Supposed contradiction and verses:
Are fowl from waters or ground?
Genesis 1:20-21
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Genesis 2:19
And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
Answer:
Yes, it does seem that this might be a contradiction, but I assure you, it is not. Let’s take a look at the first two verses. It says they were created out of the water. That is no big deal. Why not? When we read the entire 1st chapter of Genesis we see that God brought the land and the mountains out of the water. Why not animals? It is His divine right as well as being Creator to do so. In light of someone who would take this as Evolutionary in form, we see that it is not as well. Why? This is the 5th day of creation….and God spoke them into existence together, simultaneously, and without the water itself being the creator….but rather God Himself being the Creator. These verses simply speak of how the animals were created, not where they would dwell. Let’s look one verse further in this chapter at verse 22…
Genesis 1:22
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
We see here that God says the fowl will multiply on the Earth. This does two things. First, it flies in the face of anyone who tries to fit Evolution into the Bible because we see in the previous verses that God created them all at once, and at no time, did fowl ever reproduce in water, they were commanded by God to multiply on land. The other thing that this does, is establishes these verses as the Creation account as we go and look at the verse in Chapter 2 and understand the difference in what is being said, versus it being creation.
In chapter 2 verse 19, we see that God is giving Adam dominion over the land animals, such as birds, beasts, etc. by having them come to Him to be named. God brought these animals to Adam in the same way He brought them to Noah later on to get on the ark…by divine intervention. In this verse, “out of the ground” does not mean a creative account of how they were made, because we already know God made them from water; but rather this means they were of the ground. Simply put, they were ground creatures who lived and multiplied on the earth (ground), because they were brought to Adam, thus, creatures of the water could not be present, or they would die. But what about the word “formed” you might ask? Well, that word is from the Hebrew word “rcy”. One of the meanings of this word is “pre-ordain, plan (of divine) purpose of a situation” So quite literally we see, when Moses wrote this, that God had preordained the animals of the ground to come to Adam to be named. It had to be divine and orderly for all the ground animals and birds to gather in one place, at one time, and stay there until Adam was done naming them. As is the case with any other….no contradiction!