Q: I am unsure of my faith and have started reading the Bible recently. In Genesis 8:17 God tells Noah to “Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee … that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.” My question is this: If everything on earth needs to eat in order to breed and grow and carry young, and animals need to either eat plants or animals, then how would all the species of animals survive? Let’s say a lion needed to breed. The lion will eat an elk or another animal and thus, the elk will not have a partner to breed with and won’t be able to “multiply” like God said for the animals to do. Am I missing something? This doesn’t make sense to me. – Adam

Answered by Fr. Edward McIlmail, LC:

It’s good to remember that the Bible has different types, or genres, of writing.

Some parts are metaphorical, some are symbolic, some are historical but in a stylish way.

In the case of Genesis 8, we need to be careful not to read it as a newspaper account of what happened. Scripture is much deeper and richer than that.

The verse about being fruitful and multiplying echoes the words of Genesis 1:28, when God blesses the man and the woman. The idea here is that the post-Flood age is a kind of new creation; God is starting over, so to speak, to revive the world.

This basic idea holds even if, as some commentators speculate, the Flood was a regional phenomenon (in that case, lots of animals elsewhere in the world carried on as normal).

So, don’t read this Genesis passage in too literalist of a way. Genesis is not a biological textbook; it’s trying to get across a spiritual and theological truth: that God hasn’t given up on mankind and that he can renew the face of the earth.

To get a good overview of Scripture, check out Father Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” videos.

I hope that some of this helps. Count on my prayers.