page_title: Genesis creation narrative
section_title: Genesis 2:4–2:25
hierarchical_section_title: Genesis creation narrative / Genesis 2:4–2:25
caption_attribution_description: This is a part of a scan of an historical document: Title: Schedelsche Weltchronik or Nuremberg Chronicle
context_page_description: The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth of both Judaism and Christianity. The narrative is made up of two stories, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first, Elohim creates the heavens and the Earth in six days, then rests on, blesses and sanctifies the seventh. In the second story, God, now referred to by the personal name Yahweh, creates Adam, the first man, from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden, where he is given dominion over the animals. Eve, the first woman, is created from Adam and as his companion.
  Borrowing themes from Mesopotamian mythology, but adapting them to the Israelite people's belief in one God, the first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch was composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE and was later expanded by other authors into a work very like Genesis as known today. The two sources can be identified in the creation narrative: Priestly and Jahwistic. The combined narrative is a critique of the Mesopotamian theology of creation: Genesis affirms monotheism and denies polytheism.
context_section_description: Genesis 2–3, the Garden of Eden story, was probably authored around 500 BCE as "a discourse on ideals in life, the danger in human glory, and the fundamentally ambiguous nature of humanity – especially human mental faculties". The Garden in which the action takes place lies on the mythological border between the human and the divine worlds, probably on the far side of the Cosmic ocean near the rim of the world; following a conventional ancient Near Eastern concept, the Eden river first forms that ocean and then divides into four rivers which run from the four corners of the earth towards its centre.
  It opens "in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens", a set introduction similar to those found in Babylonian myths. Before the man is created the earth is a barren waste watered by an ’êḏ (אד‎); Genesis 2:6 the King James Version translated this as "mist", following Jewish practice, but since the mid-20th century Hebraists have generally accepted that the real meaning is "spring of underground water".
  In Genesis 1 the characteristic word for God's activity is bara, "created"; in Genesis 2 the word used when he creates the man is yatsar (ייצר‎ yîṣer), meaning "fashioned", a word used in contexts such as a potter fashioning a pot from clay. God breathes his own breath into the clay and it becomes nephesh  (נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎), a word meaning "life", "vitality", "the living personality"; man shares nephesh with all creatures, but the text describes this life-giving act by God only in relation to man.
  Eden, where God puts his Garden of Eden, comes from a root meaning "fertility": the first man is to work in God's miraculously fertile garden. The "tree of life" is a motif from Mesopotamian myth: in the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1800 BCE) the hero is given a plant whose name is "man becomes young in old age", but a serpent steals the plant from him. There has been much scholarly discussion about the type of knowledge given by the second tree. Suggestions include: human qualities, sexual consciousness, ethical knowledge, or universal knowledge; with the last being the most widely accepted. In Eden, mankind has a choice between wisdom and life, and chooses the first, although God intended them for the second.
  The mythic Eden and its rivers may represent the real Jerusalem, the Temple and the Promised Land. Eden may represent the divine garden on Zion, the mountain of God, which was also Jerusalem; while the real Gihon was a spring outside the city (mirroring the spring which waters Eden); and the imagery of the Garden, with its serpent and cherubs, has been seen as a reflection of the real images of the Solomonic Temple with its copper serpent (the nehushtan) and guardian cherubs. Genesis 2 is the only place in the Bible where Eden appears as a geographic location: elsewhere (notably in the Book of Ezekiel) it is a mythological place located on the holy Mountain of God, with echoes of a Mesopotamian myth of the king as a primordial man placed in a divine garden to guard the tree of life.
  "Good and evil" is a merism, in this case meaning simply "everything", but it may also have a moral connotation. When God forbids the man to eat from the tree of knowledge he says that if he does so he is "doomed to die": the Hebrew behind this is in the form used in the Bible for issuing death sentences.
  The first woman is created to be ezer kenegdo (עזר כנגדו‎ ‘êzer kəneḡdō) – a term notably difficult to translate – to the man. Kəneḡdō means "alongside, opposite, a counterpart to him", and ‘êzer means active intervention on behalf of the other person. God's naming of the elements of the cosmos in Genesis 1 illustrated his authority over creation; now the man's naming of the animals (and of Woman) illustrates Adam's authority within creation.
  The woman is called ishah (אשה‎ ’iš-šāh), "Woman", with an explanation that this is because she was taken from ish (אִישׁ‎ ’îš), meaning "man"; the two words are not in fact connected. Later, after the story of the Garden is complete, she receives a name: Ḥawwāh (חוה ‎, Eve). This means "living" in Hebrew,
caption: Seventh Day of Creation, from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel
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