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Sunday, May 1, 2011

Leupold Genesis part 55 verse 25

25. And God made the wild beasts of the earth after their kind and the domestic animals after their kind, and the reptiles of the ground after their kind; and God saw that it was good.

The report as to how God proceeded to carry out the thing He ordains in v. 24, in v. 25 inverts the order of the classes--a merely chiastic inversion--and provides a comment upon "reptiles" by calling them "reptiles of the ground." Strictly speaking, the inverted order of names changes from 1, 2, 3 to 3, 1, 2. Then the expression "after their kind" is separately added to each class. The word for "ground," 'adhamah, used with "reptiles" (for reptiles creep on the ground) most likely is to be associated with the root 'adhom, meaning a "reddish-brown," a term descriptive of the covering of topsoil found wherever "ground" covers the rock layers. Lest anyone suppose that perhaps portions of the animal world may originally have been characterized by some defect, we find that all: meets with divine approval: "God saw that it was excellent" (cf. v. 4). No blessing is specifically mentioned as in v. 22, apparently because the writer is hurrying to the climax.

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