Do all animals fear people, when the lion turns aside for none?

The two verses speak about different things, in different kinds of writing. Genesis 9:2 states the general order God set after the flood: wild creatures would hold man in fear and dread. That is a broad truth of experience, as Psalm 104 pictures the young lions withdrawing to their dens at sunrise when “Man goeth forth unto his work” (104:22–23). It never meant that no animal would ever stand its ground or attack: in the same speech God requires a reckoning for human blood “at the hand of every beast” (9:5), and Isaiah 31:4 pictures a lion that a crowd of shepherds cannot scare off its prey.

Proverbs 30:29–31 is a poem about things that are “comely in going”: the lion, the greyhound, the he-goat and the king. The lion is “strongest among beasts” and does not turn back ‘before anything’ (Hebrew mippenei kol); Gill reads this of a creature that does not go out of its way for any animal it meets. A poem on the lion’s bearing among the beasts does not deny that lions, as a rule, fear and keep clear of man.