World English Bible · Before the nations
Genesis 2
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, the earth, and all their vast array were finished. On the seventh day finished his work which he had done; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. the seventh day, and made it , because he rested in it from all his work of creation which he had done. This is the history of the generations of and of the earth when they were created, in the day that made the earth and . No plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for had not caused it to on the earth. There was not a man to till the ground, 6but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole surface of the ground. formed man from of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living . planted a garden eastward, in , and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, including in the middle of the garden and of good and evil. A river went out of to water the garden; and from there it was parted, and became the source of four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon: it flows through the whole land of , where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are also there. The name of the second river is . It is the same river that flows through the whole land of . The name of the third river is Hiddekel. This is the one which flows in front of . The fourth river is the . took the man, and put him into to cultivate and keep it. commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat of of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely ." said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him." Out of the ground formed every animal of the field, and every bird of , and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every became its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of , and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up in its place. made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones, and of my . She will be called 'woman,' because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man will leave his and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one . The man and his wife were both , and they were not .
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis