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5 This is before underbrush of the field existed and before grasses grew, since God had not yet made rain fall on the ground and mankind had not yet farmed the soil.
6 Mist used to rise from the ground and it watered the entire surface of the earth.
7 So, the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and infused through his nose the very breath of life. Then man became a living being.2
8 And from the very beginning, the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, a place of delight, and He put the man there whom He created.3
9 God caused pleasant-looking trees that bore tasty fruit to grow out of the ground. (He also put) the tree of life in the midst of the garden, as well as the tree by which to know good and evil.
10 In addition, a river that watered the garden flowed from Eden. From there it split into four tributaries.
11 One of the tributaries was the Pishon, and it ran through the land of Havilah, where gold was located.
12 The gold of that region was good, and crystal was found there along with onyx.
13 The name of the second tributary was the Gihon, and it ran through the entire land of Cush.
14 And the name of the third tributary was the Hiddekel. It went through eastern Assyria; finally, the fourth tributary was the Perat.
15 Then the Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of delight, to work in it and to tend it.4
16 So the Lord God spoke a command to the man, saying “You can eat from every tree in the garden,
17 but don’t eat from the tree of knowing good and evil, because on the day that you eat from it, you will definitely die.”
18 Then the Lord God said, “It’s not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper to complement him.”
19 The Lord God had formed all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky from the ground. He brought them to the man to see what he would name each one. Whatever the man called the living creatures became their name.5
20 So man named all the animals and birds; that is, all the creatures of the field. But there was no helper who could complement him.
21 Therefore, the Lord God put the man into a coma, and he slept. Then He took one of his ribs and closed up the skin over it.
22 And the Lord God built the rib that He took from the man into a woman, and He brought her to him.
23 So the man said, “This time, I see something like myself, flesh from my flesh,” and he called her “woman,” since she was taken from man.6
24 Because of this, a man will leave his father and mother’s household and unite with his wife; they will unite in oneness.7
25 Both the man and his wife were naked and felt no shame about it.
1. v. 4: The mention of the “heavens and the earth” is made twice in this verse. The first time the Hebrew reads “heavens and the earth,” and the second time it reads “earth and the heavens.” Perhaps this word order in the first instance is meant to be more chronological (time- and history-oriented; i.e., the heavens were created before the earth, and thus are mentioned first for that reason). Or perhaps because the sheer size of the heavenly bodies so dwarfs the earth that therefore due to the heavens’ greater magnitude, they are mentioned first. The second use is more anthropocentric; i.e., mankind (who live on earth) is the crown of God’s creation, and so the earth is put first in the word order to subtly emphasize this nuance.
2. v. 7: This is a very poetic way in Hebrew to simply say that God caused man to breathe air, after which man had life.
3. v. 8: There are some nuances about the Hebrew word qedem, which I translate as “from the very beginning.” In one understanding, qedem refers to the period before the creation of time as we know it. Thus, an alternative rendering can be “from before the very beginning (of creation).” This idiomatic usage would be informing us that the garden was planned by God before the creation of earth itself.
4. v. 15: The word used in Hebrew for “work” is the same one as is used for “manual labor” and is also used for “worshipping God.” The picture we get of the man’s work is that it was not backbreaking labor by which he hoped to eke out a living. That does happen later in the text. At this point, his “work” consists of “tending” the garden and delighting in God’s creation, which perhaps better fits a definition of “worship.”
5. v. 19: The man takes part in God’s creative activity, partnering with God and helping to complete His creation in some sense. This gives us insight into the meaning of 1.26, where the man is formed in “the image” of God. Part of God’s “image” is to be a creative being, as He is; and this is what the man does in this verse—creative activity, like that which God did.
6. v. 23: In this verse, the man first compares his new complement to the former creatures that he had seen: “this time” there was a “match” to complement him. In Hebrew, the word for “woman” is a derivative of the word for “man,” with “ish” meaning “man,” and “ishah” meaning “woman.” Thus, we have a bit of a pun, but one that linguistically attests to the close relationship between man and woman. I believe the language is telling us that the man saw something that closely resembled himself (the Hebrew word “etsem,” or “bone” may be an idiom, as it is in modern Hebrew, for “one’s self”). Just as God had created the man in His image, so had He created a woman who closely resembled man, and the first man recognized this fact immediately. To some extent, it was as if the man looked at himself in a mirror and was amazed at what he saw. The Torah text preserves the man’s reaction to seeing the woman.
7. v. 24: It is a remarkable finding of modern science that the story of one original male and one original female progenitor is factual. As the recent Mystery of Science magazine stated: “. . . using computer DNA sequencing technology, scientists are beginning to solve some of the mysteries of our genetic past. Their findings . . . corroborate the biblical claim that everyone on Earth has a common female and male ancestor—an original ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. . .” (Bernstein, “Endless Enigmas,” 6). As well, in a discussion of the human Y chromosome, Wade noted: “Every Y chromosome that exists today is a copy of the same original, carried by a single individual in the ancestral human population” (Wade, “Adam, Eve and the Genome,” 46). Again he writes: “The same is true of mitochrondrial DNA. The metaphor is hard to avoid—this is Adam’s Y chromosome, and Eve’s mitochrondrial DNA; everyone, male and female, carries the same mitochrondrial DNA because all are copies of the same original,
