The first story is like a prescientific approximation of a human scientific impulse, more primitive certainly, but the basic form of scientific thinking is embedded there. It is set up like a list that puts things into categories. Story number one is sort of “left brain.”
Story number two is less like an ordered observation and more like a situational drama. While story one is like a documentary, this one is like a sitcom. The man is created first, becomes lonely, and God creates a partner for him. The two stories speak to two different parts of human nature: the desire to catalogue and organize, and the desire for relationship. It is right and left brain thinking, side-by-side.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. If you were to write a story about the creation of the earth, would it be more like story number one or story number two?
2. The Hebrew tradition believes that human beings share the image of God. What do you think that could mean?
Read Genesis 2:4–25 again.
It is this second creation story that most people associate with the Bible’s creation account. God creates a garden and then Adam is created and is asked to subdue the garden, to tend it and take care of it. This was God’s original intention for humanity: to care for the earth. The name Adam comes from a Hebrew word adtham, for dirt or soil. He is created from soil, and then he will grow food from the soil, so there is this profound connection with the earth. Even if you read this story symbolically, human beings, like soil, are made of minerals. We share that in common.
Adam becomes lonely. Though God is with him in a special way, God is perhaps too different from Adam. God decides to create a helper for Adam, so God creates animals to keep him company. But this wasn’t suitable. He puts Adam to sleep and takes a rib from his side and forms a woman. Here, the story uses a different word for Adam, ish, which translates man. The woman is called isha, or from man. Later Adam gives her the name Havah, which means “life,” and that name eventually was pronounced Eve.
The number seven, after the seven days of creation, comes to represent a complete cycle, or perfection, and in time becomes designated as the “number of God.” The number six often represents humanity, because in the first creation story human beings were created on the sixth day.
God resting on the seventh day becomes the foundation for the larger concept of the need to rest. Thousands of years later, when God is giving the Hebrew tribe laws to shape their life, he commands they take the seventh day and rest.
The Hebrew word used for breath, ruach, is also used for spirit and wind. So the idea of God breathing into the nostrils of “Soil (or adtham)” eventually was expanded into a double layer of meaning. God’s breath is Spirit.
Lastly, there is some disagreement about the exact nature of the creation accounts. Are they literal historical descriptions or symbolic stories? If you try to track the general chronology of the history back to the time of Adam and Eve (you cannot track it precisely because it is prehistoric, or before written histories), then the earth is approximately 6,000 years old. Scientific method has observed the age of the earth to be about 3.4 billion years old. Which is it?
We will discuss these issues further when reading chapter 4 of Genesis. So put a pin in this topic and we will circle back around.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. In the creation account God rests on the seventh day. Do you or your family take a day of rest? If so, how? If not, why not?
2. Adam is tasked with tilling the garden and caring for the earth. Can you name some ways that you and your family help care for the earth?
Read Genesis 3:1–24.
This story is often referred to as the “fall of man” or the “fall of humanity.” The man and the woman are allowed to eat the fruit from any tree in the garden except one—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit, by the way, was not an apple. The story does not specify, so I wonder, “What fruit would possibly tempt you to disobey God?” When asking this question a few years ago, after a moment of serious thought a student very earnestly said, “Fried chicken.” It has thus been named in my class ever since.
Here is one way to illustrate this: You are at a family picnic. You hear a flutter of giggles behind you. You turn around and your three-year-old nephew is running naked in the sprinkler. Everyone laughs and giggles, snaps a few pictures to embarrass him in front of future girlfriends, but there is no real concern. Why? “Because the child is innocent and doesn’t know what he’s doing is inappropriate.”
Same setting, an hour later. Except this time, you hear awkward murmurs and gasps. Uncle Ted, who is sixty years old, is running naked through the sprinklers! People are scrambling to cover him up with blankets and escort him into the house. A weird tension comes over the picnic. Why? “Because Uncle Ted ought to know better!”
Uncle Ted is supposed to know that what he is doing is inappropriate. One is innocent, the other is not. In the garden story, being naked has a symbolic meaning. When they lost their innocence by gaining knowledge they did not previously have, life became awkward and complicated.
Why wouldn’t God want Adam and Eve to know good and evil?
There is pain involved when we lose innocence, especially when it is lost prematurely. The story suggests that God intended humanity to maintain innocence, at least for a while. Disobedience is defined, in this story, as jumping the gun on God. So a question for you: remaining within the “world” of this story, do you think God would have ever given the man and the woman the ability to know good and evil?
When talking about this story, I often ask fifth graders, who are ten years old, “Do your parents let you watch PG-13 movies?” It’s typically 50/50, but I press the ones who are not allowed. “Why not? What are your parents afraid of?”
And their answers are smart. “My parents don’t want me to see something that is bad because I might