I've heard it claimed that the order of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 are contradictory. My initial response was that Genesis 1 is the account of all of creation, whereas Genesis 2 is retelling the story from Adam's perspective, even though it's written in the third person. I am working on making my own translation of Genesis 1-11 for publication on Kindle, and I came across a detail that is more plausible to interpret as a contradiction. It's still not a contradiction, but it's "more plausible," and for those of us who are just looking for contradictions, it's close enough. But close enough isn't good enough. Let's review together. Here's the important text from Genesis 1:24-27. (This copy of the text below is from the Amplified translation, which is an extremely literal translation, more so than NIV, KJV, etc., and not necessarily the translation I prefer to read from but is in many ways the closest to the original. I have added the "[1]" and "[2]" for reasons you'll see below, and I've removed parenthetical text that is found in the Amplified translation, for simplicity sake of this article.)
A few months ago I sent an email at work. Someone had asked me a question on a topic I had some experience with. I sent them a link to a presentation I'd made. I told them in the email, which I sent in July, that I had made the presentation back in January. In the presentation there is a title slide, which also has a date. The date is not the date the presentation was created, it's the date it was last updated. The date on the title slide said May. But it doesn't say it was last updated in May, it just says "May." So if the recipients of my email wanted to be nit picky, they could have written back to me and been critical and distrustful and pointed out a contradiction in my understanding and representation of reality. Fortunately they weren't so, but if they had been I could have easily explained away what they could have perceived as contradiction. That's the case here with Genesis 1 and 2.
In Genesis 1:24, God tells us on day 6 He started off creating the land animals. It specifically says in Genesis 1:26, "then" He talked about making man. This wording implies a sequence, an order of events. One started before the other. Genesis 1:25 indicates that all the land animals (at least all the various kinds of land animals) were created before God talked about making man. Back in Genesis 1:11 we read about God creating plants on day 3, and even earlier in the chapter it says when God made the Earth, the land, and the waters.
In Genesis 2:7, God tells us how he made Adam. It says he made Adam after making the Earth, the ground, and water. This is aligned with the order of creation in Genesis 1. In Genesis 2:5-6 it said there were no plants, but it doesn't say Adam was created before the plants, the story just moves from Genesis 2:6 to Genesis 2:7 without explaining what happened in between. It had no obligation to. Remember when we consider Genesis 2 as a whole, it's clearly explaining the dawn of time from Adam's perspective. Adam didn't necessarily care on what day the plants were created, or that the plants were created before the Sun and stars were, or that the Earth was at first all water. Why would he care? Therefore why would it be in Genesis 2? There's no contradiction here.
In Genesis 2:8, there's a sentence that, if we're being critical (as in negative) then we could shout out "wait!" It almost sounds like God made Adam before he made the Garden of Eden. But if we keep reading Genesis 2:9-15, we see that whoever wrote this text was using the literary technique of a flashback. Genesis 2:5-8 is one line of thought, then the author recalibrates, and sort of starts over and gives another line of thought in Genesis 2:9-18. Notice in Genesis 2:19, that the author doesn't say "then," he says "now." This is significant, because it means he is yet again doing another recalibration/flashback. Genesis 2:19-25 is a third line of thought. So even though the text of Genesis 2 structurally mentions the creation of Adam before it mentions the creation of the other land animals, it's not implying nor explicitly saying that Adam was created before any of the others. There's no contradiction here.
Remember, the whole Bible was written before the printing press. This means it was written before publishing companies, and had no editor. The whole Bible is written more in the style we today recognize as blogs than as books. A great example of this is Luke 3:18-22, where the author, who was a doctor (a.k.a. a scientist), writes about John the Baptist being put in prison right before Jesus was baptized. However Matthew 14:3-11 says John was executed in prison and Matthew 3:13-17 clearly explains that John was the one who baptized Jesus. There's no contradiction here when we recognize the fact that this wasn't reviewed by an editor first. And we know that it would be hypocritical to say a writing can't be accurate if it's not reviewed by an editor. These were letters, little different than blogs, and amateur blogs at that, not professional blogs where people make a living crafting well articulated messages. Luke could have even very well wrote his letter while traveling (Colossians 4:14, 2 Timothy 4:11, Philemon 1:24). And lastly, the whole Old Testament was first written on scrolls. They weren't written on lined paper bought in a package of 500 sheets using a number 2 pencil with a new eraser. They weren't typed on a laptop where non-linear editing is standard. They were written on a scroll with a pen, and once they wrote something they couldn't go back and insert an extra sentence they'd accidentally left out. They just had to keep writing and try to make their story cohesive. And they probably didn't know what they were writing would be scrutinized by a hostile audience 2+ millennia later. They were just writing what they knew in hopes of passing it along.
This article was written as an expansion of a main feature I call my Creation versus Evolution FAQ. I hope they can be of help to your understanding of our Creator, and how easy it is to take Him seriously (believe His word, the Bible) if we are only willing.
Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind: [1] livestock, crawling things, and wild animals of the earth according to their kinds”; and it was so. So God made the wild animals of the earth according to their kind, and the cattle according to their kind, and everything that creeps and crawls on the earth according to its kind; and God saw that it was good and He affirmed and sustained it. Then God said, “Let Us make [2] man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them have complete authority over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and over the entire earth, and over everything that creeps and crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image and likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them.If we accept Ussher's calculations with genealogies in the Bible, these events happened about 6,000 years ago. But this text is not 6,000 years old. It is attributed to Moses, as revealed to him by God. Moses was born about 1,500 years before Jesus was. Paper wasn't invented until after Jesus was born, there certainly weren't any printing presses back then, and tablets were made of stone or clay, not silicon & glass. Limited hard copies would have been created, making each extraordinarily expensive. This is why it was such a big deal in 2 Kings 22:8 that they found a scroll (full story is 2 Kings 22-23). So God told Moses, who wrote it down (discussed at length in my other blog post), which was eventually copied by others, and the oldest surviving copy is probably in the Dead Sea Scrolls (http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/featured-scrolls) which are dated to around the century before Jesus was born. In Genesis 2:18-19, we see:
Now the Lord God said, “It is not good for the [1] man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable and complementary for him.” So the Lord God formed out of the ground every [2] animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.Since I added the [1] and [2] you've probably already noticed the seeming contradiction. In Genesis 1 we read about the animals first, then man, and in Genesis 2 we read about man first, then animals. But if we're going to get nit picky and claim to point out technicalities, then we need to be professional about this and put on our scientist hat and be thorough. Because we don't want to leave ourselves open for a counter attack, air tight arguments work much better.
A few months ago I sent an email at work. Someone had asked me a question on a topic I had some experience with. I sent them a link to a presentation I'd made. I told them in the email, which I sent in July, that I had made the presentation back in January. In the presentation there is a title slide, which also has a date. The date is not the date the presentation was created, it's the date it was last updated. The date on the title slide said May. But it doesn't say it was last updated in May, it just says "May." So if the recipients of my email wanted to be nit picky, they could have written back to me and been critical and distrustful and pointed out a contradiction in my understanding and representation of reality. Fortunately they weren't so, but if they had been I could have easily explained away what they could have perceived as contradiction. That's the case here with Genesis 1 and 2.
In Genesis 1:24, God tells us on day 6 He started off creating the land animals. It specifically says in Genesis 1:26, "then" He talked about making man. This wording implies a sequence, an order of events. One started before the other. Genesis 1:25 indicates that all the land animals (at least all the various kinds of land animals) were created before God talked about making man. Back in Genesis 1:11 we read about God creating plants on day 3, and even earlier in the chapter it says when God made the Earth, the land, and the waters.
In Genesis 2:7, God tells us how he made Adam. It says he made Adam after making the Earth, the ground, and water. This is aligned with the order of creation in Genesis 1. In Genesis 2:5-6 it said there were no plants, but it doesn't say Adam was created before the plants, the story just moves from Genesis 2:6 to Genesis 2:7 without explaining what happened in between. It had no obligation to. Remember when we consider Genesis 2 as a whole, it's clearly explaining the dawn of time from Adam's perspective. Adam didn't necessarily care on what day the plants were created, or that the plants were created before the Sun and stars were, or that the Earth was at first all water. Why would he care? Therefore why would it be in Genesis 2? There's no contradiction here.
In Genesis 2:8, there's a sentence that, if we're being critical (as in negative) then we could shout out "wait!" It almost sounds like God made Adam before he made the Garden of Eden. But if we keep reading Genesis 2:9-15, we see that whoever wrote this text was using the literary technique of a flashback. Genesis 2:5-8 is one line of thought, then the author recalibrates, and sort of starts over and gives another line of thought in Genesis 2:9-18. Notice in Genesis 2:19, that the author doesn't say "then," he says "now." This is significant, because it means he is yet again doing another recalibration/flashback. Genesis 2:19-25 is a third line of thought. So even though the text of Genesis 2 structurally mentions the creation of Adam before it mentions the creation of the other land animals, it's not implying nor explicitly saying that Adam was created before any of the others. There's no contradiction here.
Remember, the whole Bible was written before the printing press. This means it was written before publishing companies, and had no editor. The whole Bible is written more in the style we today recognize as blogs than as books. A great example of this is Luke 3:18-22, where the author, who was a doctor (a.k.a. a scientist), writes about John the Baptist being put in prison right before Jesus was baptized. However Matthew 14:3-11 says John was executed in prison and Matthew 3:13-17 clearly explains that John was the one who baptized Jesus. There's no contradiction here when we recognize the fact that this wasn't reviewed by an editor first. And we know that it would be hypocritical to say a writing can't be accurate if it's not reviewed by an editor. These were letters, little different than blogs, and amateur blogs at that, not professional blogs where people make a living crafting well articulated messages. Luke could have even very well wrote his letter while traveling (Colossians 4:14, 2 Timothy 4:11, Philemon 1:24). And lastly, the whole Old Testament was first written on scrolls. They weren't written on lined paper bought in a package of 500 sheets using a number 2 pencil with a new eraser. They weren't typed on a laptop where non-linear editing is standard. They were written on a scroll with a pen, and once they wrote something they couldn't go back and insert an extra sentence they'd accidentally left out. They just had to keep writing and try to make their story cohesive. And they probably didn't know what they were writing would be scrutinized by a hostile audience 2+ millennia later. They were just writing what they knew in hopes of passing it along.
This article was written as an expansion of a main feature I call my Creation versus Evolution FAQ. I hope they can be of help to your understanding of our Creator, and how easy it is to take Him seriously (believe His word, the Bible) if we are only willing.
