King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 2
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
Thus and the earth were finished, and of them. And on the seventh day ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And the seventh day, and it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which created and made. These are the generations of and of the earth when they were created, in the day that made the earth and , And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for had not caused it to upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole of the ground. And formed man of of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living . And planted a garden eastward in ; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of , where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is : the same is it that compasseth the whole land of . And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of . And the fourth river is . And took the man, and put him into to dress it and to keep it. And commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely . And said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto to see what he would call them: and whatsoever called every , that was the name thereof. And gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for there was not found an help meet for him. And caused a deep sleep to fall upon , and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up instead thereof; And the rib, which had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And said, This is now bone of my bones, and of my : she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one . And they were both , the man and his wife, and were not .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. 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