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The Alleged Contradiction Between Gen. 1:24-27 And 2:19, Alexander Heidel

Concordia Theological Monthly

The first chapter of Genesis, as every Bible student knows, has the animals made first and then man. But the second chapter is commonly held to reverse the order and to place the creation of man before that of the animals. This view is based upon the assumption that Gen. 2:18-25 constitutes a continuous piece of narrative and that the tense of the Hebrew verb with which v.19 opens therefore implies a sequence in the order of time, necessitating the following translation of v.19: "And so the Lord God formed out of the ground all the beast of the field …