1Then the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their array. 2And God completed on the seventh day the task He had done, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the task He had done. 3And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, for on it He had ceased from all His task that He had created to do. 4This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
On the day the LORD God made earth and heavens, 5no shrub of the field being yet on the earth and no plant of the field yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not caused rain to fall on the earth and there was no human to till the soil, 6and wetness would well from the earth to water all the surface of the soil, 7then the LORD God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature. 8And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and He placed there the human He had fashioned. 9And the LORD God caused to sprout from the soil every tree lovely to look at and good for food, and the tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge, good and evil. 10Now a river runs out of Eden to water the garden and from there splits off into four streams. 11The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12And the gold of that land is goodly, bdellium is there, and lapis lazuli. 13And the name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through all the land of Cush. 14And the name of the third river is Tigris, the one that goes to the east of Ashur. And the fourth river is Euphrates. 15And the LORD God took the human and set him down in the garden of Eden to till it and watch it. 16And the LORD God commanded the human, saying, “From every tree of the garden you may surely eat. 17But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” 18And the LORD God said, “It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him.” 19And the LORD God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name. 20And the human called names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the heavens and to all the beasts of the field, but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. 21And the LORD God cast a deep slumber on the human, and he slept, and He took one of his ribs and closed over the flesh where it had been, 22and the LORD God built the rib He had taken from the human into a woman and He brought her to the human. 23And the human said:
“This one at last, bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh,
“This one shall be called Woman,
for from man was this one taken.”
24Therefore does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh. 25And the two of them were naked, the human and his woman, and they were not ashamed.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
4. As many modern commentators have noted, the first Creation account concludes with the summarizing phrase in the first half of this verse: “This is the tale [literally, these are the begettings] of the heavens and the earth when they were created,” these two paired terms, “heavens” and “earth,” taking us back in an envelope structure to the paired terms of the very first verse of the Creation story. Now, after the grand choreography of resonant parallel utterances of the cosmogony, the style changes sharply. Instead of the symmetry of parataxis, hypotaxis is initially prominent: the second account begins with elaborate syntactical subordination in a long complex sentence that uncoils all the way from the second part of verse 4 to the end of verse 7. In this more vividly anthropomorphic account, God, now called YHWH ʾElohim instead of ʾElohim as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yatsar instead of baraʾ, “create”), blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib. Whatever the disparate historical origins of the two accounts, the redaction gives us first a harmonious cosmic overview of creation and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins.
7. the human, humus. The Hebrew etymological pun is ʾadam, “human,” from the soil, ʾadamah.
16–17. surely eat . . . doomed to die. The form of the Hebrew in both instances is what grammarians call the infinitive absolute: the infinitive immediately followed by a conjugated form of the same verb. The general effect of this repetition is to add emphasis to the verb, but because in the case of the verb “to die” it is the pattern regularly used in the Bible for the issuing of death sentences, “doomed to die” is an appropriate equivalent.
18. sustainer beside him. The Hebrew ʿezer kenegdo (King James Version “help meet”) is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means “alongside him,” “opposite him,” “a counterpart to him.” “Help” is too weak because it suggests a merely auxiliary function, whereas ʿezer elsewhere connotes active intervention on behalf of someone, especially in military contexts, as often in Psalms.
22. built. Though this may seem an odd term for the creation of woman, it complements the potter’s term, “fashion,” used for the creation of first human, and is more appropriate because the LORD is now working with hard material, not soft clay. As Nahum Sarna has observed, the Hebrew for “rib,” tselaʿ, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.
23. The first human is given reported speech for the first time only when there is another human to whom to respond. The speech takes the form of verse, a naming-poem, in which each of the two lines begins with the feminine indicative pronoun, zoʾt, “this one,” which is also the last Hebrew word of the poem, cinching it in a tight envelope structure.
24. Therefore. This term, ʿal-ken, is the formula for introducing an etiological explanation: here, why it is that man separates from his parents and is drawn to join bodily, and otherwise, to a woman.
25. And the two of them. But characteristically, the narrative immediately unsettles the neatness of the etiological certainty, for the first couple are two, not one flesh, and their obliviousness to their nakedness is darkened by the foreshadow of the moment about to be narrated in which their innocence will be lost.