Competing Creation Accounts? Two First Couples?

In answering a few of the “discrepancy” objections regarding Genesis 1 and 2, we need a bit of literary and theological context. There is no doubt that Genesis 2:4-25 is an elaboration of Day 6 in Genesis 1, in the sense of giving a different perspective on the same ultimate reality. But without a full sense of how Day 7 is related (symbolic, etc) one can see Chapter 2 as a different perspective and at the same time hold to a literal 24-hour sixth day, which then picks up activity in the Garden that the narrative does not tell us after 2:25. We are not told, for example, how long Adam and Eve inhabited the Garden before 3:1.

Douglas Kelly makes the point about literary structure very well,

“Genesis 2:4, is important for the structure of Genesis; it stands in the Hebrew text like a great signpost on a major highway, pointing the way forward into the rest of the book. Its words 'These are the generations' (in Hebrew toledoth) offer a clue that this is where the second part of Genesis begins, with a great narrowing down of emphasis from the whole creation to one selected area, namely, the story of mankind.”1

How do we explain the two different names for God in Genesis 1-2: elohim and adonai (or YHWH)?

Anyone familiar with the JEPD Theory (or Documentary Hypothesis) will be familiar with this challenge and its rationale. The critic sees here two different names because he presupposed two different sources of what became the final patchwork of Genesis.

Elohim (אֱלהִים) is the general name for God in Hebrew. It is grammatically plural and can be used of gods in general. That is not surprising when we consider that Greek does the same with theos (θεός). If we are getting lost in the details, just remember that English does the same, and in fact that is the whole reason we are having this conversation! If the word “gods” could not “double” to refer to the true and the false, then how exactly does it do so in that very objection that either regards (a) there to be more than one, or else (b) no true one at all? The whole internal logic of the objection breaks down on a moment’s notice.

The other name is the one behind the capitalized word LORD in our English Bibles. It is Adonai (יְהוָֹה) and is the unspeakable name of God, or Tetragrammaton. But it is also the covenant name of YHWH. The significance of that is that when Moses moves from Chapter 1 of Genesis to Chapter 2, he is moving from the cosmological account of creation (i.e. from the perspective of the whole universe) to the anthropological account (i.e. from the perspective of man’s vocation in that world).

Since man is made in the image of God—and since God is reconstituting humanity in this new people called Israel—the book of Genesis is functioning as a kind of “reintroduction to reality” in the covenanting between God and a new people for a new world. The skeptic may not have interest in such things; but that is frankly his problem and not ours. He is not at liberty to call reason to witness against what is really something beyond his attention span.

What about two sets first couples?

What we have in comparing the creation of man and woman in Genesis 1 as opposed to Genesis 2 is that same “cosmological account” (Genesis 1) as opposed to the “anthropological account” (Genesis 2). In other words, they are the same events, now with respect to the same man and woman. However 1:26-27 sets man and woman in the larger spatial context of God’s creation of the whole universe, whereas 2:4-25 sets the man and woman in the more local stage of this world. Each has its own purpose.

Think of the second chapter as a kind of “instant replay” where a closer angle shows man’s vocation at tending to the Garden and the woman’s role as a helper for him. Kelly uses two similar analogies, with Chapter 1 being like the headlines of the newspaper, with Chapter 2 being the “detailed small print that follows”; or else in a canvas painting, Chapter 1 being the whole canvas and Chapter 2 shining the “spotlight on one specific portion of the painting.”2

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1. Douglas Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1.1-2.4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, UK: Mentor, 2017), 61.

2. Kelly, Creation and Change, 63.