Genesis 2 [Look Back]

Before moving onto chapter three, there are a couple of oddities in chapter two that I want to discuss, even though it doesn't look like I'm writing for much of an audience. Maybe I'm boring. Maybe the subject matter is boring. Maybe no one and nothing is listening to my prayers. Maybe I'm just slogging through this too slowly. If so, it's mostly because I suspect that Genesis is the least likely book in the Bible to contain the true Word of God.

Chapter two gave us a very cursory account of creation. No mention of your more exotic beasts, or any of the extinct ones. No mention of dinosaurs. Why? It can't be because people wouldn't have been interested. Sure, it would have sounded strange to some primitive cultures, but certainly people who believed in giants and dragons and demons could have believed in dinosaurs. There was no mention, either, of any plants that man might find particularly useful to treat illness. Yet, it mentions bdellium, gold and onyx. Huh?

Gold I understand. Gold was valued 3,000 years ago, and it is valued today. But Onyx isn't all that fascinating, is it? I would think that copper, iron, diamonds, oil, coal and borax might be much more worthwhile to mention. And bdellium? What is that? And why don't I know? It was significant enough to warrant mention in the second chapter of the scriptures. Why don't people care or even know about it today?

Genesis 2 also gives us our first glimpse of a God who is fickle. I've always been taught that God is all-knowing and all-powerful and never-changing. God is constant. But God changes His rules and changes His mind.

I attended a service a while back in which the pastor told people to shout out an attribute of God. From around the room, people stood and shouted: God is great. God is powerful. God is merciful. God is forgiving. God is all-knowing. (I'd have said omniscient) God is kind. Then a well respected member in back stood up and said, in his deepest radio announcer voice, "God is."

Everyone was quiet, like he had just found the secret decoder ring to unlock all of the secrets of the Bible. I couldn't help but wonder what those people would have said if I had risen to my feet and proclaimed: "God is fickle."

In Genesis 1, God said, "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." In Genesis 2, God changes His mind, or clarifies the earlier, too-broadly worded gift. In verse 17, the Lord God says "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." So, chapter 1 was almost right. Man gets every tree that bears fruit. Almost. All but one.

The bigger about-face shown by God here is His search for a suitable companion for man. God is all-knowing. Although I have not yet reached any passage that says so, I recollect that one does. God knew, therefore, that He was going to make a woman for Adam. Yet, before making Eve, God said, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him." So, out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam, but among them was not found a helper comparable to him.

I have two problems with this story. First, if all those beasts were not going to make suitable companions for the man, why didn't God see that coming? Why the initial failure? Why not make Eve immediately?

Secondly, does this passage say what I think it says? The process included bringing each creature to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. Did Adam actually sit there in the garden and name every living creature? We now know that there are millions upon millions of species of land-dwelling animals. Adam sat down and named them all? How? At the vigorous pace of a beast every ten seconds, it would have taken over 300 years to hit the first billion creatures.

And was someone writing this down? Or memorizing the names? Where is the list? Why are we still discovering previously unknown animals every year?

Anyhow, after the beast companion didn't work out, God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him ... So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. And the man said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man."

This also made little sense to me. If God is capable of doing anything, why did He need the rib bone from Adam? Why not make woman out of the same dirt from which He crafted Adam? Is it because God was an alien who was cloning Adam? I doubt it, but some people believe that. This story, because it is so implausible, has spawned all sorts of bizarre interpretations by strange people in fringe religions. Why doesn't the Bible present us with something a little easier to accept as true here?