First, as always, the chapter presented, unedited and in its entirety, straight from the English Standard Version of the Bible.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground,
6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—
7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.
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11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.
13 The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush.
14 And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,
17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
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21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
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At this particular point, Biblical literalism has already taken a nose-dive off a cliff. In numerous places, the second chapter of the Bible contradicts the first; the order of creation is completely mixed from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2. For example, as discussed in the previous post, Genesis 1 has non-human animals created before mankind. Genesis 2 changes this order completely, with God creating man (but not woman; the inequality starts early in Hebrew scripture) before any other animals (2:7, 2:18-22).
I am wholly sympathetic to the idea that this is actually a completely separate Creation story, or a completely different interpretation, but one has to wonder how literal truth and competing interpretative narratives can possibly coexist in the same document.
Moving on to verse 2:10-2:14; it is striking to me how regional this creation story really is. It centers wholly around the fertile crescent; a single river is split into four, and creates the great rivers of the world; nevermind that there are longer, faster, wider, and more-fertile rivers on other continents, but that the ancient Hebrews didn't know about them. Clearly a people touched by the word of God would have been able to write a line or two about great lands that were more than just a few hundred miles from Mesopotamia.
In 2:15, God creates a garden in Eden, and tells Adam to keep it tended. He creates two magical trees that Adam is not permitted to use; one is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and one is the tree of life. To make this point we have to get slightly ahead of ourselves to Genesis 3:22, where it becomes clear that the "tree of life" is actually a tree that grants eternal life.
Here God blatantly lies to Adam; in 2:17, he tells the only man in the world that if he eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he will surely die that very same day; but as we all know, Adam does in fact end up eating from that tree and he doesn't die as he was promised. Some might argue that this "death" is metaphorical, as it introduces original sin, but again I point out that the word "literal" has a very specific meaning, and metaphor is typically not permitted. It all seems very possessive and jealous, keeping knowledge and godhead from mankind simply because God didn't want any rivals to his autocracy.
The real beef I have with this chapter comes in 2:21-22. An indubitable symbol for the subjection of women exists in the story that Eve was only created because Adam wanted her to be, and only as a companion to him, not as a being with a purpose from God in her own right. If Adam was not created, then Eve would not be; if Adam was not lonely, then Eve would not exist. From his needs, she sprang; and so isn't it obvious that she should surrender all her wants and desires in order to fulfill his? Indeed he made the ultimate sacrifice in surrendering one of his own ribs so that she might live (though God seemed perfectly capable of making every other living thing out of dirt up until that particular point). As man was made in God's image and to serve God, so woman was made in man's image and made to serve man (2:23-24).
It is particularly strange that Adam pontificates about parents in 2:24, as parenthood is up to this point a foreign concept for him, and probably for every animal on the face of the earth. All of them were created in an act of split-second conjuration, and so birth, sex, and childhood are all non-existent until the second generation springs up, and if all this went down in seven days, there couldn't possibly be enough time for that. And yet Adam declares that man shall from that day forth leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, though none of those three words would really have any meaning to him whatsoever.
Hilariously, some people even today still believe that the Bible is so inerrant that men have one fewer ribs than women. Though this was proven to be abjectly false in the 15th century, the belief still persists among those Christians who value tradition over knowledge, and who pride themselves on indoctrination instead of rationalism.
2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground,
6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—
7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.
13 The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush.
14 And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,
17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
At this particular point, Biblical literalism has already taken a nose-dive off a cliff. In numerous places, the second chapter of the Bible contradicts the first; the order of creation is completely mixed from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2. For example, as discussed in the previous post, Genesis 1 has non-human animals created before mankind. Genesis 2 changes this order completely, with God creating man (but not woman; the inequality starts early in Hebrew scripture) before any other animals (2:7, 2:18-22).
I am wholly sympathetic to the idea that this is actually a completely separate Creation story, or a completely different interpretation, but one has to wonder how literal truth and competing interpretative narratives can possibly coexist in the same document.
Moving on to verse 2:10-2:14; it is striking to me how regional this creation story really is. It centers wholly around the fertile crescent; a single river is split into four, and creates the great rivers of the world; nevermind that there are longer, faster, wider, and more-fertile rivers on other continents, but that the ancient Hebrews didn't know about them. Clearly a people touched by the word of God would have been able to write a line or two about great lands that were more than just a few hundred miles from Mesopotamia.
In 2:15, God creates a garden in Eden, and tells Adam to keep it tended. He creates two magical trees that Adam is not permitted to use; one is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and one is the tree of life. To make this point we have to get slightly ahead of ourselves to Genesis 3:22, where it becomes clear that the "tree of life" is actually a tree that grants eternal life.
Here God blatantly lies to Adam; in 2:17, he tells the only man in the world that if he eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he will surely die that very same day; but as we all know, Adam does in fact end up eating from that tree and he doesn't die as he was promised. Some might argue that this "death" is metaphorical, as it introduces original sin, but again I point out that the word "literal" has a very specific meaning, and metaphor is typically not permitted. It all seems very possessive and jealous, keeping knowledge and godhead from mankind simply because God didn't want any rivals to his autocracy.
The real beef I have with this chapter comes in 2:21-22. An indubitable symbol for the subjection of women exists in the story that Eve was only created because Adam wanted her to be, and only as a companion to him, not as a being with a purpose from God in her own right. If Adam was not created, then Eve would not be; if Adam was not lonely, then Eve would not exist. From his needs, she sprang; and so isn't it obvious that she should surrender all her wants and desires in order to fulfill his? Indeed he made the ultimate sacrifice in surrendering one of his own ribs so that she might live (though God seemed perfectly capable of making every other living thing out of dirt up until that particular point). As man was made in God's image and to serve God, so woman was made in man's image and made to serve man (2:23-24).
It is particularly strange that Adam pontificates about parents in 2:24, as parenthood is up to this point a foreign concept for him, and probably for every animal on the face of the earth. All of them were created in an act of split-second conjuration, and so birth, sex, and childhood are all non-existent until the second generation springs up, and if all this went down in seven days, there couldn't possibly be enough time for that. And yet Adam declares that man shall from that day forth leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, though none of those three words would really have any meaning to him whatsoever.
Hilariously, some people even today still believe that the Bible is so inerrant that men have one fewer ribs than women. Though this was proven to be abjectly false in the 15th century, the belief still persists among those Christians who value tradition over knowledge, and who pride themselves on indoctrination instead of rationalism.
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