Myth #17:

The heavens and the earth had children.

The Myth: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (Gen. 2:4-7)

The Reality: In the second Creation story, the heavens and the earth are deities, a wife and husband capable of having children.

The second creation story begins at Genesis 2:4 with the phrase,“These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth.” The first five words are a textual formula used on ten occasions in Genesis, and only once outside of Genesis (Ruth 4:18). In all instances outside of Genesis 2:4, the formula serves to introduce stories about particular families, as, for example,“These are the generations of Isaac,” or,“These are the generations of Jacob.” In each such instance, what follows are stories about the parents and their children and the events in their lives. There is no logical reason to think that any different interpretation attaches to Genesis 2:4.

The opening phrase, therefore, means that what follows are stories about the family of the heavens and the earth and their children. In other words, the second Creation story is a throwback to an earlier polytheistic account of Creation in which the heavens and earth are cosmic beings, deities, capable of having children.

This conclusion disturbs theologians because it contradicts the idea that the Bible is a monotheistic treatise. Consequently, they reinterpret the passage to reflect their own religious point of view. They argue that what follows are only stories that take place after the Creation. Not only does this misrepresent the plain and simple meaning, it runs into another roadblock. The stories don’t take place after Creation, but during Creation, on the second day to be precise.

As the rest of the passage states, the stories about the heavens and the earth occur “in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” and before the appearance of vegetation. In our discussion of Myth #14,after reconstructing the original sequence of Creation, we learned that the heavens and earth were created on the second day and vegetation on the third. The day that god made heaven and earth corresponds to the second day of Creation.

This establishes a link between the first and second Creation stories in Genesis. In the first Creation story, the events on the second day of Creation were based on the Heliopolitan Creation myth, the rising of Atum as a firmament in the waters, the separation of heaven and earth and the gathering of the waters. In that account, the Genesis editor stripped off the personas of the Egyptian deities and left us only with the natural phenomena that they represented. Something else happened in the second Creation story. As we will see in the discussion of some of the next few myths, the biblical editor preserved the personas of the Egyptian deities but depicted them as humans and removed their identifications with natural phenomena. But on occasion, they slipped up and failed to recognize all the earlier associations, as in this case where they left in a reference to “the generations of heaven and earth.”