2nd Creation Story: Humans ...

Thursday, Aug 15, 2013. The book of Genesis, the first book of the bible, contains two creation stories. The first story tells the creation of everything in the framework of six creation days. It looks very organized and focusses on the more physical aspect of the creation of human life and its environment. But there is a second creation story, which is quite differently organized. We read …

Men in the Garden Eden …

4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. 5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground — 7 then the Lord God

formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into

his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. (Gen 2, 4-8) We have first read creation story one - with the creation of humans on day six. It is clear that before that, the heavens have been created, and the atmosphere with its processes must have been there. Here, this second creation story, takes a quite different viewpoint. Before we go there, we need to put it into our previous framework. This second creation story first talks about missing rain, and that fields have not yet existed the way they did later. But there were rivers, als we will hear shortly thereafter, and there is a garden, which is located to be in Eden in the East. What type of temporal and spatial orientation do we want to use for this second creation story. It names the day heaven and earth have been created, which would be day two. It then talks about a garden, which would put it into day four. And it talks about the beasts a little later, which were there in the garden. So this means it needs to be at least day five. This creation story is not trying to repeat the previous account, but looking through it from a very different perspective. It is focussed on the creation of humans! Humans are from the earth! …**

The first key point here is: humans are made from dust. Humans belong to the earth, they are made out of the same material, except for the breath of life, which is in them. Second, by looking backward into creation, the whole setup of the garden is presented of being made to host mankind. God created it for mankind. Humans seem his main goal in all of this.

Today, we have started to investigate the human body by a large variety of medical and biological techniques. We know the decomposition of our body, we know that most of it is exactly what this creation story tells us: carbon and water. We are made of dust. We are part of this earth and its environmental system. We have not yet identified the place where mankind developed - excavations of early human skeletons show signs of mankind here and there, in the East as well as in Africa and Europe. But that seems to be from later times, when mankind had spread into the earth already.

We also know that we have life, that life is something fascinating and mysterious. Until today, we are still amazed and surprised by life processes. We know that humans are more than just naive beings, that we have culture, that we set goals and make decisions - the whole range of our mental and spiritual life is an integral part of what we are. This leads us to the upcoming parts of the second creation story … (Roland Potthast) ... more texts