And God said, let the waters bring forth
abundantly,
&c.] The waters gathered together in one place, the waters of
the ocean, and those in rivers, pools and lakes, and which,
before their collection into those places, had been sat on,
moved, and impregnated by the Spirit of God; so that they could,
as they did, by the divine order accompanied with his power,
bring forth abundance of creatures, next mentioned: the
moving creature that hath life:
an animal life, of which sort of creatures as yet there had been
none made; vegetables, or such as have a vegetative life, were
made on the third day; but those that have a sensitive and animal
life not till this day, the fifth; and the less perfect, or lower
sort of these, were first produced, even such as move or "creep"
F14, as the word used signifies; which
is applied to fishes as well as creeping things, because in
swimming their bellies touch the water, and are close to it, as
reptiles on the earth: and of these creeping things in the seas
there are innumerable, as the Psalmist says, ( Psalms
104:25 ) . Pliny F15 reckons up an hundred and seventy
six kinds of fishes, which he puts in an alphabetical order:
and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open
firmament
of heaven;
which according to our version were to be produced out of the
waters also; not out of mere water, but out of earth and water
mixed together, or out of the earth or clay F16 that
lay at the bottom of the waters: and it may be observed of some
fowls, that they live on the waters, and others partly on land
and partly on water; and as the elements of fowl and fish, the
air and water, bear a resemblance to each other, so do these
creatures, some fowls both fly and swim; and what wings are to
the one, fins are to the other; and both steer their course by
their tails, and are both oviparous: though it should seem,
according to ( Genesis 2:19
) , that the fowls were produced from the earth, and the words
may be rendered here, "let the fowl fly above the earth" as they
are in the Samaritan and Syriac versions, and in others
F17.