How many creation stories are there in the book of genesis

It can also refer to a non-Hebrew god or gods, angels, or even human judges. Outside of the Bible some form of that word is found throughout the ancient Near Eastern world. It is usually translated LORD small caps because scholars are not sure how the name would have been pronounced. This suggests their disconnection from Yahweh. Last week we saw that Genesis 1 is more universal in its scope and appeal, whereas Genesis 2 is more earthy.

The names of God used in these chapters further supports this distinction. In Genesis 1, God creates as a sovereign monarch giving orders from on high. He separates and divides, places the lights in the heavens, names, and blesses his activity. He then rests, observing from above a job well done.

In Genesis 2 he creates in a more down-to-earth hands-on fashion. Yahweh does not speak life into existence from on high. Rather he forms the man from the earth like a potter he also forms the animals. To animate this former lump of earth, God breathes life into him. He plants a garden. In Genesis humans Hebrew adam are created on the sixth day. These humans are both male zakhar and female neqeyvah and they are created en masse and simultaneously. In Genesis 2 one male adam is formed from the ground adamah.

Then later, in a separate creative act, one woman ishah is formed from the man ish. Genesis 1 speaks of the mass creation of humans male and female at one time. Genesis 2 begins with one man, then one woman from the man in a separate act. The difference in vocabulary reflects the difference in perspective. One thing that these two stories have in common, though, is their high view of humanity. This distinguishes the biblical creation stories from other stories of the ancient world. We will look at this more in following posts.

Here, we will note how the two biblical creation stories depict differently this high view of humanity. For some scholars this reflects the ancient practice of kings placing statues of themselves in distant parts of their kingdoms. As the images of God, humans are placed on earth to represent God and rule for him by being given dominion over what God has made. Genesis 2 presents humans not as royal figures but as servants in the garden. The Atrahasis Epic has humans as slaves of the gods, but this is not at all what Genesis 2 is getting at.

John Walton has pointed out that the Hebrew terms underlying these words are priestly language for tending to temple duties. When he takes a stroll in the garden , he was not beaming down from on high to make a guest appearance. It is his garden, his sanctuary. He dwells there. Adam is allowed to share that space with Yahweh. The difference in how humanity is depicted is one of the more significant differences between the two stories, which is why I left it for last.

It is very clear that these two stories are not saying the same thing. I mentioned this in a previous post and it will come up again: Genesis 1 deals with universal creation whereas Genesis 2 and what follows is more limited in scope.

But even though these two stories are clearly different, they are to be read in concert. Genesis 2 presumes Genesis 1, and Genesis 1 is not complete until the creation of adam in Genesis 2. Genesis 1 and 2 were originally two distinct ancient creation stories. I am jumping the gun a bit. Some of this must be fleshed out more in subsequent posts. But for now, here is the bottom line: holding the distinctiveness of the two stories before us will actually help us see why the final editors of the Old Testament put them next to each other.

If we minimize the differences, we simply will not be able to appreciate why the Old Testament begins with two such distinct stories. In my next post, I will illustrate how other ancient Near Eastern creation stories help us see the distinctive purposes between the two biblical stories more clearly.

Join us to receive the latest articles, podcasts, videos, and more, and help us show how science and faith work hand in hand. At this point v. The NIV opts for the pluperfect in order to push the creation of the garden back before the creation of the manto preserve the sequence of Genesis 1.

The same point holds for v. Genesis 2 has them created after the man, but the NIV again uses the pluperfect to push the creation of animals back before humanity to harmonize the sequences of the two creation stories.

Here too the NRSV preserves the simple past. Immediately after the first creation account, the priest inserted a second story, a version of the ancient tale that was first told centuries earlier around desert campfires. The deity in this second story is a personal god with human-like emotions, the Lord of the Plantation. This God takes a paternalistic interest in the first human, his very special creation. Proclaiming, "It is not good for the man to be alone. Adam and Eve anger God by eating a forbidden fruit, but they are nonetheless permitted to have sex and reproduce.

From this first union of man and woman, the writer explained, have come all of us. Before the time of Moses, most cultures and religions showed relatively little interest in explaining the origins of the cosmos and life on earth.

We are conditioned to assume anything that is, once was not—but that assumption was not generally shared in the ancient world. A brief survey of major cultures and religions reveals the paradigm-shattering nature of Yahweh. The early Chinese, for example, seem never to have given the question of creation serious attention at all. Hindus pondered creation, but for them creation seemed less a riddle to be explained than it was a cause for awe. The Vedas, sacred hymns in Sanskrit written between and B.

Hindus thus reverse western notions of creation: nothingness is not transformed into everything; everything has emerged from a Oneness that was there at the beginning. For the Buddha, too, the question of creation was one without answers. The epics begin with a world populated by fully mature gods and goddesses. While Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians look primarily inward for the meaning of life, the Creator-God of Moses invites speculation as to the nature of man, salvation, and the beginning and end of time.

It is especially in the theology that owes its existence to Moses that the theory of evolution presents serious threat. The most defining belief of the Christian West until the early twentieth century was that of a God who created the earth and humans, and who guided the course of history.

Does that God die, or does He retreat to the gaps of still-unanswered questions? Prior to the time of Moses, most people thought of themselves as instruments or playthings of gods. Moses—himself a kind of creator—helped changed this arguably pathetic conception people had of their role in the world. Indeed, he identified it as the source of the scientific theories and hypotheses that would one day come to threaten the very religious concepts he fathered.

Without Moses, in other words, Darwin would never have been possible. Lynn Margulis thinks humans are, essentially, a colony of closely associated bacteria. The human story, as Margulis first saw it, began about 3. Confined within the large cells, the bacteria transformed into swarming elliptical membrane-filled bodies called mitochondria.

With the formation of mitochondria began the flow of a river of DNA that sweeps through three billion years to include us all. According to Margulis, each one of the hundred trillion cells in the human body is an enclosed garden of specially tamed and always multiplying bacteria. Not only is every man not an island, in the vision of Margulis, he is in essence a community of communities. The mitochondria perform essential functions, such as allowing chain reactions to occur that are critical to breathing and digestion.

Mitochondria, with their own simple DNA that is not affected by sexual mixing, come from our mothers only. The female-only transmission of mitochondria, coupled with its slow rate of genetic mutation, make its DNA ideal for tracing and dating maternal ancestry. Researchers in the s used computers to analyze samples of DNA drawn from diverse women from all over the globe—Chinese, African tribeswomen, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, Europeans.

The researchers discovered that the family trees of these women all led back to Africa. Remarkably, the analysis demonstrated that genetic differences among the various people within Africa all are twice as great as the differences between all other population groups. This strongly suggests that all the population groups outside Africa are descended from a small band of humans that left Africa —probably about 50, to 80, years ago.

In a sense, we are all Africans. The ancestral human population that lived in Africa started to split up roughly , years ago, when the mitochondrial tree makes its first branches within the African continent. The very root of the mitochondrial tree seems to lie in the northwestern Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. The mitochondrial research matches nicely with recent genetic research using the Y chromosome, transmitted exclusively by males, which also points to southern Africa as the home of Adam.

Unlike the Genesis version of human origins, however, the Y chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve that our genetic trees trace back to did not have the planet to themselves—there probably, in fact, were thousands of other humans living at the time.

Moreover, other humans had lived and died long before they did. All we know is that these two humans, alone among the population of their time, can claim an unbroken line of sons and daughters that persists to this day.

During the high renaissance of Greek culture, in the mid-third century B. Never before in history had so massive an exercise in translation from one language to another been attempted. Impetus for the translation project came from the large Jewish colony in Alexandria , many of whom held important commercial positions in the city.

Jews in Alexandria , understandably, wanted the Law read in the synagogues to be in the tongue of the people. They probably recognized another important benefit of a Greek translation: for the first time, the Greek-speaking, non-Jewish world could be introduced to their history and faith.

What happened after the seventy-two scholars reached Alexandria is a subject of debate, but what follows is the somewhat suspect traditional account. The elders arrived bearing a copy of The Law written in letters of gold on rolls of skins. And we confess that this editorial work was inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. Genesis 1 and 2 have been put together for a reason—despite their divergences.

How should we think of the relationship of Genesis 1 to Genesis 2? One approach is to think of these two differing depictions of creation as balancing each other. Whereas the first account Gen 1 pictures God as more transcendent, speaking creation into being by his word, the second account Gen 2 portrays God as more immanent, forming the human from the dust of the ground like a potter working with clay , and conversing with humans.

And there is certainly validity, and much to value, to this approach. Another approach is to think of Genesis 2 as an expansion of the account of human creation on Day 6 in Genesis 1.

This is also plausible, though we would still have to deal with the contradictions in the order of creation events in both accounts particularly the creation of the man in Gen 2 before plants, animals, and the woman.

However, there is another way to think of the relationship of Genesis 1 to Genesis 2. What follows in the book of Genesis is a compressed account of human history, which developed out of the heavens and the earth. It is significant that while God sets up the initial conditions for the world in Genesis 1, separating realms and calling creatures into existence, no created thing with the exception of the earth in Gen is described as actually doing anything in Genesis 1.

Even humans, to whom God has entrusted dominion, do not actually govern the animals, or multiply and fill the earth in the parameters of the first creation story. Although Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 likely had divergent origins, we can think of their current relationship as that of call and response. In Genesis 1 we find God calling the cosmos heaven and earth, and all that is in them into existence. As the first episode Gen — of that history shows, it was a mixed bag. Of course, we will need to read beyond the creation accounts of the first two chapters, on into the rest of Genesis.

There we will find a profound analysis of how things have gone wrong through human disobedience Gen 3—4 , a disobedience in which we are all implicated. And we will come to understand that God has never given up on his creation, but has been working from the start to bring redemption, especially through the call of Abraham and his family to be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth Gen —3 —a trajectory that culminates in the coming of the Messiah Jesus.

Join us to receive the latest articles, podcasts, videos, and more, and help us show how science and faith work hand in hand. A discussion about the doctrine of creation and a look at a few theologians and how they have influenced the conversations around faith and science.

Ted Davis brings a thoughtful reflection on the life and legacy of John Polkinghorne, one of the early pioneers in the advocacy of the harmony between science and faith. John Walton asks us to consider a theatre production and all its components and apply the same ideas when we interpret Genesis.