Christian answering questions.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

You're overlooking another factor: when the story starts over, in Genesis 2, the story refers to God by another name. It's pretty clear that this is a cut-and-paste job by a group trying to "align" multiple traditions. It's one of the things that triggered investigation into the Documentary Hypothesis in the first place.

ah... No.

Genesis 1 actually ends on the seventh day in Genesis 2:3 Genesis 2 actually starts out in verse 4:

4 This is the story about the creation of the sky and the earth. This is what happened when the Lord God made the earth and the sky. 5 This was before there were plants on the earth. Nothing was growing in the fields because the Lord God had not yet made it rain on the earth, and there was no one to care for the plants.

So a learn-ed man would ask what day did God make earth and sky but no plants, and rather than read some douche's commentary to tell the less learn-ed man what to think the less Learn-ed man would simply go back to Genesis 1 and look for Himself rather than seek out an over convoluded theory that pushes an agenda the more learn-ed man wants to adopt. This is what He would find:

The Second Day—Sky
6 Then God said, “Let there be a space[c] to separate the water into two parts!” 7 So God made the space and separated the water. Some of the water was above it, and some of the water was below it. 8 God named that space “sky.” There was evening, and then there was morning. This was the second day.
The Third Day—Dry Land and Plants
9 Then God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered together so that the dry land will appear.” And it happened. 10 God named the dry land “earth,” and he named the water that was gathered together “seas.” And God saw that this was good.11 Then God said, “Let the earth grow grass, plants that make grain, and fruit trees. The fruit trees will make fruit with seeds in it. And each plant will make its own kind of seed. Let these plants grow on the earth.” And it happened.

Ok, so after the Second Day, but before verse 11 where Plants grew, is when the WHOLE of GENESIS 2 verse 4 and forward describes.

So here is an example of what Paul said "God will use simple to confound and make fools of the wise and supposedly learn-ed."


Genesis 2 is not a retelling, of G1. Genesis 2 is a garden specific account. Meaning man made in the image of God happened in the garden on Day 3 and everything else Genesis 1 talks about is in a correct order but happened outside the garden, on the day Genesis 1 records.

Um, that's why I said, "starts over in Genesis 2". (At verse 4, as you pointed out.) It's the transition between the Priestly account in the first part and the Yahwist account in the second part.

It's pretty clear, both from writing style and the fact that the name they use for God is uniformly different in the two passages, that two different sources were conglomerated into the single version we have today. As for a "garden-specific account", it may well be that the second (Yahwist) author preferred to write down the mythology in a garden-centric POV, but that doesn't make it one story with the first. If it was all one story, there would be no reason to say,  

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.

They took a story from the Preistly account, referring to God as "Elohim", and told the story of the creation of everything, including plants (on day 3, before the sun was made, oddly enough), and including man... then the second story begins with the above, and gets to retelling the bits about creation from a man-centric POV, using the term "Yahweh" instead of "Elohim", and includes the following:

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Every major element in story one is told a second time, in the Yahwist account found after Genesis 2:4. It's two stories, combined into a single narrative. As I said, it seems likely that they're from two different traditions, or that the former is from the formal account told by the priests, while the latter is the more common form of the story. Either way, it takes a serious degree of willful blindness not to see that, regardless of whether you think Moses wrote all of it (heh) or it was cobbled together from older traditions/scrolls, it's two different tales.

And shove that "learn-ed man" anti-intellectualism into your rectum and hold it there, please.