1 ¶ Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of
the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? 2 Canst thou number the months that they
fulfil? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth? 3 They bow themselves, they bring forth their
young ones, they cast out their sorrows. 4
Their young ones are in good liking, they grow up with corn; they go
forth, and return not unto them. 5 Who
hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass?
6 Whose house I have made the
wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. 7 He scorneth the multitude of the city,
neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. 8 The range of the mountains is his pasture,
and he searcheth after every green thing. 9
Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? 10 Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in
the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? 11 Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is
great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? 12
Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it
into thy barn?
God continues to speak to Job with
rhetorical questions asking him questions for which the obvious answer is no.
Mankind has studied the gestation periods of animals but did not create those
time-lengths. He can alter or interrupt with drugs or environmental stimuli but
he is altering something that he did not create. God determined how long
gestation periods are for kinds of beasts in general and He determines when an
individual animal will give birth. This is out of Job’s hands and not in his
power. Solomon, the great scholar of all things in the natural world, did not
have God’s power over it.
1Kings 4:31 For he was wiser than all men; than Ethan the
Ezrahite, and Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol: and his fame
was in all nations round about. 32 And
he spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five.
33 And he spake of trees, from the cedar
tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he
spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.
34 And there came of all people to hear
the wisdom of Solomon, from all kings of the earth, which had heard of his
wisdom.
The instinct, the imparted wisdom, of an
animal is implanted by God. The wild ass eventually leaves the care of his
mother and is no longer dependent upon her for anything. This ability of
animals to care for themselves rather quickly is the understanding given by God
through imparted wisdom implanted in each creature. In De Witt Talmage’s 19th
century sermon on evolution entitled, “Evolution,” he pointed this out as one
of the problems with the atheistic scientist linking human beings with other
animals.
The animal in a few hours or months
comes to full strength, and can take care of itself. The human race for the
first one, two, three, five, ten years, is in complete helplessness. The chick
just come out of its shell begins to pick up its own food. The dog, the wolf,
the lion, soon earn their own livelihood and act for their own defense. The
human race does not come to development until it reaches twenty or thirty years
of age, and by that time the animals that were born the same year the man was
born – the vast majority of them – have died of old age. (42)
As verse 7 indicates, wild animals
are wild animals and it is well known that it is difficult or impossible, in
many cases, to make them domestic animals useful for man’s purposes. One of the
results of the change in the earth after the great flood of Noah’s time was
that wild animals would become wary of man and afraid of him generally, as
man’s diet was now changed to include flesh. Remember what God said to Adam;
Genesis 1:29
¶ And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the
fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it
shall be for meat. 30 And to every
beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that
creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb
for meat: and it was so.
And then, after the flood, to Noah
and his sons;
Genesis 9:1
¶ And God blessed Noah and his sons, and
said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you
shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon
all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your
hand are they delivered. 3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be
meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
Many skeptics have made hay over a
word found in verse 9, the word,” unicorn.” A review of over 200 lexicons from
the Early Modern English Database reveals that a unicorn was understood to be
an animal with one horn.(43) Sounds understandable. The technical name for the
Indian Rhinoceros is Rhinoceros
Unicornis. Marco Polo, the famed Venetian
traveler of the Medieval Period of Western European history, referred to the
Javan Rhinoceros as a unicorn among other one-horned animals. (44)
The ancient Greeks referred to unicorns, not in their mythologies, but in
their natural histories, and although Ctesias made the earliest mention of
unicorns in his book, Indika, it was
obvious he was just going on legend and had not seen them with his own eyes. He
described a wild ass colored white, red, and black. Such a fanciful description
was carried on by Aristotle and Strabo, and it was not until Pliny the Elder in
his On the Nature of Animals that he
describes something realistic, an Indian ox, a monoceros, which in all
likelihood was the Indian Rhino.
It is generally understood by the existence of them in the Lascaux cave
paintings in France that the Rhinoceros once had a much larger range of living
than it does today, the mythological horse with a horn being a totally separate
concept from the reality spoken of here in Job, evidenced in later Greek
writings, or found in nature and cave paintings.
The Rhinoceros is a wild animal, a wild beast, Job. He’s not going to pull
your plow, plant your fields, or submit to your will. Go ahead, and try to
harness him up, if you think you can.
This brings to mind a point that must be made about the Bible and its
discussion of animals. Much is made by the creationist minded and the fundamentalist
about the phrase, “after their kind,” in Genesis 1:21,25; 6:20; & 7:14. The
word, “kind,” contrary to what is said often, does not refer to an individual
species, whichever of the many definitions of species you use (45), whether
it be a local, isolated group of finches or something like the, “breed,” of
Animal Husbandry’s dog breeding. (Although there are significant differences
between breed and species they are also not from the same disciplines so the
issue is basically one about definition of terms that refer to similar but not
identical things.)
One of the things Charles Darwin
was against was the popularly preached by clerics and many pre-Darwin
biologists view that every species of animal that existed in his day was said
to have come down from an original ancestor just like them in a doctrine
called, “the immutability of species.” If there are a hundred species of a type
of bird today then those species would have existed back to Noah’s Ark, goes
the idea. This is, of course, absurd as mankind created many breeds of dogs in
the last two hundred years alone. If you regarded a breed and a species as
having similar meanings but under different types of scientific disciplines,
Zoology versus Animal Husbandry, then you can imagine speciation, the process
where different breeds or species of dogs, cats, horses, or birds came about
taking place rather quickly in history.
But the word, “kind,” doesn’t mean
species at all. It is more like a general type of creature. Many species of cats
came from the first cat creatures on Noah’s Ark. The problem with evolution is
that the cat never became a dog, the pea never became a chrysanthemum, and an
ape-like creature never became a man. There is no evidence of such a thing
occurring without twisting the evidence into knots and the whole popularly
understood concept of evolution in that regard, called macroevolution, is a
fairy tale for atheists and in complete opposition to the Bible and reality.
Modern taxonomic classifications of living things are purely man-made and
are totally subjective to what man chooses to include as a characteristic of
the creature being named. God classifies animals differently based on
characteristics that would be understood by men without microscopes. For
instance, fowls fly, so the bat is a fowl in Leviticus 11:19 and Deuteronomy
14:18 and the Hebrew could not eat fowl with certain characteristics. The words
reptile and mammal were classifications created by man for his own convenience
and study. The Bible speaks of, “beasts of the field,” domestic animals, and,
“beasts of the forest,” wild animals. It speaks about animals in the way of
their usefulness generally to agricultural man or military man, not their
peculiarities to the curious, modern man. Trying to force man’s definitions of
everything from beasts to sin on the Bible’s definitions is futile and
arrogant. When you argue allowing your opponent to control the definitions of
words you are surrendering all leverage to them. Finally, a whale is a large
creature that swims in the sea and therefore can be called a great fish,
because fish are creatures that swim in the sea. Compare Jonah 1:17 and Matthew
12:40. The order, Cetacea, for whales, is not a concern of the Bible. A whale
simply signifies a Leviathan, a large creature which, like all creatures, came
first from the sea and then from the earth. (Genesis 1:20-24) Human taxonomic
classifications are different language for a different purpose.
Don’t read your own definitions, preferences, or opinions any more than
your own personal fears, hatreds, or bigotry back into the Bible.
(42) Thomas De Witt Talmage, The Life and Teachings of Rev. T. De Witt
Talmage D.D. (New York: D.Z. Howell
Publishers, 1902), 74. https://archive.org/stream/lifeteachingsofr00talmiala#page/n7/mode/2up
(accessed 1.12.2015).
(43) “Lexicons of Early Modern English,” (Toronto,
Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2015), http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/search/results.cfm,
(accessed 1.13.2015).
(44) Henry Yule, ed. & transl. The
Book of Ser Marco Polo (London: John Murray Publishers, 1903), 285. https://archive.org/stream/bookofsermarcopo002polo#page/n9/mode/2up
(accessed 1.13.2015).
(45) John S. Wilkins, “A List of 26 Species “Concepts”, Science Blogs: Evolving Thoughts, http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2006/10/01/a-list-of-26-species-concepts/
(accessed 1.14.2015).
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