In the second chapter of Genesis, God rests on the seventh day. God declares the seventh day holy, which means set apart, because it is the day he rested from his labor. Taking a break from work is part of the rhythm of life from the beginning.
Then the story rewinds. The writer describes an earlier time when there were no plants because it had not rained, and only a mist watered the ground. I’m confused. We just read that plants showed up on the fourth day, fish and birds were on the fifth day, and animals and humans arrived from the Earth on the sixth day.
Now we see the Lord making man from the dust of the Earth and breathing life into him. This is a different version, very intimate, very hands-on. Then the Lord planted a garden in Eden and put the man in it. Here again, we see God moving around on the Earth in a very involved way. It feels like a special project.
The order has changed, too. Here, it is man, plants, birds, and animals. Perhaps these stories are doing something other than what we want them to do. So far, there are three versions of the creation story, two in Genesis and one in Job. To be fair, no person was there to view what happened, so these stories come from either a vision, a dream, or a revelation and were repeated for centuries before Moses wrote them down. These are truths that give people an explanation that is meaningful to them.
God planted many trees with edible fruit, and in the middle of the garden is the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why do we even have that tree?
A river flows out of the garden that waters the garden and then splits into four rivers. I love that God‘s garden is self-watering. I have to drag my hose across the lawn and then I’ve got it all fixed up with tubes and valves and everything leaks.
The four rivers are the Pishon that flows to Havilah, the Gihon that flows to Cush, the Tigris that flows to Assyria, and the Euphrates. We are familiar with the last two, but the first two are lost to time. Cush is an old name of Ethiopia, but that’s far away. Rivers change course over time, and place names change too. The Bible describes the lands as being full of gold and jewels, so perhaps treasure hunters have used these clues to try to find them. Either way, the two rivers, we do know go from the mountain borders of Turkey and Syria through Iraq, out to Kuwait to the Persian Gulf. The land is still referred to as Mesopotamia.
Back to the story, God tells the man that he may eat from any tree for food, except for the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because then he does, he will surely die.
God says it would be good for the man to have a helper, and forms all of the animals out of the ground, bringing them to the man. The man names all the animals, but a suitable helper is not found. What will they do next?
