It was probably in the morning of the sixth day – that is, Friday of Earth’s first week – when God created Adam. God had spent the early part of that day overseeing the creation of the cattle, the beasts and the creeping things from the earth [Genesis 1:24-25]. God then formed man from the dust of the ground and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it” [Genesis 2:7, 8, 15]. After remarking that “it is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him”, God then brought “every beast of the field and bird of the air to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature that was its name … But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him” [Genesis 2:18-20]. From the way these Scriptures read, some have suggested that God was offering Adam a “helper” from among the animal kingdom, but this is not at all the case. God was, in fact, teaching Adam a human language; some commentaries argue that it was Hebrew. The noun, the name of a person, place or thing, is the basic element of any language, and we all learned to speak beginning with the nouns, [e.g., mamma, papa, dog, etc.].
It takes the average young person immersed in a second language at least a year to be proficient in that language. However, Adam was created in perfection and this would include a perfect mind with total memory retention. So how long would it have taken Adam to learn a language of say 5,000 words? Recalling that “every beast of the field and bird of the air…”[Genesis 1:30] would include all those now extinct and involve many thousands of species. However, “species” is a unit of Man’s classification system, but the Scripture uses the word “kinds” where each kind would include several species. For example, fox, coyoté, fennec, wolf, jackal, colishé and domestic dog are each given different species names but can all interbreed and are thus all one “kind.” Therefore, during creation week, just the ancestral “kinds” were created, greatly reducing the numbers involved to perhaps a few thousand. In addition, Adam had the best of all possible teachers, and we might suggest it took him half a day to learn a language. That this is not impossible we cite as our example William Sidis 18 [1898-1944], an American born of Russian immigrants. Sidis could learn a language of 5,000 words and the grammar in a single day and, as an adult, he could speak over forty languages. Like the man born blind, from time to time there are such exceptional people today and, as Jesus explained, this is so that “the works of God can be revealed in him” [John 9:3].
So Friday looks like a very busy day for Adam; yet the day also had to accommodate the making of Eve. Interestingly, the Scripture speaks of the “creation of Adam” [Genesis 1:27; 2:19] but the “making of the Woman” [Genesis 2:22, 23] – she was named Eve by Adam after the Fall [Genesis 3:20]. Likely this is a reflection of the fact that the man was created from inanimate material and therefore required God’s spirit of life while “the Woman” was made from Adam’s living bone and tissue. Faced with the apparent difficulty of cramming all these activities into that busy first Friday, some of the early commentaries, such as The Book of Jubilees, have argued that Eve was made on theFriday of the following week. This, however, is believed to be an unnecessary expedient. We are told that everything God made was within the first six days [Genesis 1:31] and reminded of this in the fourth commandment: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them …” [Exodus 20:11].
References : Charles, Robert Henry [translator]. 2005. The Book of Jubilees or the Little Genesis. Original publishers: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, N.Y. in 1917. Published 2005 by Ibis Press, Berwick, Maine, USA. Sidis, William. Biography and photo-portrait given in Wikipedia. Image: Animals – Pixabay.com
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