R Evans, Genesis in Context - 3

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3. The Second Creation Account

NB: not integrated into wiki

In Genesis 2 verse 4, there is a significant change in emphasis. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens’”.

In Genesis 1 we are told that the heavens and earth were made in six days: we are now told that those six days comprise a single “day”. Accompanying this change from “day” in a literal diurnal sense, to “day” in the sense of a period of time in which something happens, is a change in order; from heavens preceding earth, to earth preceding heavens. This verse constitutes a link, indicating continuity of the narrative while signifying a fundamental change in focus.

At this point, our traditional, dogmatic response is to regard Genesis 2 as an expansion of events in Genesis 1, and to insistently read into the accounts an appropriate reconciliation. This subjective preconception, based on an entrenched theology of Creation, actually hinders our understanding.

If we deliberately set aside all preconception, and approach the account objectively, while comparing it to Genesis 1, we immediately perceive some fundamental differences:

1. The account takes place in a local, barren wasteland, rather than in a universal chaos.
2. The setting is in a “day 3” context, on land that is dry but not yet vegetated.
3. The man is made first as a singular male, and plants and animals are formed afterwards.
4. Birds are formed out of the land, rather than out of the waters of the sea.
5. The woman is formed last, and out of the man, not directly from the dust of the earth.
6. In the first account, all vegetation bearing seed is permitted for food. In the second account, consumption from one fruiting tree is specifically prohibited.
7. In the first account, mankind is created as the final and crowning act, and sent forth from God, with the express purpose of reproduction and of domination. Male and female are created simultaneously, and we are not told how many of each are formed. In the second Creation account, one man is specifically created as the first and focal act, and immediately sequestered, with a role of service and of personal relationship to God.
8. In the first account God creates and names, signifying absolute authority; in the second God creates and Adam names, implying a delegated authority.
9. In the first account God is Elohim, the mighty creator; in the second He is Yhwh Elohim, the God of the Covenant Name, reinforcing the representation of God in a relationship role.

See also →
	Genesis 2:18-20 Concordist (mis)translation

The traditionalist is immediately presented with some problems, and has some intense wresting to do to make the text fit his theory. He is forced by his preconceptions to place the second account in a Day 6 context. Consequently, though retaining the past tense of “God created man” in verse 7, he must read the Hebrew grammar in the pluperfect tense in verses 8 and 19 when referring to the garden and to the animals (“had created”): despite the fact that a prior existence of plants and animals would conflict with the empty wilderness setting of the introduction.

Added to this, if the creation of Adam and of Eve are to be shoehorned together into a sixth-day context, he has to accept the challenging logistics of Adam’s creation, coming to terms with existence, naming all the birds and animals, falling asleep, and waking to find himself a married man, all within the latter part of a single twenty‑four hour day.

The real difficulties, openly apparent to the objective reader, are not chronological but exegetical.

There is also an implicit difference of spatiality and of scale. Whereas the Genesis 1 account is macrocosmic, the second account is microcosmic. Whereas Genesis 1 begins with a universal watery waste in a state of darkness, Genesis 2 begins with a local, terrestrial wilderness, presumably illuminated, and contextually set within the macro-cosmos. Context indicates that this second account is not a part of the universal ordering; it is an account of the spiritual heart of the Creation; the shaping of the temple of God’s presence, and the creation of its priesthood.

When read in context, the two accounts are complementary not contradictory. Contradiction is only engendered when we read both as describing the same event: conflict being a shortcoming of interpretation and not of content. Thus Jesus could refer to both accounts in a complementary context — with man and woman being created, and the holy purpose of wedlock — without necessarily implying conflation.

The second account begins, like the first, with a passive introduction. In poetic point and counterpoint we are given both scenario and purpose.

The land is devoid of pastoral shrubs, and devoid of pastoral herbs,

because:

God had not yet sent rain on the land, and there was no man to till the ground.

yet:

the ground was watered by a mist . . . 

• The terms “shrubs of the field” and “herbs of the field” are indicative of vegetation related to human use; the word “field” (sadeh) denoting agricultural or hunting land.

• The word for rain (matar) is widely used in Scripture of causative provision from heaven; of rain, of blessings, and of judgments from God

• The word “till” (abad) also means to serve; either in the sense of serving the ground, of serving others, or of serving God.

These connotations are crucial to the context.

The poetic scenario is pregnant with implication. Two things are absent. Two causes are given. One is mitigated. The symmetry is destroyed, the reader left hanging. Something is missing.

The problem was not a lack of water; as there was provision from the earth, in the form of a mist that watered the ground. Therefore, the lack of verdure was not the function of any lack of natural process. This is completely at odds with natural creation, where the lack of a man is irrelevant; given water and land, vegetation will proliferate.

The subtle implication is that there was no provision from heaven, because there was no man with whom God could have a providing and productive (that is, a spiritual) relationship. It was the man who was missing, and who is the crucial focus of this second creation. The second Creation account describes the creation of God’s Priest, and the establishment of God’s temple, or walled pleasure‑garden, sequestered from the secular world.

First of all, God forms the man. “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (nepes hayyah).”

Here we have the recipe for Adam, the essence of his being. It is no different to that of the animal creation. In Genesis 1:20, at the command of God, the earth brought forth living beings (nepes hayyah): cattle, birds, and creeping things, and also mankind.

Ecclesiastes 3v18 confirms that men and animals are made to the same formula: “The fate of man is as the fate of beasts. One thing happens to both. As one dies, the other dies also. They all have one ruach (breath, spirit). Man is no better than a beast. All go to one place, all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows if the breath of the son of man goes upward or the breath of the beast goes downward? (rhetorically, what difference does it make?)

In Adam the formula of life is specifically defined: dust + breath = living being (soul).

The writer of Psalm 104 confirms the equation of life by subtraction and addition (Psalm 104:29-30) speaking of beasts and, by inference, man:

“You take away their breath, they die and return to dust” (living being – breath = dust)

“You send forth your breath, they are created” (breath + dust = living being).

Job 34:14 confirms that if God “withdrew his spirit and breath, all humanity would perish together; and mankind would return to the dust”.

Death is, by definition, the separation of breath from body, resulting in the dissolution of the soul and the cessation of all conscious existence.

In the second Creation account, the priest‑man in Eden is specifically created to the same formula as animals and man in the first Creation: a natural, perishable, physical, body‑and‑breath being, entirely capable of death. This is the specific state of Adam from the moment of his perfect creation.

The Garden

See also →
	Geography of Eden

God then plants a garden—the original meaning of the word gan is a walled or fenced enclosure—and puts the man in it. At its centre he places trees for food, and two unique trees: a tree of life, and a tree of knowledge. A river flowed from Eden, watered this garden, and from thence became four distributaries. The man was put in this garden, to serve it (abad) and to guard it (shamar).

God then creates animals and birds from the ground, and brings them before Adam, as potential companions; though none prove suitable. Adam asserts his authority by the act of naming all animals, all the birds of the air, and all living things (2:20). But what he needs most of all is a companion with whom he can develop an intellectual relationship, something not possible with animals; a relationship that will reflect and reinforce his relationship with His Creator. So God makes woman out of man as the culminating creative act, and brings her to the man.

Adam’s response is one of immediate identification with his new companion. Recognising the unique, derivative bond between himself and his wife, and speaking of himself in male gender (ish) instead of in generic human terms (adam), the man names her (naming is claiming), confirming both possession and comprehension in a triple affirmation that has its full impact in Hebrew: This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh, she is ishah, of ish.

The nature of this bond, unique to the second creation account, is taken up in a narrative interpolation by the writer of the text: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”.

Three points are worth noting here:

• Firstly, that Adam had no mother and father in the natural sense, so this moral lesson is an anachronistic insertion, a comment on the narrative added by the inspired author.

• Secondly, that it is the man who is to leave his family and bond to the wife: the antithesis of our European traditions, but the foundation of Jewish tradition. Isaac went into the tent of Rebekah to seal their union; for the same purpose, Leah did not come into Jacob’s tent but Jacob entered hers.

• Thirdly, the unique nature of Eve’s formation from Adam, as opposed to the contemporary formation of woman and man in the first creation, becomes the basis of the marriage bond.

Marriage is a Divine union, originated in the Temple‑Eden of God.

As the woman was created after the command not to eat, Adam had to transmit the commandment to his partner, so that they would both be one in purpose. He was to instruct her, as God had instructed him. Under his care she became a help for Adam, a partner at his side, suitable as his companion in every way, in the keeping and service of the Garden. The Hebrew word for help, ezer, is frequently used of God as Man’s helper and rescuer. The woman was intended from the outset to be a companion in equal, a confidant, an assistant, a rescuer, a counterpart in a mutual partnership, and not a subservient assistant. Both were to be priests before God, a gender equality in the Divine service.

The Eden Temple

In the second Creation account, God establishes His presence among men, through a priesthood set up in His temple on earth. The presence of both man and woman, with the inherent ability to procreate, implies that the priesthood was to be generational.

The identity of the Garden of Eden as a primeval temple is echoed throughout Scripture. In the latter chapters of the book of Ezekiel we read of a future Temple, whose entry is in the east (43:4). From this temple issues a river of life-giving water. On its banks grow trees, bearing fruit for food, and leaves for healing (Ezekiel 47). In the ultimate future City-Temple of Revelation 22, a river of water of life issues from the throne of God. On both sides of it are the trees of Life, yielding fruit month by month, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations. Both Ezekiel’s temple and the future temple- City have confining walls, with an inside where God is present, and an outside.

See also →
	Genesis 2:8-14

Out of Eden likewise flowed a river, watering the garden as it went, which was then parted into four distributaries. The sense of the text implies a downstream divergence, rather than an upstream confluence. This implication is affirmed in the prophecy of Zechariah (14:8-9): “And in that day living waters will flow out of Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and the other half toward the western sea; it will be in summer as well as in winter”.

See also →
	gather at Rivers of Eden; also Geography of Eden!

Strictly geographical readings of Genesis struggle to define a practicable diverging four-river system. Tigris and Euphrates are the two great rivers of the Chaldean lowlands: however they do not originate from a common source.

Josephus (first century AD), citing Hebrew tradition, identifies Pishon as the Ganges in India, and Gihon as the Nile in Egypt. Augustine likewise affirms that these two rivers are the Nile and the Ganges (Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 4^th Century AD). However these rivers are geographically separate from the other two.

Bede, a 7^th Century English monk, states that Pishon is the Ganges, Gihon is the Nile, confirms the identity of Tigris and Euphrates; acknowledges that all flow from completely disparate headwaters, and in an effort to reconcile these traditional identifications with Scripture, postulates an underground river system from Eden as the solution to a common source.

In support of the traditional identification of Gihon, Cush is a Biblical name for Ethiopia, on the Nile; and according to a National Geographic article on the Blue Nile printed in 2000, the name Gihon is still used by local people for the river to this day.

Conversely, literal interpretations which require the Gihon and Pishon to physically connect with the Euphrates and Tigris seek a confluence rather than a divergence, and appeal to locations closer to Babylon for the identity of these rivers.

Our natural Western impulse is to look at things logically, and to try to find a four-river system that either diverges, or, failing such a geographical implausibility, converges (although a convergence is not strictly true to the text). Perhaps in seeking a physical resolution, we may be completely missing the point. By comparison with other scriptures (Ezekiel 47, Revelation 21), what is described is not literal geography, but the spiritual concept of the Eden temple-garden being the source of water of life for all of the then-known world.

Man and woman in the first creation of Genesis 1 were given complete freedom. No command was given, no rules laid down; instead they were simply told to spread out, procreate, and to have dominion over all of creation. Likewise they were free to eat of anything that grew- instincts natural to every man. No limits or controls are mentioned. This is the created state of the natural world.

Conversely, Adam was created with explicit personal responsibility and requirement. He was immediately sequestered, and tasked with the duty of guarding and keeping the Divine temple-garden: a responsibility capable of shortfall. More critically, he was issued with a specific command in the negative: while he could eat of everything that grew, there was one precise exception; and disobedience to that requirement was punishable by death. While procreation was a possibility, it was not a command: the emphasis in Eden was on mutual companionship and support.

This was the innocent state of the created priesthood of God.

Next: Sin enters the Temple →

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