Genesis Creation Narrative - Genesis 2:4-24

Genesis 2:4-24

Genesis 2–3, the story of Eden, was probably authored around 500 BC as "a discourse on ideals in life, the danger in human glory, and the fundamentally ambiguous nature of humanity - especially human mental facilities." According to Genesis 2:10-14 the Garden is located 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.

The Yahwistic creation account opens "in the day 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 ed (Genesis 2:6); the KJV translated this as "mist", following Jewish practice, but since the mid-20th century it has been generally accepted that the real meaning is a 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, 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, a word meaning life, vitality, the living personality; man shares nephesh with all creatures, but only of man is this life-giving act of God described.

Eden, where God puts his Garden of Eden, is 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 the hero is given a plant whose name is "man becomes young in old age," but the plant is stolen from him by a serpent. There has been much scholarly discussion about the type of knowledge given by the second tree, whether 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 reflect 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 it appears as a geographic location: elsewhere, notably Book of Ezekiel 28, 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 set phrase 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, a term which is notably difficult to translate, to the man. Kenegdo means "alongside, opposite, a counterpart to him", and ezer 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 his authority within creation.

The woman is called ishah, Woman, with an explanation that this is because she was taken from ish, meaning "man"; the two words are not in fact connected. Later, after the story of the Garden is complete, she will be given a name, Hawwah, Eve. This means "living" in Hebrew, from a root that can also mean "snake". A long-standing exegetical tradition holds that the use of a rib from man's side emphasizes that both man and woman have equal dignity, for woman was created from the same material as man, shaped and given life by the same processes. In fact the word traditionally translated "rib" in English can mean also mean side, chamber, or beam.

Marriage is monogamous ("wife", not "wives": in Judah at the time Genesis was canonised the issue of marriage, polygamy and divorce was a burning one) and takes precedence over all other ties. The end-point of creation is a man and a woman united in a state of innocence, but the word "naked", arummim, looks forward to the "subtle", arum, serpent about to be introduced in the next verse.