Week 1 Genesis 2
A long time ago a guy told me Genesis was screwy because it told two different creation stories. So it left me asking which one was the “real” story? Creation Story #1 or Creation Story #2?
I figure the answer is: both. I think it works something like this…
I saw an educational video where a guy was discussing a painting. It’s a picture of four people in a 1940s American diner. The inside is brightly-lit but outside the street is pretty dark & totally empty.
The guy doing the video suddenly focused on a very small detail of a couple sitting together – the left hand of the woman and the right hand of the man. The thing the guy talked about was the distance between the hands and what that meant.
None of the viewers complained that the guy was jerking them around and showing two different pictures. There was the one big picture…and then a smaller explicit detail.
And it looks to me like Creation Story #2 in Genesis 2 is a detail of Creation Story #1 in Genesis 1.
The Genesis writer concludes Creation Story #1 by saying: this is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.
It would have helped if he’d then said something like: now I’m going to focus your attention on a smaller detail of this big story. But he didn’t. He left me to dope that one out for myself.
Note: quote from Genesis 2:4 (NLT). The painting is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.