It was never meant to be taken literally. The most sophisticated creatures of all – man and woman – first appear on the scene after everything else is already up and running (26-28).īy contrast, Genesis 2 is so memorable precisely because it is allegorical.
These, of course, come only after the life-sustaining vegetation had been created (verses 11-12) which in turn only comes after the water and light issues are resolved. The Torah clearly tells us about dinosaurs (something which science first discovered in 1841), and that all living creatures emerged and evolved from the water in the sequence we pretty much accept to this day (verses 20-21). One can easily see a big bang in verses 1-3. The chronology of Genesis 1 – assuming we don’t take the term “day” literally as 24 hours – is not all that different from what science has subsequently established. Yet it doesn’t, for the same reason, perhaps, that no one would argue that Midrash preceded the Torah. Surely the more advanced telling should supersede the first by appearing later in the text.
Clearly Genesis 1 is more sophisticated than Genesis 2 which is the stuff of Sunday school Bible stories (and what most ordinary folk think of when they think of Creation) as opposed to the first which does not quite lend itself to comic book distillation or illustration. If we were to treat the two as cosmologies we should wonder why they appear in their designated order. It is hardly meant to be taken literally, certainly are not as history. However, I would like to argue that there is no conflict between the two creation stories, as the first is indeed the Torah’s cosmology while the second is merely a midrash, a legendary sequence that serves a didactic purpose as do most midrashim. I have no intention here of taking a position in this debate. The rabbis go through all sorts of contortions to somehow reconcile these two narratives, while the heretics use them as (further) proof that various human hands were engaged in the Bible’s authorship, with a final canonization that fails to airbrush out much of the scar tissue that is evidence of crude editing. Genesis 1 is a detailed, orderly, virtually scientific synopsis of creation, while Genesis 2 is primarily focused on the human element the creation of man, of woman, original sin and exile. The two accounts differ markedly in style, content and chronology. Rabbis, scholars, critics, scoffers, saints and heretics have long been obsessed with the presence of the two conflicting creation stories in Parshat Bereishit the first starting with Genesis 1:1 and ending with Genesis 2:3, and the second starting with Genesis 2:4 and concluding with the ejection from Eden at the end of chapter 3 – although I would argue it ends with the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4:16. The entire process requires six epochs called “days”. These evolve into birds and dinosaurs, followed by more sophisticated vegetation, more advanced animals and, finally, our ancestral prototypes who differ from everything that preceded them, and whose minds and creativity more closely reflect the image of God. From the oceans there emerge creatures that roam the earth. A big bang is followed by the emergence of light, followed by water which then enables the appearance of grass and life-sustaining vegetation. They are the culminating creation following an organic natural progression that is pretty much in lockstep with our ideas of evolution. In the Genesis 1 narrative, man and woman are created in the image of God not out of a clod of dirt or a human rib.
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