Judeo-Christian Reinterpretations
Many of the elements which Christians today take as part and parcel of the Creation/Eden story are in fact the result of later interpretation: Genesis 1 was not originally concerned with establishing God as creator of the world (that was taken as given), or with explaining just how he created it (ancient peoples were not interested in that question), nor does the Eden story ever say that the serpent in the Garden is the Devil, or that Eden is a heavenly garden where the righteous will live eternally, or even that this is the story of the Fall of man.
The process of redefinition began when the original Hebrew text was translated into Greek for Greek-speaking Jews of the last few centuries BCE. A notable example is the word adam. In the original it signified both mankind in general and the specific first man. The authors of the Greek version took anthropos for the undifferentiated adam, and transliterated the Hebrew as Adam when a single first man seemed indicated, thus transforming adam, "man", into a personal name. Unfortunately for later readers, there was no way Greek could capture the word-play that linked adam, man/mankind, with adamah, the material from which he or they were formed.
The idea that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) is central today to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism - indeed, the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides felt it was the only concept that the three religions shared. Yet it is not found directly in Genesis, nor in the entire Hebrew bible, and is found no earlier than later Judaism. The Priestly authors of Genesis 1, writing around 500-400 BCE, had been concerned not with the origins of matter (the material which God formed into the habitable cosmos), but with the fixing of destinies. This was still the situation in the early 2nd century CE, although early Christian scholars were beginning to see a tension between the idea of world-formation and the omnipotence of God. By the beginning of the 3rd century this tension was resolved, world-formation was overcome, and creation ex nihilo had become a fundamental tenet of Christian theology.
Greek thought also led to a major reinterpretation of the underlying cosmology of the Genesis narrative. The biblical authors conceived the cosmos as a flat disc-shaped earth in the centre, an underworld for the dead below, and heaven above. Below the earth were the "waters of chaos", the cosmic sea, home to mythic monsters defeated and slain by God (Exodus 20:4 warns against making an image "of anything that is in the waters under the earth"). There were also waters above the earth, and so the raqia (firmament), a solid bowl, was necessary to keep them from flooding the world. During the Hellenistic period this was largely replaced by a more "scientific" model as imagined by Greek philosophers, according to which the earth was a sphere at the centre of concentric shells of celestial spheres containing the sun, moon, stars and planets.
The opening words of Genesis 1 sum up the authors' view of how the cosmos originated: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"; Yahweh, the god of Israel, was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals. Later Jewish thinkers, adopting ideas from Greek philosophy, concluded that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit had shared in the creative act. Christianity in turn adopted these ideas and identified Jesus with the creative word: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).
Read more about this topic: Genesis Creation Narrative