positive grants convey no more than the express words they are made in will carry, let us see which of them here will comprehend mankind, or Adam’s posterity; and those, I imagine, if any, must be these, “every living thing that moveth”: the words in Hebrew are, חיה חרמשת i.e. bestiam reptantem , of which words the scripture itself is the best interpreter: God having created the fishes and fowls the fifth day, the beginning of the sixth he creates the irrational inhabitants of the dry land, which, ver. 24, are described in these words, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind; cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, after his kind, and ver. 2, and God made the beasts of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth on the earth after his kind”: here, in the creation of the brute inhabitants of the earth, he first speaks of them all under one general name, of living creatures, and then afterwards divides them into three ranks. 1. Cattle or such creatures as were or might be tame, and so be the private possession of particular men; 2. חיה which, ver. 24–25, in our Bible, is translated beasts, and by the Septuagint θηρία , wild beasts, and is the same word, that here in our text, ver. 28, where we have this great charter to Adam, is translated living thing, and is also the same word used, Gen. 9:2, where this grant is renewed to Noah, and there likewise translated beast. 3. The third rank where the creeping animals, which ver. 24–25, are comprised under the word, חרמשת , the same that is used here, ver. 28, and is translated moving, but in the former verses, creeping, and by the Septuagint in all these places ἑρπετὰ , or reptiles, from whence it appears that the words which we translate here in God’s donation, ver. 28, “living creatures moving,” are the same, which in the history of the creation, ver. 24–25, signify two ranks of terrestrial creatures, viz. wild beasts and reptiles, and are so understood by the
When God had made the irrational animals of the world, divided into three kinds, from the places of their habitation, viz. fishes of the sea,