either way, it doesn’t change what is important about what God is saying about Creation.
This I agree with absolutely. While I think there is a contradiction in literal order of events as recorded in the two chapters I don't actually think this creates any real problem, unless one is trying to make a TV show about creation based entirely on the biblical text. It happens that I don't buy into the idea that the creation narrative is meant to be science, and instead feel that God is really revealing that he alone is the creator and that all things come to be out of his goodness. Because of that, contradictions in such details don't demonstrate anything to me except that the bible text has been protected beautifully since any editor would likely try to clean those things up.
again just to make sure i’m being understood, i find absolutely no contradiction, anywhere in the Bible. in this case, to my mind there are two possible correct readings that i know about: verb tense or just that God is bringing the wildlife back to Adam, both introduce no contradiction.
ultimately one of those or another i haven’t thought of is the One historically correct meaning.
may God bless you.
and one other thought. if you know how logical systems work (cause and effect back to first causes and propositions linked formally with logic) and are falsified, you realize that a true contradiction that falsifies one proposition in the system, falsifies the whole system. thus an *apparent* contradiction that doesn’t invalidate the whole system, is a clue to you that it is not really a contradiction. so a single real falsification would introduce chaos and confusion in the whole. and that confusion would be readily apparent. not something you’d have to split hairs over parsing out.
Which is why one principle of textual criticism is that the "dissonant" version of a text is usually more likely to be the original, or at least closer to it. If scribes are changing the text deliberately, which we know they did, they will be much more likely to try to harmonize the texts than to try to make them dissonant.