GENESIS 2
Read Genesis 2:4-25
We now get a bit more detail about the creation of mankind, first with Adam. We read that God formed the first man from the ‘dust of the ground’. The word ‘ground’ in Hebrew is adamah, so Adam is made from the adamah, his very name reflects his origin. God made Adam from the ground but it was not until he breathed the breath of life into him that Adam became a living being (v7). The word ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’ are the same in Hebrew, so we could read that the man did not become a living being until God had breathed his Spirit into him.
God put Adam into the Garden he had made to work it and take care of it (v15). The language here is the same as is used later of the Temple priesthood and so has a sense of ministering. Of course, God didn’t need to have someone looking after his garden, but he chose to create Adam and here we see the beginning of a recurring theme in the Bible; that God chooses to be in the company of his created beings and to work alongside them.
In Verses 10-14 we see a description of four rivers. Two of the names we recognise, the Tigris and Euphrates, the other two, the Pishon and Gihon, we don’t. The location of these rivers is a bit vague, but the Bible is not a geography text book. Where they are is not the point. What matters is that these four rivers come from a headwater that flows from the Garden of Eden, the place where God dwells. And wherever the rivers flow they bring abundance and blessing. This is another recurring biblical theme – the river of God that brings blessing. We see this in Ezekiel’s visionary temple, we see it in Revelation 22 and we see it in Jesus. The source of the blessing is God himself and in Jesus we see the living water that brings eternal life (John 4:10, 7:38).
At this point we get God’s instruction to Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, anticipating the fall to come in Chapter 3.
Then we have the creation of the first woman, Eve. God decided that it would be good for Adam to have a companion, described as a helper. Does that imply that Eve, as a ‘helper’, will be inferior to Adam? In Psalm 10:14 God is described as ‘the helper of the fatherless’, so there is no sense of inferiority in the term ‘helper’. In Verses 21 & 22 we read that the woman was made from Adam’s rib, but the word there could equally be read as ‘side’, and that would give the sense of being complementary, equal but different or even ‘side by side’.
The chapter ends with the ominous line, “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (v25). There is the anticipation again of the fall, after which they were both naked and they did feel shame.