Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Days five and six: the living creatures
Genesis 1:20-25
20 God said, “Let the waters abound with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the sky.” · WEB
Sea, sky and land are filled with creatures made in categories, and the first blessing in Scripture is spoken over animals.
The fifth day fills the waters and the air, and the sixth fills the land, completing the pattern the chapter set up: the three realms divided on days one to three are stocked on days four to six, in the same order.
A new verb appears at verse twenty-one — God created the large sea creatures — the word used only of God, last seen in the book's first sentence and next used of the making of man. Its placement is deliberate. The introduction of conscious life is treated as an act of the same order as the origin of the universe, and not as an extension of what came before.
The sea creatures named are the great ones, and the choice of example is again pointed. The large monsters of the deep were, in the mythology of every surrounding nation, primeval powers of chaos that the gods had to subdue before the world could be made. Here they are items on a list of things God made on a Friday, and the verse says he saw that they were good.
Then the first blessing recorded in Scripture, and it is spoken over fish and birds: Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas. The capacity to reproduce and flourish is not a biological fact the text reports; it is a gift God pronounces. The same words will be spoken over the man and woman eight verses later, and over Noah after the flood — so the blessing survives the fall and survives the judgment.
The land creatures are grouped in three categories — livestock, creeping things, and animals of the earth — which is a classification by relation to human life rather than by anatomy. Domesticable, small and ground-dwelling, and wild. It is how a farmer sees a field, and it is another mark of a book written for people who kept flocks.
And through all of it the refrain continues: after their kind, five more times in these six verses. The categories are made as categories. Each is completed on the day it is made, in its own sort, with the capacity to produce more of the same. Nothing in the account is unfinished or on the way to becoming something else, and the verdict pronounced over each stage is that it was already good.
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