Genesis: Chapter Two (Adam and Eve)

Wherein God rests and then changes history so that the creation of woman makes less sense.

At the outset, God creates man when “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth ... but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground – the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (2:5-7)

This strikes me as chronologically inconsistent. Coming off the heels of Chapter 1, where God creates the earth in a very specific order, this passage screams in direct opposition to previously made statements. According to the timeline we're given in Chapter 1, God created:

Night/day → Earth/sky → Land/sea → Shrubbery → Sun/moon → Animals → Man

However, according to Chapter 2, it goes a little more like this:

Night/day → Earth/sky → Land/sea → Man → Other stuff

That is, this passage claims that many of the objects the previous passage said were made before man had not actually been made by the time man was created. Which is it? As hot as the creation/evolution debate is in the US these days, it's kinda weird that the creationist side of the argument can't even get its story straight. The evolutionists can manage to keep it together when their proposition spans billions of years. The creationsts can't manage to keep track of six days.

2:8 says, “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.” Again, the Bible has a time sync issue. Suddenly, the author(s) have decided that yes, there were actually plants and vegetation and the like before God made man. This is getting hard to follow.

A particular famous tree is described in 2:9 as “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

2:10-14 mentions that the Garden of Eden is said to reside around the convergence of the Tigris, Euphrates, Pishon, and Gihon Rivers, a paradise with plenty of water to cool off and bathe in.

In 2:17, God tells the man, who still isn't named, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

I've always found this to be a particularly disturbing command. I've also heard this tree being referred to simply as “the tree of knowledge,” but even in its full description, it's still offputting. It's just that God is basically telling us not to know the difference between good and evil, or in the simpler form, we're just not supposed to know anything. We're supposed to remain unaware of how our actions affect others and just blindly do what God says, regardless of the outcome. Personally, I find that blindly doing what anybody says without seriously questioning the purpose is a huge failure of responsibility, especially in today's society where corruption exists in the highest and most respected of positions. When the president of the United States of America makes decisions blindly because God told him to do them, and he doesn't question those orders, we are being led by a total failure of a human being. Consider the perspective that God does not exist, and you'll realize that the USA, twice in the past decade, elected a dangerously schizophrenic man to run the country.

The first man finally gets named in 2:20. He's Adam, and he's lonely because the omniscient God who is so infallible conveniently created males and females of all other species and just forgot to do the same thing for humans (If you follow Time Thread Number One; following Time Thread Number Two bypasses this plot hole.)

God puts Adam into a deep sleep, removes one of his ribs, and makes a woman out of it. (2:21-22) Adam is unphased by this. God has good morphine.

God states through verses 2:23-24 that because woman was made from man, woman and man shall henceforth “become one flesh.” This is a really poetic way to say that male and female humans will have sexual intercourse with one another, something which should have been obvious if you're following Time Thread Number One, where other animals were created first. I guess that even if you follow Time Thread Number Two, there were animals around when woman was manufactured, proving that no matter how you slice it, God hates women and thinks they belong at the end of everything.

This chapter ends on a nonsequitur (2:25): “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.” This sentence does several things. First, it takes advantage of a previous sentence where it is said by no one in particular that every man shall depart his parents to marry a woman to draw the assumption that Adam and this new, unnamed woman are now married, despite the lack of any text specifying how that happened, and lending creedance to arranged marriages in the Christian faith (which I think are mostly a thing of the past, society having spoken out loudly against it in more recent years). Second, it makes sure we know that they are in total nudity, but don't feel bad about it. Contrasted against Genesis Chapter Three, it seems silly that Christians in modern society make such a big deal about nudity and sex in movies, novels, and on television. If we're all supposed to be nude, and there isn't supposed to be any shame in that, why the big stink?

Chapter Three