Is it not possible that Genesis 2:19 means nothing more than that God gathered together the creatures He HAD ALREADY formed out of the ground? That seems plausible enough to me.
Read Genesis 2 carefully.
In verse 5, there are NO living things on the earth. No plants, no animals, no nothing. And the FIRST living thing God creates is The Man, in verse 7. AFTER this, God creates plants, rivers, etc., and puts The Man into the Garden of Eden to work the ground. And there's the description of the Rivers (which are actual rivers but they never meet ... further evidence that the author is saying, "Hey, folks, this is a myth, a story, hello...." It'd be like me writing about something that happened in "Chicago, Indiana." My audience would immediately know I was telling a story, because they all know that Chicago is in Illinois, not Indiana. Of course, someone from China reading the same thing, maybe 4,000 years in the future, may not realize that. They may see the city name, and think, "Woah, this must have really happened. I've heard of Chicago."
Anyway. Back to Genesis.
It's not until verses 18-19 that the Lord even considers any other animals. He doesn't want The Man to be alone, so he creates beasts of the field, birds of the sky, etc. He creates those out of the ground. It doesn't say, "God grabbed all the animals he had already created and brought them to The Man." It says "He formed them OUT OF THE GROUND." They didn't exist before.
Again, if you understand all the clues the author is giving you that it is a story, there is no conflict. I don't know why, but somewhere around the mid-18th-century, a few American Christians decided that they wanted to try to force Genesis to be literal rather than allegorical, as it had been understood for thousands of years up to that point.
The problem is, if you try to force it to be literal, it contradicts itself. You have to be a contortionist to "explain away" all the anomalies. "Oh, God created the animals, then he created man, then he had to create some more animals." It's utter nonsense, enough to make me think maybe the Catholic Church was right in saying common people shouldn't be reading the Bible. I mean, if that's what they get out of it...
No, I don't really believe common people shouldn't be reading the Bible. After all, I was rather common and uneducated when I started reading it, and I managed okay, as have millions of others. It seems to me its only people who have been brainwashed into thinking that it has to be literal who have this problem.
It's also problematic, because somewhere along the way, we are taught that if it isn't literal it isn't real. But for thousands of years, humans have understood "reality" differently. When my son says, "No, mom, I didn't break the glass. Someone else who looked exactly like me was clowning about, and he dropped the glass and it broke." Of course, I know what really happened. But my son's story is also kind of true. He is saying, in his tiny little way, that he knew goofing around while holding a glass was a bad idea, and that is why the glass broke. He is telling me -- though he may not fully realize it -- "Yes, mom, I broke the glass because I was being foolish and I'm sorry." He doesn't really think his story is going to fool me, he's not purposely lying to me. He's being a child, and telling the story from a child's mind. And I get that. That's why I tell him, "Well, you be sure to tell that child that it was indeed foolish to play with the glass, but it's all cleaned up now, and it's a good thing no one was hurt." And he knows that's my way of saying, "I forgive you." He may not fully understand it, but he knows it, in his child's mind. He groks it.
