the fall. According to verse 30, they were vegetarian.
The
"literal"? But we are translating literally, as you'll see below. You seem
to have missed the point of verse 30, which was written in contrast to
verse 29. There is no evidence, strictly speaking, that the Genesis
1:29-30 record requires the animals in verse 30 be vegetarian and only
vegetarian. The text in those two verses is contrasting man versus the
animals as to their food source, not as to their nature. The man was not
given plants to eat. The animals were. The text says in verse 29 that the
man was given the plants from which he was to harvest their seed, and eat
the seed, not the plants.
Animals were to eat the plants, too. So the text isn't claiming that the
animals were necessarily vegetarians, only that when they ate plants, they
ate from the whole plant, as opposed to the man, who was to eat the seeds
that were produced (the Hebrew verb is quite explicit about this) by the
plants.
It would be helpful to think like a rabbi here: just because the text
focuses on one reality doesn't mean that there might be another reality
present, but not relevant to the subject of the moment. You see that
pattern arising in the Gospels, where one synoptic writer talks about one
demon-possessed man at Gadara, and another writer talks about two.
The rabbis
would say if there were two men there, that means that there was one there
if all you wanted to do was talk about one of them. You could ignore the
other guy because he's not relevant to the story. Apply that process to
Genesis 1 and you'll see that saying the animals ate plants doesn't
necessarily mean that was all that some of them ate. Predatory animals
aren't precluded by that way of thinking, and that's just how Hebrew
writers thought of things back then.
An example of this is the oft-cited rationale as to why animals "must have
been" 100% vegetarian before the fall. The rationale for this is that the
book of Romans says that death came by the sin of man, therefore, goes the
logic, there was no animal death before the fall. But Romans is talking
about human death, not animal death, and there's no failure of Scripture
to suggest that animal death didn't occur before the fall. Have you ever
wondered how it could be that Adam and Eve would understand what the word
"death" meant at all when they were told in Genesis 2:17 that they would
"die during the day that you eat from" the tree, if some form of death had
not been observable to them so they could understand what God had meant by
the warning? If language means anything at all (and it does), the text of
Genesis 2:17 requires at least some form of death to have been present
before the fall, for the warning of Genesis 2:17 to have had any
existential meaning at all to Adam and Eve.
All told, the ISV COT has a very high respect for the historicity of the
events described throughout Scripture, from the first verse of Genesis to
the last one of the Book of the Revelation. That's why we think there had
to have been animal death visible to pre-fall Adam and Eve in order for
them to understand the warning of Genesis 2:17. God would have been
telling them, "what you see happening to the animals will happen to you on
the day that you eat from the tree."
But having said that, we're reluctant to add things to the text to make
the translation explain things that aren't strictly speaking, in the
original language. That would be a failure of translational integrity.
We'll leave it to commentaries and Bible teachers to explain the subtlety.
And we'll continue to use "wild" in the text. We'll add a comment, though,
that the word contrasts these animals from what would later become
"domesticated" animals that today we would call "beasts of burden".
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