Genesis 2

The seventh day

Somebody told me recently (sorry, no credits since I forgot who) that the seventh day is still going since there is no closure of that day like there was with the previous days. That God is still having his Sabbath. I'm not sure what to think of that.

God made the seventh day holy. He blessed it and He rested from all the work he had done. I've recently started to try to reintroduce the concept of the Sabbath into my life. I'm quite the busy guy and because of that I sometimes hit a wall. I get exhausted because I kept working and took too little time to rest. It's not always easy to set a day a week apart for rest in this society. But I do think it is worth trying.

Genesis 1 VS Genesis 2

Where Genesis 1 is more like a chronological list of things that happened, Genesis 2 tells one continuous story, that is not separated into days. I did some first steps into the Hebrew language but not enough to start reading the Bible in Hebrew. Because there are some contradictions at first sight I turned to the internet and see what I could find about this topic.

In my search I stumbled upon the site answersingenesis.org. There they put forward that Genesis 2 is a more in depth view of the 6th day. The Bible that we read is translated, and like with every translation things can get lost. In this case they claim that the tense of some words might have been mistranslated. That God didn't create Adam first and then everything else, finishing up with Eve. But that the order of Genesis 1 is correct and we just mistranslated the words (there are some translations who have translated it in past tense).

The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

Both trees are located in the center of the garden but God only says they can't eat of the tree of good and evil. We don't have many details on the tree of life, only that God placed it there and didn't forbid Adam and Eve to eat from it. From this we can draw the conclusion that God did intend for us to live forever from the start. God didn't intend us to be mortal. He wanted us to be like Him. The next time we will hear from a tree of life is not until Revelations, the end of the Bible.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, on the other hand, comes with a warning. Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat from it because they would die. There is no answer provided here, but why place the tree there in the first place?

Meet Eve

After naming the animals Adam had not found a match for himself, so God created Eve from a rib of Adam. I find this very interesting because Adam was created without a rib of a previous person. Still, God decided to take a part of Adam to create Eve.

It was only when I was working on the Genesis 3 blog post that I noticed that the name Eve wasn't even mentioned before the fall. So this title should actually have been "Meet woman". Because of this I went back to my Bible and started looking in the footnotes if there was something more to be found about this. The note that jumped out for me was that this is the only full account of the creation of woman in all the ancient Near Eastern literature.

Do you think Adam and Eve had belly buttons?

They felt no shame

God created the earth perfect. Adam and Eve were both naked and felt no shame. It must have been a wonderful time to live in, to be able to be yourself without worrying about what others might think.