Many years into my former life as a pastor, and many years after I had earned two degrees from a Bible College, I read a simple statement that said that the Bible’s first book, Genesis, begins with TWO creation stories, one that happens in water and one that happens in a desert. I had never considered that before, but I realized immediately that the author was right.
Of course I was familiar with the stories the author was talking about. They are contained in the first three chapters of Genesis. But I had always considered this text as a single story, “The Creation Story”, one of the most important stories not only in the Bible but in the modern-day culture wars.
I had noticed significant differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2–3. As a minister, I had explained this by saying that Genesis 1 is the big picture of creation, and Genesis 2–3 zooms in to give more detail about the creation of humans and animals. But when I looked closer, I had to admit that I would never have seen them as a single unified story if they weren’t in the Bible and therefore (to my way of thinking at the time) exempt from scrutiny.
Let me highlight some of the differences.
Story One is contained in Genesis 1:1–2:3¹ and covers the well-known six-day creation account, with a day of rest for God on the seventh day. Story Two runs from Genesis 2:4 to the end of Genesis 3, and contains the equally well-known story of the Garden of Eden where God forms the woman from the man’s side. It tells of the serpent in the garden, the forbidden fruit, and the expulsion of the man and the woman from the garden. Both stories speak of the creation of animals, plants, and humans. But they deal with these matters in very different ways, using very different styles, for very different purposes.
And (significantly) each story uses a different name for God. Story One speaks of God with the word Elohim, which is not a proper name but a plural noun that denotes divine beings, much like the English word ‘god(s)’. Elohim is rendered ‘God’ in English Bibles.
Story Two calls God by the proper name Yahweh, which is rendered “LORD God” in most English Bibles. For context, when the Bible later forbids taking “the name of the LORD your God in vain” (Exodus 20:7), it is this name, Yahweh, that it mentions.²
Story One begins with Elohim and water:
In the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters (Genesis 1:1–2, NASB³)
There is no hint of the much later theological idea of creation ex nihilo, from nothing. Instead, Elohim will pull order out of preexisting chaos. He will push aside the primeval waters which represent the frightening dark unknown, and will bring forth light, and life of every kind, and order in every way.
Story Two starts with Yahweh and a desert. This story begins shortly after the creation of the heavens and the earth. There is no water and no apparent life. But there is the dust of the ground, which will be Yahweh’s building material.
Story One describes creation as a six-day event, plus an additional seventh day on which Elohim rested. Story Two says explicitly that it is telling us about “the day” that Yahweh created the heavens and the earth: “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God (Yahweh) made earth and heaven” (Genesis 2:4).
Story One is intensely orderly. In seven days, Elohim 1) called forth light and separated it from darkness, 2) created a livable space between the waters above and below (some have likened this new world to a snow-globe-like space, surrounded on all sides by water, 3) separated dry land from water and spoke into existence all manner of plant life, 4) created the sun, moon, and stars to move about on the roof of the dome which held back the waters above, and to mark out days and seasons and years, 5) created birds and sea animals, 6) created land animals and humans, and 7) took a day of rest, which isn’t technically part of creation, but is certainly part of the story of Elohim’s ordering of things. Elohim sanctified the seventh day as a special day.
In Story Two, Yahweh doesn’t work through a structured plan (as Elohim does in Story 1). He’s more experimental. Yahweh takes a step, then evaluates the results, then takes another step. He makes a man. He plants a garden, and puts the man there to cultivate it and tend to it.
Then Yahweh steps back (so to speak) and evaluates his work and says: “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
At this point, it is fairly clear (unless your translation obscures it⁴) that Yahweh now creates the animals and birds and brings them before the man.
The man gives them names. But there is more going on here. This part of the story is intended to be understood as a search for a suitable companion for the man. Here’s the brief description in the NASB:
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” And out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field, but for Adam⁵ there was not found a helper suitable for him (Genesis 2:18–20).
Note how differently Story Two describes creation. In a barren world, Yahweh formed a man. Then he planted a garden and put the man there to care for it. Then, since the man had no companion, Yahweh began creating animals and brought them to the man, who named them all. But “for Adam, no suitable helper was found”.
If we allow Story One and Story Two to stand on their own, we can’t help but notice how Story Two differs from the six-day, orderly creation of Story One. And why not? They are making different points about God and humans.
But if it is necessary to harmonize the two stories — and it is necessary for many Christian evangelicals who take these stories as entries into a historical record — then the thing to do is to hammer and bend the texts so they sort of sound like they’re saying the same thing. The typical evangelical approach (which I used to apply) is the one I mentioned at the start — that Story Two gives us more details about the sixth day of Story One — even though the two accounts have very little in common.
So, back to Story Two. There is no suitable helper for the man, so Yahweh puts him to sleep and removes a rib from his side, and fashions a woman from it.
Now we are getting to the different objectives of each story. In both stories, humankind is portrayed as a special part of creation. In Story One, Elohim brings most of creation into existence with his command (“Let there be…”). But when it comes to humans, there is a different tone. Elohim says: “Let us make humankind in our own image”. And then it says: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).
Story Two says nothing about the man being made in God’s image, but it does have its own poignant way of expressing the elevated state of humanity. When Yahweh made the man, he formed him from the dust and then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living person.
But there is a big difference between the two. In Story One, the image of God applies to “male and female”. In Story Two, it is only the man who receives the divine breath of life. The woman is fashioned out of the man’s body as a companion and helper. This is exactly the lesson the apostle Paul takes from this story in 1 Corinthians 11:7–9 where he says: “For a man should not have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake”. Notice how Paul rolls the stories into one, drawing the concept of God’s image from Story One and everything else from Story Two.
The biggest difference between the two stories is this: Story One shows us the goodness of creation (“and Elohim saw that it was good.”) There is no garden of Eden in Story One, no forbidden fruit⁶ nor any notion of the man and woman as childishly innocent (“naked and unashamed”). Every living thing has its place, whether in the sea or on land or in the air. The moon and stars mark out the portions of the year. The rising and setting sun marks out the days for labor and the day for rest. (These things became very important religious matters later in the Bible, which helps us locate in time the author of Story One). It is a good world, freshly made, unspoiled, full of life, and divinely ordered.
By contrast, Story Two begins (figuratively) with a loaded gun on the table, with the seeds of disaster already planted in the garden in the form of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “On the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die”, Yahweh tells the man immediately after creating him and putting him in the garden.
Story One has ended for now, but Story Two moves on to tell of a serpent in the garden who entices the woman to try some of that forbidden fruit. The details of that story are for another time, but let me mention the crushing consequences for the woman and the man, since they help us see the purpose of Story Two. Because of their disobedience, God declares that he will multiply the pain of childbirth for the woman, that her desire will be for her husband and her husband will rule over her. As for the man, God will curse the ground, and the man will have to work hard for his food until the day he returns to the dust. As for the serpent, he’ll be condemned to crawling around on the ground, eating dust. He’ll become a fearful and sneaky enemy to the man and the woman.
And these penalties aren’t just for this man, this woman, and this serpent. Their descendants will suffer the same fate. Which brings us to the purpose of the stories.
Story Two answers questions like: Why is life so hard? Why do people have to work so much just to survive? Why do women suffer and often die in childbirth? Why are there snakes that sometimes kill our livestock and our little ones? Why do men and women get married? Why is the man always the boss, not only at home, but everywhere? Why do we suffer and die?
In answer, Story Two says: “Well, God created the man first, breathed the breath of life right into the man’s nostrils. God made the woman later, and it was different. He made her out of the man’s rib, and he made her to be his helper. That’s her purpose. And life wasn’t always so hard. God gave them a beautiful garden to live in, and to cultivate. But the woman and the man couldn’t resist. They ate that fruit. So God punished them, punished us all. He cursed the earth and made childbearing difficult and dangerous. So our ancestors are to blame for the way things are. And truthfully, if we had been there, we probably would have done the same. So don’t think that God punishes the innocent. We’re all to blame. We deserve what we get.”
It’s the kind of story that, if you encountered it in a different book, you would understand that it wasn’t history, but rather a kind of story that you might tell around a campfire, one that is designed to give an imaginative explanation about why things are the way they are, and to defend the status quo. It’s also a story that can plant some profoundly damaging ideas in culture. And it has.
Story One thinks on a grander scale. While Story Two is about everyday life (marriage, hard work, suffering, and trying to make a living ), Story One is thinking about humanity’s place in creation. It says that God created a beautiful and orderly world, and every part of it has a place. Humankind is the pinnacle of life because humans are made in God’s image and given dominion over all living things. And yet, the story says, there is a God who is higher. He made everything, and in the process of doing that, he showed that the things other people worship as gods — heavenly bodies, rivers, trees — are subordinate to him. And, very importantly, God put his lights in the heavens to mark the times — times for holy festivals of religious observance and sacrifice, times to plant and harvest, days to work and a day each week on which no work may be done. This is God’s order, and it is good. You will do well to observe its boundaries.
I’ll say once more that if we encountered these stories in another place, we would quickly know that they were designed to (among other things) define boundaries, prescribe proper behavior, and control people. Which is exactly what the stories have been used for down through history, right up to the present moment. Anyone who advocates for gender equality, or for the right to divorce (or any right at all), or who questions gender norms, or champions a woman’s right to vote or to make decisions about her own body — can be (and have been) directed to these stories of why things are the way they are.
The Bible speaks with many voices from many perspectives, and not every text agrees with every other. This was not obvious to me in my ministry days because I was committed to an idea of the Bible that allowed it to speak with only one voice. How fascinating it is, then, to find such diversity in the first two chapters.
NOTES
[1] In case you aren’t familiar with biblical notations of chapter and verse, Genesis 1:1–2:3 refers to chapter 1, verse 1 through chapter 2, verse 3 of the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. Chapters and verses (and, in many cases, the titles of books) were added to the text long after the books were written, and sometimes (as is the case here) don’t reflect the natural breakpoints in the text.
[2] The use of two “names” for God is a fascinating and important part of identifying and understanding the two stories as they appear and reappear throughout Genesis and into Exodus. You can see even in an English Bible the terms “God” and “LORD God” used in different section of Genesis (including in the account of Noah and the flood in Genesis 6–9, where sections bearing one name or the other provide conflicting or repeated information — a sign of two similar stories from different sources being woven together by a later editor). This is no small theological point, because when we get to Exodus, the writer of Story One tells us that “God (Elohim) spoke further to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord (Yahweh); and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by My name, Lord (Yahweh), I did not make Myself known to them” (Exodus 6:2–3). As we have seen, “Yahweh” is the name for the Lord in the Garden of Eden (Story Two) which goes on to tell us in Genesis 4:26 that in the days of Adam’s son Seth, people began to call on the name of Yahweh.
If we came across these facts in a different book, we would be open to the idea that a later editor wove together two (or more) religious traditions that often dealt with the same topics in different (sometimes conflicting) ways. In my view, seeing the creation stories in this light opens up the splendid richness of the text and helps us to begin to understand the Bible as it is, rather than as the mythical document we want it to be.
[3] All Scripture quotes are from the NASB, the English translation known as the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved. The NASB is a reliable and somewhat literal translation that generally does not obfuscate the difficulties in the original text. Other popular English Bibles tend to hide these difficulties, which I think has the effect of giving the reader false confidence that their preferred understanding (often an evangelical one) is correct.
[4] The New International Version, the one I used as a minister, obscures the timing of when God created the animals in Genesis 2:19 when it adds the word “had”: “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals…” (emphasis added). This makes it appear certain that God had already created the animals, which is more in line with Genesis 1, but which is not expressed in the text.. Most other translations let the difficulty stand, but the NIV (here and in many other places) smooths over difficulties, apparently (in my opinion) to appeal to evangelical readers.
[5] This is the first time the NASB calls the man Adam, and it is a judgement call on the part of the translators, since in Hebrew the word for “man” is the same as the proper name “Adam”.
[6] Genesis 1:29 says: “Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you…”