Here’s a question to get us started. Since we all know that Genesis says that God created the world in six days, on what day did the Lord create Adam and Eve?
If you’re shaking your head in confusion that’s a good thing because it’s actually a trick question. The Bible speaks about God’s creation of the world occurring in six days in the first chapter of Genesis and on the sixth day, after creating all the animals that creep upon the ground, the Lord creates humans – male and female – in the image of the Deity. But Adam and Eve are not mentioned there. Instead, they come up in Genesis 2-3 where the Bible gives us a second version of the creation.
The lead description of the creation is a glorious poem featuring God as a master artist weaving order out of chaos through the power of His voice. (By the way, when I use the masculine pronouns for God, I’m not saying God is masculine. The One who created gender is surely beyond classification as male or female.) In the first three days God establishes the broad outline of the world: introducing light into the darkness (1), separating the waters of the sky from the oceans (2), and bringing forth the dry land for vegetation (3). God then uses days four through six to fill in the canvas with more detail: light becomes sun, moon and stars (4), birds fly in the skies and fish come to live in the oceans (5), and animals, with humans forming the triumphant finish, populate the dry land (6). At the end of each block of creation, God steps back to admire the work and note that it is good. If we as readers step back and ask ourselves what are the main points made here, we’d have to see that the discussion of “days” is actually a poetic device to demonstrate the orderliness of God’s creation.
If this is not enough to convince us that Genesis 1 is not meant to read as a science lesson, we have only to look at Genesis 2, which shifts the perspective of the creation story from God’s viewpoint to that of the first humans – Adam and Eve. (Think of zooming in on a spot on your computer screen). Here the order of things created changes from Genesis 1. The earth begins barren and only recently watered by underground streams when God forms the “man” (note that this is a single man – not the male and female humans of Genesis 1:27). God then creates a beautiful garden full of lovely and nutritious fruit-bearing trees for the man to tend. Yet, once the Lord places the man in the garden, God stands back and says, “It’s not good if the man is alone.” The Deity brings forth beasts and birds, but none of these is a suitable partner for the man until God shapes out of one of the man’s ribs a woman.
It’s easy to see these two creation stories as contradictory merely on the basis of the order of things created but that would be only a shallow, literal reading of the text. Taken as a pair, we see that the elements common to both versions stress that God is the master creator with a clear intention of making the world a good place for humans both to enjoy and to take care of. In addition, the two versions complement each other by highlighting two functions of God’s creation of gender: reproduction in Genesis 1 and companionship in Genesis 2.
It’s a very sophisticated form of literature on display here in the opening of Genesis. The same story is told twice in order to render a panoramic perspective of the creation (kind of like seeing it in an IMAX theater). If we try to read the Bible literally when the text does not call for a literal understanding, we miss the real point that the Bible is making.
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