If there is one chapter of the Bible almost everyone knows, it is Genesis 1. God speaks, and the world appears, day by day. Most of us read straight on into chapter 2 without noticing that the story starts again.
Try a question before you read on. In Genesis, are people made before the animals, or after?
The first account: people come last
Genesis 1 opens in water and darkness. Before God says anything, there is "complete chaos," darkness over "the face of the deep," and "a wind from God" over the waters (Genesis 1:2). Then God speaks, and over six days the world fills up. Land animals come on the sixth day.
God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1:25
Then, last of all, people.
So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27
Male and female are made together, in one act. And nobody has a name. The Hebrew word here is adam, and in this chapter it means humankind, people in general. Eve is not named until Genesis 3:20. Adam first works as one man's name in Genesis 4:25.
The second account: the man comes first
At Genesis 2:4 the scene changes. There is no water now. The ground is dry, nothing has sprouted, and it has not yet rained. The maker also has a new name: not "God," but "the Lord God." And instead of speaking from above, he works with his hands.
then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Genesis 2:7
The Hebrew has a pun the English hides. The man is adam, and the ground is adamah. Then God plants a garden and puts the man in it. Only after that do the animals arrive.
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
Genesis 2:18-19
None of the animals is the right partner. So the woman comes last.
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Genesis 2:21-22
In Genesis 1: animals, then man and woman together. In Genesis 2: the man, then the animals, then the woman.
One more detail most of us skim
The second account has a seam of its own, inside the story. God gives the rule about the tree to the man, in Genesis 2:17, before the woman is made: "of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat." When the woman repeats it to the serpent, it has grown.
but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ”
Genesis 3:3
God never said anything about touching. The text does not say where she heard it.
Two ways to read the two accounts
Readers hold Genesis 1 and 2 together in two main ways.
One story, told twice. Genesis 1 is the wide shot of the whole week. Genesis 2 zooms in on the sixth day and tells how people were made, in more detail. Many readers take it this way. Some English Bibles translate Genesis 2:19 as "had formed," which puts the animals back before the man. The Hebrew is hard to pin down there. Many scholars read it as "formed," something that happens next, and the NRSVue does too.
Two accounts, set side by side. This is where most scholars land. Their reasons are the differences you just read: two orders of events, two names for God, two ways of making people, two starting scenes, one wet and one dry. Even the wording flips at the join, from "the heavens and the earth" to "the earth and the heavens" (Genesis 2:4). Careful readers began sorting the two apart more than three hundred years ago.
Those two chapters became the starting point for the best-known theory of how the first five books of the Bible were put together: the Documentary Hypothesis. It says those books were woven from older written sources, each known by a letter. In that view, Genesis 1 comes from a group of writers scholars call the Priestly source, or P, for its care for worship and the seventh day of rest. The garden story comes from a different writer. The classic theory calls that writer J, the Yahwist, because this source uses the name Yahweh, "the Lord," from the start. Many scholars today will only say "non-Priestly," because how to divide up the rest is still argued. We lay out the Documentary Hypothesis, and where scholars argue about it now, in a separate article.
Most scholars think the garden story is the older one, even though it comes second; when each was written is still argued. The two were probably joined after the exile in Babylon, and whoever joined them kept both. The same thing seems to have happened in the flood story, a few pages on, and it is one of the first things seminary students meet.
What the page keeps
Genesis does not choose between its two openings, and it does not explain how they fit. It sets them back to back and moves on. Which reading makes more sense of the text is yours to weigh, with both chapters open.
For further exploration
Three things to try with the text open:
- Read Genesis 1:24-27, then Genesis 2:7-22. List what gets made, in order, in each.
- Circle the name for God in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, then in Genesis 2:4-25. See where it changes.
- Read Genesis 2:16-17 next to Genesis 3:2-3. Write down every difference between God's rule and the woman's version of it.
Sources
- Genesis 1:2; 1:25; 1:27; 2:4; 2:7; 2:17; 2:18-19; 2:21-22; 3:3; 3:20; 4:25 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, introduction to Genesis and notes on Genesis 1 to 3
- Michael D. Coogan and Cynthia R. Chapman, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, chapters 3 and 4, on the two accounts of creation and the sources of the Pentateuch