Seeking a way out of futile debates over the discrepancies between the conclusions of modern science and the Bible, Jeremy England suggests a novel approach that begins with the way the biblical account of creation understands language:
What does it mean to “create the heavens and the earth”? . . . . From [the first chapter of Genesis] we can already infer that creation ([denoted] in Hebrew [by the verb] bara) is first and foremost about giving names to things that are distinguished by recognizable properties. A few chapters later, this inference is resoundingly confirmed: “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God; male and female He created them. And on the day of their creation (hibaram), He blessed them and called them Man” (Genesis 5:1–2). As before, naming goes hand in hand with creation, this time at the moment when the clearest and brightest distinction is being drawn between different kinds of humans. Another riff on the same idea plays out in the Garden of Eden, when the first human being is tasked by God with naming all the animals in the world while in search of an “opposite companion” (Genesis 2:18).
This role granted to people in giving names to living creatures is worth dwelling on, for it reverberates backward to the very first moments described in Genesis. It is by having the capacity for language that man is able to join God as a fully fledged participant in the work of creation—for it is through language that man develops the taxonomy that allows the naming of diverse phenomena. It should come as no surprise, then, that the first recorded action taken by the Creator at the beginning of the world is to speak: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). We have heard this phrase so many times that by the time we are old enough to ponder it, we easily miss its simplest point: the light by which we see the world comes from the way we talk about it.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/partly-predictable-world/