After recognizing the pattern of the Genesis 1 creation account of paired days and themes, evidently there is a special connection between the seed-bearing and fruit-bearing plants and trees on the land (the final creative act of day 3), and the humans created in the image of the gods (the final creative act of day 6). What is the connection?
Genesis 1:29 gives one straightforward response to the question: all seed-bearing plants and trees that produce fruit are meant to be food for humans. That is our nourishment in the ideal, pre-fallen state. All acts of creation have aligned to set up this perfect homeostasis of life-sustaining energy. We are intricately connected to the plants both in the creation patterns and in the time following the story. If we are to believe that Genesis 1 is a story of the world set up the way God intended it, and that all the pain and suffering that we see today originated at the choice of humankind to pursue its own wisdom represented by eating the forbidden fruit, then we must recognize that everything that was put in place prior to that event was at perfect form and functionality, one aspect of which is how humans eat. By no means is this the only notion to be drawn from the passage. The idea of humans and trees sharing a functional commonality is another. But it is one.
Immediately following the proclamation of seed-bearing trees as food for humans, God commands the green grasses and plants be as food for the beasts of the earth, birds of the sky, and…
The connection of seed-bearing plants and humans are actually one of a few intimate relationships established by God on day 6. Immediately following the proclamation of seed-bearing trees as food for humans, God commands the green grasses and plants be as food for the beasts of the earth, birds of the sky, and creatures moving along the ground. This doesn’t match up as nicely in the creation day mapping scheme as fruit trees and humans, as the plants are still the second creative act on day 3, but birds were created on day 5 and the beasts of the earth were the first creative act on day 6. Nevertheless, the plan for animal kind, everything that has the breath of life (God’s ruach, Hebrew translated spirit, in animals and humans), receives the gift of plants as food. So people aren’t the only ones for whom this is an ideal, but animals are also included. This obviously comes into contradiction with what we simply observe in the animal kingdom: some animals can only eat other animals to live, i.e. felines. I will get into this later, but we do know that humans can make a choice to live according to this principle and live well.
Another established relationship in this story is that between animals and humans. In Genesis 1:28, we are told to rule over the animals and subdue the earth. On initial reading, to us this seems like a green light to utilize all of creation as we see fit. Several critics have cited this as the reason the Western world has made a habit of using and abusing our planet: it is both permitted and demanded by our religious tradition. We seem to have a knack for, with the aid of modern technology, manipulating the earth to accommodate us and our desires, to the point of wreckage. The same may be said for the animals. If we need them to meet our nutritional needs by being a direct source of calories, so be it. That is why they are here.
We practically can already see some problems with this mindset in our current place on Earth. As we manipulate our technologies for our liking, we see the detriment this is having in our environment. Climate change has become a pretty complex issue, but it does appear to be at least in part due to human activity. It is well established that the harvesting of animals for human consumption also leaves a larger carbon footprint than the harvesting of plants. Science has established this data recently, but we should have recognized that disaster would happen when we interpret Genesis 1:28 as a free reign for our desires.
We may make the assumption that the relationship between humans and animals is only vertical. We rule them, case closed. Looking at the creation patterns, this doesn’t appear to be the case. We also have a horizontal relationship with animals, as we were created on the same day as they. We are creatures just as they are, made on the same day as the land creatures, sharing that day of creation with them. All life forms, unicellular or multicellular, plant or animal, sea swimmer or land rover, fall under the auspices of creation and the physical laws that govern it. After the animals were created, God stated that what he created was good, just as he did after all other creative acts in Genesis 1. This suggests that all of creation was already good in and of itself before we showed up. That should remove some entitlement we may feel as the only important part of creation.
But rather we are intimately connected with the earth as evidenced by the Genesis 2 creation account.
We are not separated from the earth, dropped down here from some other realm to make use of what we find. But rather we are intimately connected with the earth as evidenced by the Genesis 2 creation account. This states man was formed from the dust of the earth and had life breathed into him, hence the name of the first man as Adam (from the Hebrew adamah, “of the ground”). Mankind is formed as the weird combination of “dirt and divine breath (Hebrew ruach)”. That should make us rethink our relationship with the earth, that we are intimately connected with it, and that anything we do to it, any means of disrespect and negligence we exhibit, will come back to affect us accordingly.
So our relationship with the rest of creation is not a simple linear pattern of one entity above the other. We are told to rule the animals, but at the same time we are on something of equal footing with them. Both animals and humans share a relationship with the botanical creation of day 3, assigned to use those resources as our food. And humans have a specific relationship with the earth, commanded by God to subdue it. Reading Genesis in its ancient context, subdue most likely refers to farming the ground, as the ancient Near Eastern cultures reading or listening to this narrative were primarily agrarian. In Genesis 2, the second creation narrative, humans are put in a garden, where their food source is fruit-bearing trees, and told to “work and care for” the garden, in other words farm the ground. In fact, no plants had yet showed up on earth until humankind was created because, in part, there was no one yet created to work the ground. But while we are told to subdue the plant-producing earth, we see that if by subdue we mean abuse and disrespect, following our own wisdom and working toward our idea of what is right for us, our intimate connection with the earth will cause us to feel the effects, however welcoming or catastrophic they may be. The effects of treating the earth in this way can be expressed in God’s curse to Adam in Genesis 3 after he decides that God’s wisdom is secondary to his own by eating the forbidden fruit:
Cursed is the ground
Because of you;
Through painful toil you
Will eat food from it
All the days of your life
It will produce thorns and thistle for you
And you will eat the plants of the field
By following our own wisdom, making our own choices for ourselves and our rule of the earth, suddenly what should be existence in a harmonious garden in which life cannot help but sprout up the best of what the plant kingdom has to offer, becomes a struggle against the earth to strangle from it life-sustaining nourishment.
We are also made aware by God in Genesis 1:30 the relationship between animals and the earth, not directly involving humans. They are to have the green plants as food. Why should we care what they are given to eat or not? We know that we have the fruit-bearing trees. This is likely a warning to humans from God concerning our stewardship, as subduers and rulers over earth and animal, that that relationship between the animals and green plants is sacred, and part of our responsibility in ruling alongside God is to make sure the relationship is preserved and allowed to flourish. We are not to utilize the whole earth for our own immediate good, but to reflect, as image-bearers carrying out God’s rule on earth, the care God gives to all of creation by helping protect this other sacred relationship. Therefore, we are not to ransack the earth for all its resources, but rather to use what we need in order to live, trusting that God has created a generous space capable of taking care of all creatures.
After every creative process, the end of every day of creation, God sees that what he has created is good. This is repeated six times in Genesis 1, all immediately after the acts of creation: light, gathering of the seas, vegetation, heavenly bodies, sea creatures and birds, and wild land animals. However, he doesn’t say this right after humans are created. Rather, after humans arrive, God proclaims humans’ role, and the role of plants and seed-bearing trees for animals and humans, and after that proclamation does God say that this is very good, clearly a more emphasized statement from what he has previously said. While all of creation had been proclaimed good up to this point, apparently the final statements of order at the end of the chapter, statements laying out the functional relationships among living creatures and the earth that houses them, have added exponentially, not just summarily, to the quality of creation. I think this means we are not to take these final statements lightly. We may want to really consider what they mean for our purpose and symbiosis with the world and with God.