The reading which I chose was the two creation stories from Genesis, found in the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible.  One main reason I am choosing to this is because for most of my life, religious education was always a school subject. I always had to take everything at face value. This time, however, I can remain objective and read the stories I’ve been studying as an outsider, looking more at the compositing than the faith value.

One obvious standout between the two stories is differing accounts of the creation of the universe and of the creatures that dwell in it. The main difference between the creation story from the first chapter of Genesis and the second chapter of Genesis is thus: In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, God creates everything in six days, starting with light and darkness, and then ending with creating man and woman both on the sixth and final day, then resting on the seventh. The second chapter of Genesis has God creating man first, and giving him the companionship of the animals of the Garden of Eden, then taking a rib to create Eve.

As someone who has read a good bit of the Good Book, this happens a lot, especially in the New Testament, where the stories focus on different areas to appeal to different groups of people, so the two creation stories exist probably for this reason. The feeling I have from the first Genesis story is it is a little more straightforward. What I mean is that I see it as a bullet-pointed list. The feeling I have of how these people saw God is somewhat detached, that is, not active all the time with the Earth. In this story, God creates everything a little at a time and either “saw that it was good” (Norton 158) or tell the living creations to “be fruitful and multiply” (Norton 158).  God then rests on the seventh day, which compared to the second creation story, is very much more hands-off.  The first story seems to portray a loving but distant God. After each creation, he “sees that it is good” and is proud of the work done, and God tells man and woman “I have given you every seed bearing plant on the face of all the and every tree that has fruit bearing seeds will be for food” (Norton 159). This shows how much he cares about his creation, and treats them well enough by giving domain over the rest of creation, but God isn’t constantly there, he rests on the seventh day, unlike the God portrayed in the second Genesis story.

In the second Genesis creation story, Adam is created first, and is placed into the Garden of Eden, which was not mentioned in the first story.  Also, in the first story, Adam and Eve were created on the same day. In the second creation story, Adam is made first and Eve is then taken from Adam’s ribs “This one at last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman, for from man was this one taken” (Norton 160). Most importantly, I believe that this story reflects a people who believe God was more vengeful.  Firstly, in the first Genesis story, God gave man and woman “every seed bearing plant” but in the second story, God restricts them form eating from the tree of knowledge, “from the tree of knowledge , good and evil,  you shall not eat” (Norton 158-159). Also, they see God as vengeful because at the end of this creation story, God punishes all those involved “to the woman he said ‘I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain you shall bear children…’ to the man He said ‘Cursed be the soil for your sake, … by the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread till you return to the soil’” (Norton 161).  This seems to be a way for people to come to terms with the terribleness of the world and all the pain and suffering people have to deal with every day.