After the first 5 days of the creation we come to day six and the creation of humans.
Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion etc etc.
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
It doesn’t say how they made them or from what but create them male & female, he did.
So here as early as Genesis 1, we have a male and a female created in the “image” of the gods plural. Gen 1 ends at Gen31 day six with god saying “it was very good”.
Then something extra peculiar happens. At Genesis 2:5
"And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew:for the Lord God Has not caused it to rain upon the earth, andthere was not a man to till the ground".?????
What are we to make of this? Had he forgot that he had already made a male and female? And wasn’t the first male and female at Genesis 1:27 created for this very purpose?
Well we can’t say with absolute certainty because it only speaks of “dominion over” every living thing and “over all the earth”, which implies ruler ship i.e. a monarchy.
So putting aside this question for now, it then continues with a verse informing us that god needed labourers “to till the land” . So a God sets about a second creation of man but giving the reader more details of how he went about creating this second human male.
Genesis 2:7 And the Lord god Formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. It goes on to say he then put this man into the garden, implying that the man was actually created outside of the garden somewhere else.
7 verses further on at Verse 15 it reiterates again where he placed the man and why :
“and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”
All was good we can take it? No, of course we can’t,because 16 verses after the creation of this second man Genesis informs us that A God then decides that because the man shouldn’t be alone without a mate/helper so he goes to a third creation of a human, this time a female. But this creation is like no other.
Genesis 2:21 And the Lord God Caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And therib, which the Lord God Had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Any Geneticist reading this today would no doubt recognize this as nothing less of cloning/genetic engineering.
So what do these three individual stories of the creation of humans all mean?
