Naming



"Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field." (Genesis 2:19, 20 ESV)

Again and again, I marvel at the miracle of language and the power of words. Human language is not the result of evolutionary development from grunts and sounds to vocal articulation, it is the gift from a communicating Creator to his creatures made in the image of God. 

German theologian Erich Sauer comments on Genesis chapter two...  

"What is a word? A sound, a note, a tone which goes out of the mouth! Yet much more! A conveyor of a motion of the spirit, an instrument for manifesting the intelligence, a sign, a sound-symbol of an activity of the soul. Only through the gift of the spirit and speech man becomes really man. Only thus is it that he receives the capacity of inward development.

"By speech Adam began in Paradise the exercise of his royal authority. At the very beginning, even before the creation of the woman, God Himself brought to him the creatures of the air and the earth, so that he, discerning their natures, should give them suitable names (Gen. 2:20): and thus was their 'king' at the very beginning crowned by the Creator, and speech became, spiritually speaking, the 'scepter of mankind.'

"Thus, speech is not, as unbelieving philosophers assert, an invention which man first made little by little within human society for the purpose of mutual intercourse. For God 'spoke' to Adam even before He had given him Eve as helper, and in like manner Adam, before the creation of the woman, made use of speech in the naming of the animals. Rather therefore is speech an 'instinctive emanation of the spirit' which, 'passing out through the mouth, is a perceptible revelation of the intelligence' (Plato), 'audible spirit' (Bettex). As an aptitude inherent in creation the gift of speech was present in man from the beginning; but it needed to be freed and released, and this God effected by giving to man the task of naming the animals."

-- Erich Sauer, The Dawn of World Redemption (1952; Eerdmans, 1994)


Image above: Adam naming the animals, etching by G. Scotin and J. Cole after H. Gravelot and J.B. Chatelain, 1743. Wellcome Library.

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