Getting to Know the Story

Doing several deep readings of Genesis 2:4-3:24 reveal to me some details of the Garden of Eden story I had never noticed before, and I came away with some questions.  But, when one compares Genesis 2 to Genesis 1 even more things begin to stick out.  Genesis 2, beginning at verse 4, can easily be viewed as a creation story.  It begins, "This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (2:4).  It is interesting to compare these two chapters as two creation stories.  I put Genesis 1 and 2 side-by-side on my computer screen and they have striking differences, and it almost seems like two different people penned them. 

Although they both declare that God created the earth and heavens, they give God different names.  This may be due to the translation I use (NIV).  In chapter 1, God is called God (1:1) and in chapter 2 God is called the Lord God (2:4).  I don’t know if this distinction is made in the original Hebrew, but it seems that either the NIV translators gave God two names or the writer did.  Since I do not think NIV translators would have given God two names without reason, nor would an ancient Hebrew writer, I hypothesize that chapter 1 and chapter 2 had different writers.  Each used a different name for God in Hebrew, like Yahweh versus Elohim.

A comparison between the two chapters showed me more differences than similarities.  Genesis 1 is a rather detailed account of God’s creation process, carried out systematically in days.  Each day is a new piece of the world, as humans understand it.  God is the main character of the story and the focus is on God’s actions and feelings toward what he creates (“…and God saw that it was good.” 1:10). 

The chapter feels like a poem or song.  After God creates a new kind of thing, be it light, fish or land, the text reads: “And there was evening, and there was morning—the ____ day” (1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31).  In addition to this, the chapter rings with the words “and God saw that it was good” (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).  The repetition of these phrases and the presentation of creation as a systematic process give this chapter a rhythm which could be likened to a piece of poetry. 

Chapter 2 has qualities that make it more narrative-like.  First I must mention that Genesis 2:1-3 seem out of place.  The content makes it seem like it belong with chapter 1 but to me the way it is worded does not sound like chapter 1.  2:4 begins what sounds like another version of creation.  God becomes the Lord God and the order in which things are created changes.  The “heavens” are only mentioned in verse four and no where in the chapter does it mention the Lord God creating the sun, moon or stars.  It begins with the barren ground, before rain had fallen or the ground had been tilled and before anything had grown (2:5).  Streams first watered the earth and after this the Lord God created a man from the ground by breathing the breath of life into him (2:6-7).  After this creation, the Lord God planted a garden in Eden and placed the man there (2:8).  Genesis 2:9-14 give a description of the garden and its location.  By verse 14, the writer has clearly showed us that he is writing a narrative.  He has given a setting, the Garden of Eden, and introduced the protagonist, Adam.  The rest of the story takes place in the garden and revolves around the experiences of Adam. 

The order of creation continues to differ from the order in chapter one.  In verse 9, the Lord God creates the plants and in verse 19, the animals.  The Lord God’s motivation for creating animals is also different.  Instead of being made for their own sake and later being given to man, they are created specifically to be potential helpers to man.  Adam names them in verse 20 and because he did not find a suitable helper among them, the Lord God creates a woman.  If there were no Genesis 3, one might be tempted to think that Adam and the woman walked into the sunset together and lived happily ever after.   It sounds like a good story to me.  After all, if man is created systematically, along with the rest of creation, and is simply mentioned, it is not so much a story as a stated fact.  Eden and the garden are not even mentioned in chapter 1.  This is another quality that make chapter 1 seem more like a poem about how creation happened and chapter 2 seem more like a narrative centered around humans.

Popular belief is that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible and that Genesis 1 and 2 are both telling the same story with different aspects of it elaborated at different times.  This could be argued but another case could be made.  These two stories could be considered competing, even contradicting, creation stories within the same religious tradition.  When one looks at these stories as they are, without influence from the rest of the Bible, this is what they appear to be.