> However, there is a point I am curious about. When I looked up these
> verses in the New Revised Standard Version of The New Oxford Annotated Bible, I
> didn't find the idea of "after his kind" at all, but rather "plants yielding
> seed of every kind" and so forth. Does this mean that the "after his kind"
> translation in the older King James was not the best translation?
NRSV is not unique. Moffat & TEV are similar, & NIV has
"according to their various kinds."
The Hebrew in v.11 is _lemino_ which is literally "after (or
according to) his kind." "His" is a grammatical artifact - there is no
Hebrew neuter. It looks to me as if NRSV & similar versions have lost,
or at least weakened, the idea of offspring being like parent.
Another point: With the literal singulars of KJV one could
understand this as God creating (mediately!) a primordial TREE from
which all the types of trees we have today are descended. Thus there
would be considerable scope for evolution within a huge _min_ (which, as
Don notes, doesn't necessarily correspond to any of our current taxa).
NRSV seems to lose this possibility.
George Murphy