1And the skies and the earth and all their array were finished.
2:1. the skies and the earth and all their array were finished. Attempts to reconcile this seven-day creation story with evolution and geological and cosmological evidence of the age of the universe are absurd, requiring a twisting of the words of the text in ways they never remotely meant. Arguments over whether the biblical or the scientific picture is correct are pointless. Of course the biblical picture is not a factual, literal account of the universe’s origin. The evidence to this effect is overwhelming. It is, however, a meaningful, valuable, instructive account: It conveys a particular conception of the relationship between humans and the cosmos, of the relations between the sexes, of the linear flow of time, of the Sabbath. It sets the Bible’s story in a context of a universe that starts out as good, with God being initially very close to humans. I have discussed the relationship among creation in the Bible, creation in Kabbalah, and what we know of the universe’s origin through science in The Hidden Face of God, chapters 10–12.
2And in the seventh day God finished His work that He had done and ceased in the seventh day from all His work that He had done.
2:2. the seventh day. The seven-day week is found in cultures around the world, presumably because of the association with the sun, moon, and five planets that are visible to the naked eye. Hence, the English Sunday (Sun-day), Monday (Moon-day; cf. French lundi), and Saturday (Saturn-day), and French mardi (Mars-day) and mercredi (Mercury-day). It is fundamental to creation in the Torah, again relating the ordering of time to the very essence of creation. The reckoning of days and years is established by the creation of the sun and moon on the fifth day. The reckoning of weeks is established by the very order of divine activity in the creation itself. This may suggest that the week is given a special status among units of time, and this appears to be confirmed by the singular status given to the Sabbath. It is blessed by the creator, sanctified, and later will be recognized among the Ten Commandments.
2:2. ceased. The word (Hebrew 
) means to “stop,” not to “rest” as it is often taken. The explicit association of the Sabbath with rest will come later, in the Ten Commandments.
3And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because He ceased in it from doing all His work, which God had created.
2:3. made it holy. (Hebrew 
) This word is commonly understood to mean “separated,” in the sense of being set off from the usual, rather than denoting a special spiritual or even mysterious quality, but there really is little linguistic justification for that understanding. Holiness in the Torah seems indeed to be a singular, powerful quality that certain objects, places, and persons acquire. See comments on Leviticus 19. It means much more than just “separate.”
2:3. made it holy. What does it mean to make a day holy? The creation of humans toward the end of the account is both a climax and, at the same time, a small component of the universe. Their creation is not the culmination of the story. The culmination, as the story is arranged, is the Sabbath, a cosmic event: the deity at a halt and consummation. A. J. Heschel wrote that the special significance of the concept of the Sabbath is that it means the sanctification of time. Most other religious symbols are spatial: sacred objects, sacred places, sacred music, prayers, art, symbolic foods, gestures, and practices. But the first thing in the Torah to be rendered holy is a unit in the passage of time. This powerfully underscores the Torah’s character as containing the first known works of history. In consecrating the passage of time in weekly cycles, the institution of the Sabbath at the end of the creation account in Genesis 1 is itself a notable union of the cosmic/cyclical and the historical/linear flow of time. It sets all of the Bible’s coming accounts of history in a cosmic structure of time, just as the story of the creation of the universe in that chapter sets the rest of the Bible’s stories in a cosmic structure of space. Thus Genesis 1 is a story of the fashioning of a great orderly universe out of chaos in which everything fits into an organized temporal and spatial structure.
4These are the records of the skies and the earth when they were created: In the day that YHWH God made earth and skies
2:4. These are the records. A second account of creation starts here. What is the relationship of the two creation accounts: In the scholarship of recent centuries, the two creation stories have come to be attributed to different authors. On this and other matters of authorship, see my Who Wrote the Bible? There I addressed the story of how the Torah came to be written, and I identified the source texts that were combined to form it. I concluded that the combination of those texts produced a Torah that is greater than the sum of its parts. In this commentary I am more concerned with the point at which Who Wrote the Bible? leaves off: with the final product of centuries of history and composition, which came to be known and cherished as the Torah. In the case of the creation story, the combination of the from-the-sky-down and the from-the-earth-up accounts produces a much richer and much more whole conception of creation than we would have if there were only one account. Also, placing the cosmic conception first creates the impression of the wide camera view narrowing in. This feeling of narrowing in will continue through the coming stories, contributing to the rich-in-background feeling that will persist through the rest of the Bible.
2:4. records. This word has commonly been understood to mean “generations,” but that translation is inadequate. The word is used both to introduce records of births (as in Gen 5:1) and to introduce stories of events within a family (as in Gen 37:2). (Its root meaning is “to give birth,” but it acquired a much broader sense. Its broadest meaning is here in its first occurrence in the Torah, where it refers to the skies and earth and introduces the story of the early events of creation.) It thus means historical records, and usually family records.
This verse is sometimes taken to be the conclusion of the preceding seven-day account. That is wrong. The phrase “These are the records” always introduces a list or story. It is used ten more times in Genesis to construct the book as continuous narrative through history rather than as a loose collection of stories.
—5when all produce of the field had not yet been in the earth, and all vegetation of the field had not yet grown, for YHWH God had not rained on the earth, and there had been no human to work the ground,
2:5. not yet. The word for “not yet,” Hebrew 
erem, occurs twice in this verse, followed by the explanation that God has not “rained,” Hebrew himir, on the earth. This kind of pun, based on rearrangement of root letters (metathesis), occurs frequently. This story is riddled with puns. They convey right from the beginning that the elegance of the Torah’s wording is important even while it imparts important content. One might say: even though the ideas here could stand on their own feet, they are given chariots of gold in which to ride. Also, since puns are untranslatable, their presence here urges us all to learn to read the Torah in Hebrew.
6and a river had come up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—
2:6. a river. The Hebrew word, ’
d is probably related to Sumerian ID, which means a river, rather than meaning a mist, as it has frequently been understood.
7YHWH God fashioned a human, dust from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being.
2:7. human. Hebrew ’
dm. As in Gen 1:26, the word refers to the species, not to the male of the species. The word “man” (Hebrew 
) is not used until after the formation of woman (2:23), which implies that a sexual identification is meaningless so long as there is only one being. This may in turn imply something about the sexual identification of the deity in monotheism. On one hand, God is regularly identified with masculine verbs and adjectives and has a masculine name. (See the comment on Gen 1:26.) On the other hand, what is the meaning of a sexual distinction when there is only one of something?! As in many other matters relating to God in the Tanak, the hiddenness of the deity leaves this question unanswerable. The ancient Israelites themselves were at least as uncertain about this as people in subsequent ages, for there were times when they conceived of their God as having a female consort. Thus the prophet Jeremiah criticizes the people for including “the Queen of the skies” in their worship (Jer 44:17ff.). And an inscription that was excavated at Quntillet Ajrud refers to “YHWH and His Asherah.”
2:7. a human, dust from the ground. A pun: The word for human in Hebrew is ’dm (sometimes translated in English as “Adam”), and the story reports that he is formed from the ground (Hebrew ’
dmh). And this in turn began with a river (’d) coming up. So we have in vv. 6–7 the sequence 
.
8And YHWH God planted a garden in Eden at the east, and He set the human whom He had fashioned there.
9And YHWH God caused every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for eating to grow from the ground, and the tree of life within the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
2:9. tree of life. Ancient Israelites believed in an afterlife, but it will not come up in the Torah until later. It is not part of the creation account. Even in the combined picture of the two parts of the creation account there is no reference whatever to the creation of a realm for afterlife—no heaven or hell. On the contrary, there is a tree of life in the garden which enables one to live forever. Humans are not forbidden to eat from this tree. (Only the tree of knowledge of good and bad is prohibited.) So death, life after death, heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment are not yet elements of the account. After the humans are expelled from the garden and thus cut off from the tree of life, death will enter the story. But there still will be no account of the establishment of any realm of afterlife.
2:9. tree of knowledge of good and bad. Not good and “evil,” as this is usually understood and translated. “Evil” suggests that this is strictly moral knowledge. But the Hebrew word (r‘) has a much wider range of meaning than that. This may mean knowledge of what is morally good and bad, or it may mean qualities of good and bad in all realms: morality, aesthetics, utility, pleasure and pain, and so on. It may mean that things are good or bad in themselves and that when one eats from the tree one acquires the ability to see these qualities; or it may mean that when one eats from the tree one acquires the ability to make judgments of good and bad. Perhaps the meaning was clear to the ancient reader who knew the immediate connotations of the words. It is not clear to us in the text of the story as it has survived. The only immediate consequence of eating from the tree that the story names is that before eating from the tree the humans are not embarrassed over nudity and after eating from it they are. This is not sufficient information to tell us what limits of “good and bad” are meant, nor does it tell us if absolute good and bad are implied or if it is the more relative concept of making judgments of good and bad. The wording, “the eyes of the two of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked,” may imply awareness of an absolute value. On the other hand, great numbers of commandments, as articulated in later accounts in Genesis and especially in the following four books of the Bible, suggest that few things are treated as good or bad acts in themselves in these texts. Rather, there is only that which God commands or God prohibits.
10And a river was going out from Eden to water the garden, and it was dispersed from there and became four heads.
11The name of one was Pishon; that is the one that circles all the land of Havilah where there is gold.
12And that land’s gold is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.
13And the name of the second river is Gihon; that is the one that circles all the land of Cush.
2:13. Gihon. The name is a pun, because later the snake will be cursed that it (and all snakes) must crawl on its “belly,” which in Hebrew is g
n (Gen 3:14). The names of the other rivers may contain puns as well, for the letters of Euphrates (Hebrew 
) occur in the next words of the snake’s curse: 
; Pishon (Hebrew 
) contains the same root letters as the word that describes the human’s becoming “a living being” (Hebrew 
); and the letters of Tigris (Hebrew 
) occur in a similar jumble (a metathesis) at the end of the story: 
(3:22). So the rivers that all derive from Eden both convey geography and hint at the coming events there.
14And the name of the third river is Tigris; that is the one that goes east of Assyria. And the fourth river: that is Euphrates.
15And YHWH God took the human and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to watch over it.
16And YHWH God commanded the human, saying, “You may eat from every tree of the garden.
2:16. every tree of the garden but from the tree of knowledge of good and bad. Only the tree of knowledge of good and bad is forbidden. The tree of life is not forbidden.
17But from the tree of knowledge of good and bad: you shall not eat from it, because in the day you eat from it: you’ll die!”
2:17. in the day you eat from it: you’ll die! On first reading, most readers take this to mean that one’s death will occur in the very day that one eats from the tree. In the absence of punctuation in the Hebrew text, however, one cannot be certain. Before eating from the tree of knowledge, humans have access to the tree of life and therefore can live forever. This verse may mean that in the day that humans eat from the tree of knowledge they become mortal, in the sense of: “If you stay away from it, you’ll live; in the day you eat from it, you’ll die.” This general meaning of the expression “In the day you do you’ll die” occurs elsewhere (1 Kings 2:37,42); and this is what in fact occurs in the story here.
Alternatively, if it does in fact mean that their death will occur in the very day that they eat from the tree, then we must understand what subsequently occurs to be a divine act of mercy or relenting: they do not die immediately but are rendered mortal.
18And YHWH God said, “It’s not good for the human to be by himself. I’ll make for him a strength corresponding to him.”
2:18. a strength corresponding to him. Woman is usually understood to be created as a suitable “helper” (Hebrew ‘zer) to man in this account. The Hebrew root, however, can also mean “strength.” (This was first proposed by R. D. Freedman. See cases of ‘zer in parallel with ‘z, another word for “strength,” as in, for example, Ps 46:2. See also Azariah [2 Kings 14:21] and Uzziah [2 Chron 26:1] as alternative names of the same king.) The Hebrew phrase ‘zer knegdô therefore may very well mean “a corresponding strength.” If so, it is a different picture from what people have thought, and an intriguing one in terms of recently developed sensitivities concerning the sexes and how they are pictured in the Torah. In Genesis 1, man and woman are both created in the image of God; in Genesis 2, they are corresponding strengths. However one interprets subsequent stories and laws in the Torah, this essential equality of worth and standing introduces them.
19And YHWH God fashioned from the ground every animal of the field and every bird of the skies and brought it to the human to see what he would call it. And whatever the human would call it, each living being, that would be its name.
2:19. animal of the field. This phrase refers to wild animals.
20And the human gave names to every domestic animal and bird of the skies and every animal of the field. But He did not find for the human a strength corresponding to him.
2:20. the human gave names. The human, who is created in the image of the creator, is now given a function that the creator performed in Genesis 1: bestowing names on parts of the creation.
21And YHWH God caused a slumber to descend on the human, and he slept. And He took one of his ribs and closed flesh in its place.
22And YHWH God built the rib that He had taken from the human into a woman and brought her to the human.
23And the human said, “This time is it: bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh. This will be called woman,’ for this one was taken from ‘man.’”
2:23. bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh. In addition to its literal meaning in this case—the woman is formed from the bone of the man—this expression has the figurative meaning of persons belonging to one another. It has this latter meaning in biblical episodes to come (Gen 29:14; Judg 9:2; 2 Sam 5:1 = 1 Chron 11:1; 2 Sam 19:13–14).
2:23. will be called ‘woman,’ for this one was taken from ‘man.’ The Septuagint and Samaritan read “her man” (Hebrew 
), which makes the pun better, and that reading avoids both the grammatical problem and the social problem that Hebrew 
is not in fact the feminine of Hebrew 
. (Its root is 
and is related to Hebrew ’enš.) It also makes a better parallel to the coming reference in 3:20 to “his woman.”
2:23. man. Now, after woman has been formed, the word “man” occurs for the first time instead of “human.” Sexual distinction has no meaning unless there are two or more kinds of a species, so there is no male until there is a female.
24On account of this a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his woman, and they become one flesh.
2:24. On account of this … This is understood to be more than the story of two individuals. The acts of the first two humans are presented as having implications for the character and destiny of all their descendants. This fact is established here, prior to the events surrounding the tree of knowledge, so that it will be clear that the consequences of those events will be the fate of all humankind.
2:24. and clings to his woman, and they become one flesh. This may be taken as the origin of marriage or of sexual union or both.
25And the two of them were naked, the human and his woman, and they were not embarrassed.
2:25. his woman. The use of the word “his” may or may not imply possession of the woman or some dominant role for the male, because the text refers a few verses later to “her man” (3:6). Also, men’s domination of women is pictured in this story as deriving from God’s decree on woman after the episode of the tree of knowledge of good and bad, which has not yet occurred at this point.