How Did Adam Name All the Animals in One Day?

I think there are two basic assumptions that typically motivate this question/objection to a straightforward understanding of the creation narrative in Genesis 1:

1. There were millions of species of animals,

2. Adam had to name every one those species.

These might seem to be reasonable assumptions to make, but does the Bible support them? Let’s see what it says:

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. — Genesis 2:19,20

So, what did Adam have to name?

1. livestock

2. birds of the sky

3. animals of the field

What did he not have to name?

1. creatures living in the waters (Genesis 1:20)

2. creeping things (Genesis 1:24)

While “creatures living in the waters” are fairly trivial to identify, “creeping things” is a bit more difficult to nail down. However, for our purposes here, it should suffice to note that there were many animals that Adam did not have to name—he only had to name some subset of all the creatures that God made.

The other problem is the use of the term “species,” a term which is foreign to the pages of Scripture. When we see the Word of God mentioning various categories of animals in Genesis 1, the term we see in English is “kinds” (e.g. “according to their kind” in Genesis 1:11,12,21,24,25)—which is likely something higher on the classification chart: genus or family. To demand that this means “species” is unwarranted. This significantly reduces the naming burden that the first man had to bear.

So, did Adam have to name wolves, coyotes, foxes, dingoes, jackals, and wolves? No—he’d only need to name a representative of the family Canidae or the genus Canis say, a wolf, and say “Let’s call this one a ‘dog’.” I won’t hazard a guess as to how many genera or families that Adam was tasked with identifying, because it would be pointless to speculate on that which the historical account does not tell us. As others have said, “Where the Bible is silent, so also should we be; where it whispers, we should not shout; but what it says plainly, we should boldly proclaim.”