Genesis 2:4-17--The Creation of Man

​Genesis 2:4-17
World English Bible

4 This is the history of the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens. 5 No plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for Yahweh God had not caused it to rain on the earth. There was not a man to till the ground, 6 but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. 8 Yahweh God planted a garden eastward, in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 10 A river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was parted, and became the source of four rivers. 11 The name of the first is Pishon: it flows through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12 and the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are also there. 13 The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the same river that flows through the whole land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is Hiddekel. This is the one which flows in front of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. 15 Yahweh God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. 16 Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”

---

​This is the beginning of the narrative of Adam. Genesis to told as an oral narrative history with five main parts: The Story of Creation (Genesis 1:1-2:3), The Story of Adam (Genesis 2:4-Genesis 5:32, The Story of Noah (Genesis 6:1-10:32, The Story of Abram/Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel (Genesis 11:1-37:36), and the story of Joseph (Genesis 38:1-50:26). The narratives overlap at times, but these appear to be the main characters we follow that move the biblical narrative forward. It is possible to divide the stories a little differently with more or less divisions, but it is important to note that the genealogies help mark the places that you would start or stop a particular story. There is no genealogy here between the first two narrative portions, but the perspective changes from God being the only witness to the events of creation to man now seeing things through his own eyes.

This passage tells us that all mankind came from one man (and one woman, we’ll talk about her next time). God “formed” or “crafted” man out of the dust of the ground—a different word than speaking things into existence out of nothing. This shows a different side of Him that shows that He is a master craftsman and artist. It is no wonder that Jesus was a builder (while we translate this as “carpenter,” it is a more generic term for anyone who takes raw materials and crafts them into something else). Certainly, man was made differently and for a different purpose than everything else.

The first verses of this chapter may seem to contradict the creation narrative that we just read, but they do not. Adam is seeing everything fully formed (all the different kinds of plants and animals and the sky and sea and everything living in them) as if it all happened in one day (we know from what we just read that it was created over six days with a seventh day of rest). We are also told that no herbs or other harvested plants have sprung up yet. God will give man the work of tilling and preparing the ground and farming, but first God will make man from the dust of the ground and breath His spirit into him. This makes sense with what we know—life brings forth life, but non-life cannot bring forth life. We worship the Living God who can impart life (both temporal and eternal) and He is the source of all life.

God planted a garden in the east (probably facing the east which matches with the orientation we see of the Tabernacle and the Temple later). We might ask “east of what?” and I think the answer is probably Canaan, or maybe more specifically Jerusalem—which will become an important focal point later, and I think God already has this central point of this central story in mind. He places man in the Garden intentionally and gives him good work to do (work is not a result of the Fall, but unproductive and futile work is a result of the Fall because creation will fight against us instead of cooperating with us). God made a special river to water the entire Garden and from this one river (a source of what people would call “living water”) the whole earth was watered and given life. We’ll see this same image again in the New Heavens and the New Earth where The River of Life will give life to the whole earth. I will not give any time to trying to figure out the locations of these rivers and the exact location of The Garden of Eden, but these were real rivers in real places that the people reading this were meant to recognize not only because of names and general locations, but specific characteristics of the natural resources found in those areas. You would not provide such falsifiable details in a story you were making up.

God places man in the Garden and gave him two jobs:
1) Cultivate (work the ground to make it more fruitful and easier for things to grow)
2) Keep (protect what is already growing there)

God then gave man two commands, one positive, and one negative:
1) Eat freely from any tree in the Garden, but
2) Don’t eat from the tree in the middle of the Garden—The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This negative command comes with a curse, “For the day you eat of it, you will surly die.” That a correct translation, but it more literally says “dying, you will die.” This gives the idea of a double death—a physical one that happens slowly, and a spiritual one that happens immediately. God already knows that man will eat of that tree, for He does not say “if you eat of it,” but “in the day that you eat of it.” It was a certainty in God’s mind that man would eat of that tree, and that meant that God knew that man would Though the event has not happened yet, it is a certainty in the mind of God because He knows the end from the beginning. Nothing is going to surprise Him. He is not going to have to come up with a Plan B when man violates this command. He has had a plan to deal with that which has been Plan A from before the foundations of the world. More on that later.

Next time, we will talk about the one thing that should seem to be mission so far. God has made every animal male and female, but we have only met man so far. God is going to help Adam realize in our next passage that even though God filled the world with all kinds of animals, there is not another creature that is compatible with him in the same way that that the male and female animals are obviously the same, but different and made to be compatible with one another. God could have just given woman to man, or explained the idea of complementarianism to him, but God lets Adam figure this one out and realize his need, and then God is ready there with the solution to the problem that Adam didn’t even know that he had. We’ll talk about that next time.