What Does Genesis 2:15 Mean?

God forms every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens from the ground and brings them to the man to see what he will call them. The man's naming of the animals is the first recorded exercise of human intelligence and linguistic capacity in the Bible, and it is directed at the work of understanding and categorizing the created world. The man who was formed from the ground meets the creatures also formed from the ground and gives them the names that define their identities in human experience.

The divine intention is evaluative: God brings the animals to see "what he would call them." The naming is not arbitrary; the man sees each creature clearly and gives it the name that fits. Whatever the man calls it, that is its name, the first instance of authoritative human naming in the Bible, an exercise of the dominion-mandate in the cognitive and linguistic sphere. The man's naming reveals him as a being capable of true knowledge of the created world.

The naming of the animals is also the process of discovering correspondence and its absence. The man who names the animals demonstrates his capacity for recognition, he sees what each is and names it accordingly. But in seeing each animal clearly, he also sees that none of them is what he needs. The naming that reveals his capacity for knowledge also reveals the limit of what the existing creation provides. The man can name the world; he cannot among the named find his counterpart.