So, days after God created Adam, he saw that he was lonely and then decided to make him a woman. But what did he think about who was supposed to keep him company? A chimpanzee? Koala bear? Not to mention that he already created animals in pairs, but for some reason he didn't create humans in pairs.

(June 1, 2026 at 6:08 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: So, days after God created Adam, he saw that he was lonely and then decided to make him a woman. But what did he think about who was supposed to keep him company? A chimpanzee? Koala bear? Not to mention that he already created animals in pairs, but for some reason he didn't create humans in pairs.

There’s nothing in Genesis 1 or 2 that says Eve was created ‘days after’ Adam. The myth in Genesis 2 is open to a degree of interpretation, but Genesis 1 explicitly says they were created at the same time.

Boru

How can that be when the text specifically mentions the loneliness of Adam without a companion.

(June 1, 2026 at 6:59 pm)Paraselene Wrote: How can that be when the text specifically mentions the loneliness of Adam without a companion.

The relevant passage from Genesis 1:

Quote:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earthand subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

And from Genesis 2:

Quote: 7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c]from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

But for Adam[f] no suitable helper was found. 21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs[g] and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib[h] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

There’s nothing there to definitively indicate the passage of days. It can be convincingly argued that, at most, the story says that Eve was created later on the same day as Adam.

And the text, in every translation, says that Adam was ‘alone’, not ‘lonely’.

Boru

I would wonder how Adam would know he was lonely when he hadn't experienced life with another person.

(June 1, 2026 at 8:02 pm)awty Wrote: I would wonder how Adam would know he was lonely when he hadn't experienced life with another person.

Also, sex hadn’t been invented yet, so it couldn’t be that he was watching the animals gettin’ busy.

Boru

"The Invention of Sex" is a pretty good title for genesis as a just-so story.

The modern belief that eve was created the same day as adam comes from exodus and hebrews. Exodus being part of the later priestly tradition along with gen 1 - hebrews being nt. Gen 2 is the older version of the ot story, jahwist. Oversimplified, the jahwist source represents folklore from about the 10th century - whereas the priestly source is the formalization of theology from the 6th century onward. There's an intermediary voice between them...or a conglomeration of voices, from about the 8th century, represented by isiah and others, that tells us that the modern belief is a misreading based on that formalization process. Where we learn that there were people before adam and eve - I cant remember offhand how many but it was some contractually important bit of numerology.

That a 10th century tribal god doesn't seem to know something that's obvious to us very likely had the same impact on a listener then. It was part of the hook. We (and they, then) as the audience know where this is going. The value or success of the tale is in how it brings these discordant and sometimes absurd elements together into a semblance of the world the listeners then believed in. It's a really familiar setup to folklorists. The thing to remember about egenesis and it's details is that the person writing it then was not telling the same story we read today after these centuries of revision and formalization. Not about the same god, not even about the creation of man. It was a god of a different character creating these very special people whose lives would...very quickly...become the prototype for the lives of the culture in question. The outcomes for their children explaining the macro forces present in the 10th-8th century window in said cultures experience.

Genesis is one of if not the best story in the whole damn book. Adam means red earth. Eve means source of life. Cain and Abel are farmer and shepherd archetypes, their names themselves being a description of their professions. The place they came from means well watered or steppe, maybe even pleasure or leisure. There's every reason to believe that the original telling wasn't even about all the animals they knew of - just the ones important to the garden. Consider this, in gen 2, the older version, we have one of the more specific lists of exactly what sorts of things god created in these categories of creation. Ornamentals and crops. Not all the trees, specifically those trees that were pleasant to look at or good for food. So too the phrase "birds of the sky and beasts of the field" is a well used one in near eastern cosmology and refers to agrarian species. So..no chimps, no koalas. Not an exotic zoo. Paradise as a clan based hill-holding society would see it.

Gen 1:30 is later apologism directly to this effect. Where a person from 400 or more years later, thinking about all these other things, starts to wonder exactly how it would work out that they lived there together for one minute, let alone one day. There needed to be some explanation for this older story where the god in question was not a dipshit, and was engaged in a much wider creative act. One that granted a more credible and exhaustive claim to political authority in the time of those later authors. A deed to a land still inhabited claimed by people who had never set foot there before, and in which they were massively outnumbered by those inhabitants. Aquinas would attempt the same thing with christian mythology and classical pagan thought that the priestly source worked for with respect to canaanite myth and babylonian tradition.

(June 1, 2026 at 7:49 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: And the text, in every translation, says that Adam was ‘alone’, not ‘lonely’.

Boru

I'm sure there's a Bukowski quote along the lines of "Not lonely, Lone. There's a difference."
This is the closest I could find to it: 

(June 1, 2026 at 11:23 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote:

(June 1, 2026 at 7:49 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: And the text, in every translation, says that Adam was ‘alone’, not ‘lonely’.

Boru

I'm sure there's a Bukowski quote along the lines of "Not lonely, Lone. There's a difference."
This is the closest I could find to it: 

Bingo lolly. It’s perfectly possible to be alone without being lonely.

Boru

I am always tickled by most, if not all, paintings of them having belly buttons.