Great Whales
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 1:21) KJV
The reptile/mammal transition isn’t evolution, there’s no passage of heritable traits from generation to generation, it’s abiogenesis. It illustrates the use of spherogenetic systematics as a deductive tool.
Yesterday we considered the possibility that there was a reptile with mammary glands. Today we can make another connection from the reptiles to the mammals to indicate that the latter is derived from the former. The great whales spoken of in Genesis 1:21 have been translated from an Hebrew word for serpent, dragon or sea monster. The word whale occurs twice in the KJV Old Testament, the word whales once. They’re all translations of the same Hebrew word: הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם – tannin: serpent, dragon, sea monster.
Whale(s): תַּנִּ֑ין – tannin
- serpent, dragon, sea monster, whale
- serpent, Deuteronomy 32:33 (venomous), Psalm 91:13
- dragon, as devourer (simile) Jeremiah 51:34
- sea– (or river-) monster, Genesis 1:21
- intensive from the same as tan; a marine or land monster, i.e. Sea-serpent or jackal — dragon, sea-monster, serpent, whale.
We all have the same evidence. Our choice of paradigm determines what we think it’s evidence of.
– Matty’s Razor
The Origin of Marine Mammals
Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?
(Job 7:12) KJV
Son of man, take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say unto him, Thou art like a young lion of the nations, and thou art as a whale in the seas: and thou camest forth with thy rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy feet, and fouledst their rivers.
(Ezekiel 32:2) KJV
There doesn’t appear to be an Hebrew word for large aquatic or marine mammal. This word is one of several translated elsewhere as dragon or serpent. We can wonder why it may be that the translators of the KJV decided to render the word as whale or whales in these instances, but we can also trust in the Lord that it’s what he wanted us to know.
Faith is believing in something that you can’t see, because of evidence.
– Faith, definition
Placing the large marine Mammals within the Serpents isn’t the incompetent handling of language, a scribal error, or a Biblical inconsistency, it demonstrates the pattern and process of creation from the creator’s perspective.
Where else would the origin of the large marine mammals be but the reptiles? We see lines of development of life from firmaspheric reptilian progenitors to a wide variety of hydrospheric reptiles. Hydrospheric reptiles give rise to atmospheric reptiles and both hydrospheric and atmospheric mammals.
We have to get used to the idea that the group we call Mammals isn’t a monophyletic clade based on shared derived characteristics (sinapomorphies). It’s a group of organisms with mammalian characteristics from as many origins as there were progenitors.
Evolution, the passage of heritable traits from generation to generation, didn’t start until after the fall of man in Genesis 3. It’s not part of the six days of creation. This means that we’re free of its constraints on our understanding of God’s creative work.
Salvation
- Call upon the name of Jesus Christ,
- believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
- confess your sin.
Read through the Bible in a year
| Reading plan | May 19 | |
| Linear | Job 23-25 | |
| Chronological | 2 Samuel 19-21 |
Matty's Paradigm 