Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2
Sometimes I think the entire known history of our race on this world is
encompassed in the seventh day or phase of the creation, and I think maybe the
Gods are now resting and mostly letting their plans play out.
Sometimes. Maybe.
No, there are problems with that idea, especially if taken too literally.
But,
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
There are certain senses in which things were not finished, particularly if we insist on wrapping all the stuff in chapter 1 up in six distinct intervals that are all past and gone when we start chapter 2.
Anyway, we can say that the plans and preparation were mostly finished over the course of the six days or phases, and God rested. And God says rest after work is a good thing.
How long that seventh phase lasted is another question, and whether Adam and
Eve were created within the seventh phase or after, is also not really
clear.
Oh, and verse 4 contains a case where a day is most definitely not a 24 hour period, or even a single rotation of any planet:
... in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ...
If that were "in the days" it would fit more easily into an interpretation of six literal days, but day here is singular.
I have heard that the word for day here in the original language -- or, rather in the language closest to original that we have -- is different from the word for the six days of chapter 1. But we're getting distracted.
(4) These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.Look at verse 5:
And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: ...
Here it is.
What can that be that was done in the six days, but talking about laying out blueprints and such?
Plans. The first six days were planning sessions.
Maybe. It sort-of works for me, although I do have the impression that primitive plants and animals were physically created during the planning sessions.
Why?
... and there was not a man to till the ground.
I can interpret this to mean that what grew in chapter 1 was wild, and that the plants in chapter 2 are more of the class of plants that might benefit from human attention.
Maybe.
I'm not sure what the
... for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, ...is supposed to indicate. Whether the first six days were all 24 hours or not, it doesn't make sense that there had been no rains of any form during the process. Particularly, when the waters below the firmament were separated from the waters above, precipitation of some sort had to have occurred.
So this is a question I put on the shelf. If the time comes that I need to know, I'm going to trust God to reveal it to me.
But God causes a mist to cover the ground, ...
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
This verse is one of the places were we can see the usage of the word soul to indicate the spirit and body of man as a single entity.
Dust of the ground?
Carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium,
iron, .... These are elements from which our bodies are made. They are also
prominent among the elements found in the dust of the earth.
Water, air, and the dust of the earth. What else would we be made of, if we were going to live on the earth and have bodies? Plants grow out of the ground, animals eat the plants and grow bodies out of the elements of the dust of the earth. We eat some of the plants, too, and sometimes we eat some of the animals. Our bodies also are made of the dust of the earth -- indirectly, but of the dust of the ground.
It has been suggested by certain people that the Gods ate of the plants that were growing and then made Adam the same way we make children. I'm not sure I should believe that, but I'm not sure I should not.
We are not Golem, of course.
Adam was told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because doing so would make him subject to death.
Certain of our religious philosophers tend to talk about our coming from the
presence of God to be born into this world, and they speak as if we were in
some state of perfection before we were born. We also talk about the Garden of
Eden as if it were a state of perfection.
Some people insist there is only one perfection. Is the absolute perfection of
God the only perfection? Or are there lesser perfections?
A number of ancient philosophers and astronomers (astrologers, at the time) perfected a geocentric model that was perfectly self-consistent. It proved not to match the real solar system very well, but it was perfectly self-consistent.
There are many things that are perfect in a limited sense, even though they do not match reality.
In a similar way, it is my understanding that we each attain a limited,
self-consistent sort of perfection as spirits before we are born into this
world. It's a limited sort of perfection precisely because we don't have a
physical body that can experience the things that would push us past our
limits.
After Adam is placed in the Garden, the less primitive animals are created and brought to Adam, and Adam gives them names. But animals don't provide the company that Adam needs, and the Gods borrow some genetic material from Adam, remove one of the genes (a "rib" in the genetic structure, as I see, but that may be just me) in Adams genetic makeup, and make Eve with the full set of genes.
This was part of the plan in the first place, but it was also part of what Adam had to experience, perhaps so we could understand how united the spousal union should be -- not just "one flesh", but entirely one in purpose.
Okay, I really can't justify the genetic theory about the rib business, but
I'm pretty sure no one can prove me wrong. Heh.
Again, the record doesn't say how long this takes. For all we know, Adam and Eve might have been in the Garden of Eden for hundreds of millions of years, and plants from the Garden itself might have spread over much of the surface of the earth.
Wait. Can plants spread without dying? Does it matter, outside philosophies derived from the interpretations of mortal humans of limited perfection?
On the other hand, if death truly was not part of the world until after Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, time in such a world would simply not have the same meaning it has in ours, and attempts to measure geological ages would result in meaningless measurements.
More to the point, time measured without a mortal observer is still different from time measured by mortals such as we are.
Chapter 2 has something that looks like a discussion of geography, but it does not match any geography I know of, unless, perhaps, the rivers mentioned became oceans after the flood, when the continents split apart. If that were the case, Adam would have been in the Garden of Eden in geologically very ancient times.
And why not? He was helping with the work of getting the earth ready for us to live on, too.
What Eden was eastward of is something I have not particularly figured out. Perhaps Moses was simply telling the Camp of Israel that Eden was not in Egypt, the wilderness, or Canaan. Someday, I will be able to ask God what the geography of the world before the flood was, and why it mattered to Moses and the people of Israel, and I suppose then I'll get better understanding.There's something we might miss in the last verse, if we are not too distracted -- Adam and Eve were clearly in a state of innocence. That's important to remember.
Genesis 3:
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