Hi, Trixie.
There is a little grammatical glitch involved in all of this, though. The King James Version of Gen 2:19 (which you cited) says this:
quote:
And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
However, in the New International Version, it says this:
quote:
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky.
The KJV's past tense is changed into the past perfect tense in the NIV. The use of past perfect specifically means that this element is being introduced out of chronological sequence: it happened
before this point in the narrative, but not
at this point. I can't speak to the correctness of using one tense or the other, but there is at least a way to weasel out here.
Then, in verse 20, it says this:
quote:
So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
So, when I read the whole part about the creation of animals and man, to me it sounds more like it's saying this:
"Adam needed a helper, and God was going to make one. There were animals, which God had made before, and Adam gave them all names, but none of them were a suitable helper for Adam. So, God made a woman to be Adam's helper."
From this, I don't know that there's much of a case for the two chapters contradicting one another in terms of the sequence of events. Of course, that hinges on whether or not the NIV's use of past perfect tense was justified.
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
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