Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of Biblical Theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and I am back this week with Geoff Johnson to continue talking about the creation accounts in Genesis. I've got to apologize for the weird quality of my audio. I really have no idea why it's strange.
Maybe I can get it a little tweaked and reuploaded, but for the moment... It's just weird. That's my technical description of it. Hopefully I can get the bugs worked out for next time, but better here than not is just the attitude I'm going to go with, and I appreciate you all for bearing with me. Oh, but before we get into the episode this week, I do have exciting news!
My website is up, [00:01:00] complete with domain name, so yay! You can now go to GenesisMarksTheSpot. com and find all kinds of cool things. I'm so excited about it because it's got way more functionality than I ever thought I would have. You can listen to episodes, read transcripts, leave comments on episode pages, leave reviews, leave your email so that you can get on my newsletter list, find information about my guests, find out how to donate.
And there's a blog where I will be posting extra info and resources. Anyway, I'm super excited to have all of that in one place, so go visit it if you haven't. GenesisMarksTheSpot. com. Super easy to remember, so that's always good. But let's go ahead and get into our episode. All right, welcoming back Geoff Johnson to continue our reading of Genesis.[00:02:00]
We are going to be continuing to chapter two, as we did in our previous episode when we were reading chapter one. There's actually a really odd chapter division where it really shouldn't be. And chapter two starts in the middle of the first creation account. So we read into. Chapter two last time, and we're going to just pick up on where we left off, but first I want to give Geoff a moment to introduce himself and say a little bit about himself.
So welcome, Geoff.
Geoff Johnson: Hey, Carey, thank you so much for having me back. I really enjoy these readings through scripture. Reading with other people who are interested in the details of the text is just a pleasure. So it's something I love to do. I do have a YouTube channel called The Storeroom of Scripture where I'm basically 20 years.
And I always try to do what they call [00:03:00] expository teaching. Just exposing to the reader, to the, to the class member, what is the original intent of the author. I always study with that in mind and teach with that in mind. And I've been sharing some of that online at YouTube with the Store Room of Scripture.
So, I, I hope that those who might like to dig into a verse by verse style study of the text might join me over there. Uh, and I pointed my viewers to you too because I, I love the way that you take the topical questions and explore them in so many ways. So it's a, it's an honor to be here.
Carey Griffel: Yep. That's great.
And I will be including your YouTube channel in the show notes. So for people who are interested. They can go there directly and you will be doing a, or you are doing a study on Revelation, which is everyone's favorite book, except mine.
Geoff Johnson: Yeah, I just [00:04:00] started that. So we're on the cusp of it. And I would spend a lot of time digging into every text, but I kind of disciplined myself to go faster just so people don't get bored with things.
But with Revelation, for as long as my class will tolerate it. I am taking it very slowly as we just really dig into it. So I'm covering like two to four verses every week. So if you're going to follow along with my revelation study, we might be in there for the next six to 12 months, but if you're up for it, I'd love to have you join our study.
So
Carey Griffel: today we are going to be reading the second creation account in Genesis, which begins in Genesis two, verse four. And I am going to be reading from the New King James version, and Geoff will be choosing a different translation to read from so we can kind of compare and contrast, and we will be kind of bringing [00:05:00] in some of our discussion from our last conversation, because part of what we want to do is compare and contrast these two creation accounts, see why there's differences, see what those differences are, and just look at the text and see what we can read.
So I will be starting in verse 4 of chapter 2, reading the New King James Version. It says, This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth in the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth, and before any herb of the field had grown.
For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. But a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. Okay. I'm going to pass it over to Geoff now to read his version.
Geoff Johnson: And my version has a little bit different sentence structure. So actually kind of where you [00:06:00] stopped, mine is in the middle of a sentence.
Uh, mine goes through verse seven before it gets to the period on a rather long sentence. So I'll just read through verse seven. So it completes the thought in my translation. And this is the Lexham English Bible. I picked it partly because it preserves the name Yahweh in the text. That actually didn't come up last week, uh, the last time we talked about this, because Yahweh, the proper name, doesn't appear in chapter 1.
Uh, but it will come up this week, as we'll read right here. It's starting back in verse 4 through 7. These are the generations of heaven and earth when they were created, in the day that Yahweh God made earth and heaven. Before any plant of the field was on earth, and before any plant of the field had sprung up, because Yahweh God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no human being to cultivate the ground, but a [00:07:00] stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground.
When Yahweh God formed the man of dust of the ground, and he blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. So, can't see it in a podcast, but at the end of verse four, there's a dash, and in the Lexham English Bible, they take verse five and six As an aside, like a parenthetical statement describing when this is taking place, uh, and then finishing the thought with verse seven, as far as what God did during that period of time, when God formed man from the dust of the ground.
Carey Griffel: So wow, that's quite the difference, really. The New King James version, the verse seven says, and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils, the breath of life. And man became a living being. [00:08:00] So this is an extremely dense section of scripture to talk about. There's a whole lot of stuff we can say about this.
Geoff Johnson: That's true. We won't be able to thoroughly explore any of it fully. One thing that stood out to me here is that, like the beginning on chapter one, where the writer describes what's wrong, there's no light, there's no, there's nothing, there's, it's void, it's, it's shapeless, it's void, and it has no light.
And then the rest of the creation story is about Fixing those things that it doesn't have, that the earth doesn't have, uh, here we have two things that the earth doesn't have, and that's why there are no plants of the field. There are no plants of the field because there's no rain and there's no human.
And then the rest of chapter two is about God fixing those problems so that there could be these plants of the field. [00:09:00]
Carey Griffel: Right, and I forget what commentary I read this in, but recently I read a commentary that highlighted those facts. and said that there was a reason for those two separate problems in creation that we have here.
We have the rain, and the human tilling the ground. Well, the rain is the provenance of God, so that's God's doing something that needs to happen in order to have fruitfulness in the land. And we also have humans that need to do something in order to make this also happen. So, right off the bat in Chapter 2, Before it even talks about the creation of man, we have the idea that there's a dynamic between humanity and God where it's a partnership, right?
God is doing something and then we are also doing something in order to create the ideal situation on earth.
Geoff Johnson: Yeah, it's kind of spins [00:10:00] off that qualification, which doesn't appear. I don't think, I didn't go back to double check, but I don't think of the field is a qualification used in chapter one, the plant of the field.
Which seems to me, and may, may not be able to push this too hard, but it seems to me like that suggests cultivation, a cultivated plot of land o of the field. And yes, you can have wild vegetation, you can have a jungle or a forest or a savanna. You can have all of that without man, but you cannot have a field without a man who is going to till it.
and seed it and then irrigate it, uh, and take care of it. You can't have a field, a cultivation without humanity, but man can do all that and you still won't have anything good out of that without the rain. You still need that rain. So I see that very much that it is [00:11:00] a partnership that we need both participating.
To have a field, a cultivated plot of land that can produce not just wild vegetation, but food and flowers, a garden, as, as we will get to very soon, you can't really have either a garden or a field without intentionality, keeping it in some way, cultivating it with horticulture or whatever, you've got to take care of that land.
Carey Griffel: So right off the bat, we have the idea that humanity is going to be working. A lot of people come to read this chapter and they kind of skip over that. They get to the end of the whole scene in the garden where mankind is supposed to toil for their work. And they think, well, that means that man wasn't doing anything in the garden.
We didn't have any work to do in the garden. This kind of shows that [00:12:00] that's not really the case. Man was always meant to be doing something in the field, to be working the ground. And this probably connects to our dominion of and subduing of the earth as well.
Geoff Johnson: Oh, right. There was no human being to cultivate the ground.
So yes, that we were created not just to cultivate the ground, but the ground couldn't be productive without the cultivation that we could provide, something we do. And that word cultivate here in the Lexham English Bible is the same word in Hebrew as to just serve, to, to serve someone or something, a vad, a servant, a form of that word is the form for a slave.
It's the person who does the things that need to be done. Uh, and we were created to serve the ground.
Carey Griffel: So right when we started reading, there is, there was a difference in verse [00:13:00] four. Mine says, this is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created. And yours said these are the generations of heaven and earth when they were created.
There's a couple of differences there. First of all, I see that heaven and earth are singular in your version and they're plural in mine, or at least heavens is plural in mine. And it's my understanding that in Hebrew, the term heavens just comes naturally as a dualistic
Geoff Johnson: plural. Yeah. Shemayim is heavens.
It's always that, Shemayim. Dualistic plural, right? In Hebrew, it has singular, plural, and then the special plural dualistic, which usually refers to something that has a pair. We talk about a pair of glasses. Even though we can think of it as one thing, it's kind of a pair because there are two eyes and two lenses, and it's a pair.
Glass always comes in twos. And things that always [00:14:00] comes in twos often use this plural form to describe them, like nostrils. ears, they often come with a word that designates them with that dual plural. And here we have the heavens. You know, that's an interesting question. Nobody has a definite answer why the heavens use a dual.
I think it's my pet theory. I have no. I can't give you a paper to prove it. I think it goes back to the fact that there are waters above the heavens and the waters below the heavens, and that these waters always paired in opposites to each other, but they're always there. They are, they're always there.
And they're always a pair between what's above the firmament and what's below. So I kind of think that the fact that we have that two same, but. Different waters, because the word for what the water under the on the earth is also the same dualistic plural. It's mayim. We [00:15:00] have shamayim, the heavens, and mayim, the waters or the seas.
And to me, that's no coincidence that we have a dualistic form for both the seas and the heavens. So whether it's rendered as singular or plural in the translations, the ones that are plural are obviously trying to... Pick up on that dualism from the Hebrew in English, since we don't talk about heavens usually, unless we're being poetic in English.
Carey Griffel: So what's interesting is how we can use language and how we can see the way we think. And I think if we look at the Bible and we see how it uses words and we look at the language of Hebrew and how they thought about things, I think part of what we can kind of do is. Look at both of those things and see that they're, they're not separate.
I think that Hebrew and also the [00:16:00] Bible, they're so interconnected with the way they thought and the way that they would use their words, that I think that speaks a lot to the integration of the people who spoke Hebrew with the text itself. Like, they were truly a... People of the book, so to speak.
Geoff Johnson: Oh yeah, definitely how you think about something impacts how you talk about it.
And that's reflected all through the scriptures. And that's one of those things, that learning the original language can open you up because it's reflected in their idioms. Like in Hebrew, the idiom for getting angry is that your nose gets hot. It's the way that they think about it. We talk about being a hothead.
They would have said you're a hot nose if you got angry easily and just things like that Will kind of let you know that they're thinking about things a little differently than we do not wrong. Not [00:17:00] bad It's just different but thinking about things the way they thought about them or at least appreciating that they think about them differently is a big step in Stepping back and trying to think like a biblical writer and like a biblical audience to understand what they're saying
Carey Griffel: And when we have this phrase here at the beginning We probably don't want to get too deep into what this means, but when it says this is the history of the heavens and the earth in my version and in yours, it says these are the generations.
This is something that's repeated through the book of Genesis.
Geoff Johnson: Right. The word Toledot is the word that translated either history or generations. And Genesis has, I believe, is it seven or eight Toledot?
Carey Griffel: Well, there's 10 or 11, depending on how you count them. Oh,
Geoff Johnson: ten or eleven. I just always think they're going to be seven.
Because [00:18:00] it's, you know, everything needs seven. Right. Yeah. Yes. But one doesn't start with one, which is interesting, because every other major section of Genesis does start with the toledoth. But Genesis 1 doesn't. So that's an interesting thing. It does, it always does seem to follow then, except for this story.
This, here in Genesis 2. But every other Toledote seems to start with a genealogy. The Toledote of Adam. And it gives the genealogy that leads you down to the next major historical figure that's going to get his own. You know, story. And so I think that's why in the Lexham English Bible, they have it as generations because it seems to be tied to the idea of what follows generationally from this point forward, uh, down to the next major generation where something significant occurs in the history that's being recorded.
So that's maybe why Toledot is [00:19:00] translated as generations in. Lexham, but it also, I think, history, you know, Toledot doesn't translate to either one of those words, literally. It's just that the word itself in Hebrew, but it seems to be tied to that, that thing that, that happens from this point forward, here on.
Carey Griffel: Right, right. The, the, the generations of whoever. We tend to think that it's kind of like a chapter division, and then we think that that chapter must be about who was just mentioned. And that's actually, when you're reading these sections of Genesis, that's not the case. The person being mentioned isn't the main character of what then follows.
The person who is mentioned as, these are the generations of, or here, the thing, the heavens and the earth, they're not the main character. It's just that everything that follows... Seems to [00:20:00] stem from that thing or person. Usually it's a person. It's only a thing right here in heavens and earth.
Geoff Johnson: That's right.
Because right now we don't have a person, no human being to cultivate the ground, you know? So we don't have a person, we just have God's creation waiting for that next thing to happen.
Carey Griffel: Right. And I've seen some commentary suggest that it says Heavens and earth because what follows after that is what? is affecting the heavens and the earth.
We corrupt the heavens and the earth throughout what happens in the following section. But this is also one reason why Genesis 1 is often seen as a prologue or something separate from the rest of Genesis because it doesn't begin with this phrase. Some people have tried to tack this on to the end of the Seven Days of Creation, but that's not how it's used [00:21:00] anywhere else in Genesis, and it ruins the entire structure of the rest of the book.
So I think we really need to read this section as the beginning of what happens next.
Geoff Johnson: I agree with
Carey Griffel: that. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the differences here in Genesis 2 versus what we see in Genesis 1. So when people look at these two creation accounts, and they say they're so different because in Genesis 1, we have the nicely ordered creation of the first three days being the environments, and the second three days being the inhabitants of those environments.
But we see very clearly that plants are made before humans, and here we have this emphasis on how there's no plants of the field. And no herb of the field. And so we see that as meaning that that there is literally no vegetation on Earth yet. [00:22:00] But what we miss is that there's different terminology here, that these are not exactly the same words that are used in Genesis 1.
Geoff Johnson: Yes, the existence of plants before there are people might seem to go against this account. But with that qualifier, like you mentioned, of the field, plant of the field that had sprung up, it doesn't necessarily mean no plant at all. Again, I think it could suggest that cultivation. There were no cultivated plants, there were no plants that required cultivation.
Humans could, could grow in a field because there were no humans to take care of them. You know, a crop of, I guess there's corn and wheat that grow in the wild, but probably very sporadically, not enough to actually make a loaf of bread. So you're going to have to have something that's, that uses cultivation of a, of a human to get that.
And so one way to reconcile that is to say that there were [00:23:00] already plants. There just weren't any plants that needed a human to take care of them. And so we're talking about a separate thing. I was going to maybe wait a little bit longer here to get to some of this, because also we have the animals being created after man.
So the order in Genesis 1 is with the plants being created, actually in conjunction with the earth. Earlier in like day three, uh, where the plants are there on the earth and then little animals then and then humans, animals and humans both on day six, whereas here we have human being created in verse seven and then Galway plants, the garden in the east where he presumably creates all those plants of the field that didn't exist in verse five of chapter two, but then after that, then he creates all the animals.
And so if it's man first and then plants and then animals, that's definitely out of sequence from what we saw in Genesis [00:24:00] number one. I've always thought that here in chapter two, we have, at least with regard to the plants and the animals, a kind of special creation of a subset of the plants. A certain kind of plant, the kind of plant that needs people to take care of them.
And then certain exemplar animals. Not that he made every single animal on the face of the earth when he asked man to name them, but example animals. Like, he created an example of a cow and brought it to him. He didn't create all cows, he created a cow and brought it to Adam and said, what would you call this?
Now, he created a bird or an example of this bird and brought that to Adam to say, what would you name this? So that there were example creatures created, just like there were a certain subset of plants created in chapter two. [00:25:00]
Carey Griffel: Now, that is an interesting idea. And I think it kind of corresponds to the fact that we have unique creation of humans here as well, which we'll get to in a second, but what I've seen also in some commentaries is the suggestion.
But this is talking about a very specific part of the earth. It's talking about Eden. And if we're talking about a very specific part of the earth, well, there's climate. And there's seasons in a specific part of the earth. So, the suggestion is that maybe this is talking about the exact season of this part of creation, right?
Like, we have no cultivation, but cultivation can only happen in certain seasons. And so that's kind of... Another way of looking at this part and the differences like
Geoff Johnson: the rainy season because like this says that God had not caused it to rain upon the earth. Is that because it wasn't the [00:26:00] season for rain that raises that question to my mind.
That kind of reminds me of the. The Jewish thinking about this, and there was debate in the Talmud. There's debate as to whether God created the earth in the spring or in the summer. It's going to be one of those, because especially when Eden was created, Adam was able to eat from the trees. Which means it had to be a season when the trees were producing fruit.
So it's either going to be in the spring when they begin to bear fruit or in the summer, when it is already in full bloom and things are mature, like apples that you could take from the tree and just eat them. And so there's this whole dialogue in the Talmud about when God created it, but they, some Jewish rabbis apparently.
Got it down to the exact month and maybe even day of the month when God created it based on the idea That the [00:27:00] garden had fruit in it when Adam was put there,
Carey Griffel: right? well, and then you have Bishop Usher who calculated the date of the earth by adding up all the chronologies. Well, he did it wrong We can actually redo his math and show that he did it wrong.
And there's other problems with treating the Bible like that. But he came up with the date of creation being in October.
Geoff Johnson: Well, there, I guess it was in the fall. Well, I guess if the trees are producing apples. October would be the time when the apples are, are ready to pick.
Carey Griffel: Right. But you know, there wouldn't be very long of harvest after that is, you know, I think the, the rabbis were kind of tracking a little more accurately than Bishop Usher was.
Probably.
Geoff Johnson: Probably.
Carey Griffel: So we also have this mist and nobody knows quite what to do with the mist in chapter two
Geoff Johnson: either. Trying to look at [00:28:00] my text here. ed', the word Hebrew. That's I'm given a primary glosses, a stream, and that's what the Lexham English Bible puts there. A stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground.
And it's a, it must be a fairly unusual word. In Hebrew and yeah, exactly what whether we're talking about mist in the air I don't know like a dew or whether we're talking actual stream It does seem to be odd to be a stream because when god makes the Garden, he also has a stream coming from Eden to water the garden.
And so it seems like that's something new. When Eden is there and there's a stream there, there's something new, but it wouldn't be a new idea if there's a stream already watering the face of the earth. [00:29:00] What I do see as the contrast here is that in verse six, the water covers the whole face of the ground.
Again, this is not good cultivation. Cultivation directs the water. To where it needs to be in the field at a certain spot. You don't just flood the whole area unless you're making rice patties, I guess. But if you're going to cultivate like wheat or corn or something like that, you have to control the water and have it flow into proper channels and be controlled.
Flooding the whole area doesn't work. And so that may be why the covering the whole face of the ground. is still a problem. Even though there's water, maybe not rain, but there's just water, but the water is uncontrolled because it covers everything. When you have cultivation and trees of the field and plants of the field, you need that water to be directed.
Carey Griffel: That's a great [00:30:00] observation. And then you have people who are, who are more of the Concordist type of interpreters who say that this was some sort of perfect field of water that, you know, enveloped the earth and perfectly watered the ground. We really see that it's a problem here. Things are not happening the way that they should be happening.
So I don't think that we can see this as some ideal thing that was ruined by global warming or whatever else. So it's, it's, it is a problem, this word. And see, this is why we use different translations. When you see there's a different word there that means something entirely different. Mist and stream are not similar things.
You can kind of investigate that and say, huh. We don't really know what that means. And I think it's okay to take a step back and say, we don't know what that means. And trying to formulate it in idea of what it is, [00:31:00] we're probably going to be off the mark there. So I think it's more interesting to look at this whole idea that it's watering the ground, but not doing so productively.
Geoff Johnson: Right. If it weren't a problem, it wouldn't be mentioned as a reason for why there was no plant of the field. That, that seems to be definitely why it's here is to describe why Yahweh had not created the plants of the field yet. And what's going on in my mind, and I don't even have a complete resolution to try to share, but I'll talk it out.
That's a great thing about reading in community is we can kind of talk it out between us. Because even if you're a concordist trying to bring this into chapter one, every time God made something in chapter one, it was good. Oh, somebody recently pointed out that the refrain of and God saw that it was good isn't in every single day of creation but for most of them are and and it definitely occurs when he's creating the plants and [00:32:00] Creating the dry ground and creating the animals and so on.
So how do you? Reconcile that this was all good when God made it to the point that now Things aren't quite right. There are no plants of a certain kind because the streams were uncontrolled and the water was uncontrolled and there were no humans, right? How could you call it good when there are still issues that need to be resolved?
And I think maybe we need to come back to our understanding of the word good is one thing. Your last episode, which is a real, finished recently, excellent episode on The Odyssey, also pointed out that It couldn't be perfect, because if it was perfect, it would just be God again, it would just be God creating God, an extension of God himself, because only God is perfect.
So if he creates anything other than himself, he is creating something that is not [00:33:00] perfect. So we can't say that the word good here means that everything was perfect because otherwise it would just be God again. It is something other than the God and therefore it is something less than perfect. In its creation, and so being good doesn't mean perfect, and so it was good in that it, you know, I'm just talking out loud myself here, it was good in that it could sustain what God intended for it, but that doesn't mean it didn't have room to grow and change, and this might be one example, it was good for what, when he created it, for what it was, and it could sustain what he needed it, but it needed to be tweaked.
Thank you.
Carey Griffel: The idea of maturity and improvement seems to be ingrained in this idea of creation, which I think that's a really important thing, because when we understand, even from the very beginning, there [00:34:00] was room to grow, then that gives us a little bit of breathing room to say, Oh, it's okay, but I am also not perfect and that I also have problems growing up.
Even though we're, we're in Christ, even though we are being perfected in him, that's a process. And it's okay to see that it's a process. It's okay to see that we are, we are not yet perfect ourselves. But this is the goal of creation is this process. And it's here from the beginning. All right, so let's talk now about the man who is created.
In my version, in the New King James Version, It just uses the word man. But in the Lexham English Bible, it uses the man. And this is the same term that's used in Genesis 1, but in Genesis 1 it's used for both man and woman. It encompasses all of [00:35:00] humanity. And I was just looking at some other translations, and I don't see any of them that translate this.
As a proper name as Adam, probably because it does have that definite article in front of it. Unlike what is brought out before in my translation.
Geoff Johnson: Yeah, actually I was looking at that word thinking that we might discuss it in our conversation and it's very interesting in verse seven. It does have the definite article in Hebrew, ha adam or ha adam, the man or the adam.
And there are other places though. Where it just uses the word Adam without the definite article. And I was trying to find a rhyme, a reason to when that definite article appears, whether we could say, okay, with the definite article, it is a man without it. It is humanity. [00:36:00] And yet that doesn't track because back in Genesis chapter one, it's used without the definite article to refer to.
Mankind, as you said, it applied to man and woman as mankind, male and female. He had created Adam. So it's tricky. And I don't know that there is a specific rule that you could consistently follow that say, every time there's a definite article, it's one thing. And every time there's not, it's something else because it doesn't seem to be that precise.
Carey Griffel: We can't say that it does become a personal name because we have. Adam listed elsewhere in scripture. He's part of the Genealogy in, is it First Chronicles, I think?
Geoff Johnson: Right, First Chronicles. I love that genealogy in First Chronicles because it just starts. It just starts. The first word of the whole book is [00:37:00] Adam.
Adam, Seth, it just, the list, it just starts with a list of names, uh, and it just assumes that you're going to come to it with an understanding that you're suddenly in a genealogy and you're starting from the beginning. But yes, you're right. It's used there as a proper name for the father of Seth at the beginning of the line.
Carey Griffel: But it's clearly also just a word that can mean humanity, uh, as we see in Genesis 1. So I think we need to be very careful in not just ascribing this as a personal name necessarily. It seems like it becomes a personal name within the narrative somehow and in some way, but we need to really look at each incident.
Geoff Johnson: I'm scanning forward to see when the first time in the Lexham English Bible, it's used as the name Adam, I may miss one by just [00:38:00] scanning here quickly, but it looks to me like the first time it really stands out to me is when Adam is getting reprimanded in chapter three, verse 17, to Adam, he said, and probably because he had just finished talking to the woman, which And so it's definitely just addressing him individually.
And so it uses, I'm looking at the Hebrew and there's no definite article. It's to, to Adam. So no definite article in that particular construction to Adam, he said, because you listen to the voice of your wife, et cetera. But it looks like that's the first time in the Lexham that his name is used as a name.
All the times before that, they're consistently just referring to him as the man.
Carey Griffel: It's in verse 19 that Adam is used in the New King James Version.
Geoff Johnson: Again, it just says the man, [00:39:00] though I'm looking at the footnote from the Lexham English Bible, which put a little footnote next to it there. It says it indicates the noun is singular and occurs with a definite article.
Carey Griffel: That's what it said earlier too. So in the Lexham English Bible. versus the New King James Version. In the New King James Version, in verse 19, it starts using Adam as a personal name. This seems to be, like, the first thing that Adam is now acting as an independent agent, I guess, in verse 19, because he's supposed to be naming the animals.
Thought would be that this is not generally humanity's job to name all of the animals. Although, I mean, I kind of think it is, so.
Geoff Johnson: Right. We have not stopped naming animals.
Carey Griffel: So that's, that's kind of an interesting thought. So hmm. All right. Yeah. So people who are reading their Bibles and reading different translations, this is an interesting kind of [00:40:00] rabbit trail to look at in the different translations as to how they translate this word and when they use it as a proper name and when they don't.
That's very interesting. I mean, these are the kinds of things you can't really land one way or the other because it's, it's simply not clear because it's not as consistently used as we want it to be.
Geoff Johnson: It's just the way we use language. We want language to be more precise. Then apparently they were comfortable with a certain amount of imprecision in the way they talked that make us uncomfortable.
This could be reflected in the whole, let us make man in our image. We want that to precisely identify whether God is acting alone or with a group. And because it isn't extremely clear, because he uses a plural, then we debate it. And is this the Trinity? Is this the Divine Council? [00:41:00] Is this something else?
And we go round and round with it. But the... The person who wrote it, the audience he wrote it to, they were comfortable without him being very precise. Because when God gets around to actually doing it, he's the only one who's given credit for having done it. And probably that's fine with the audience. And the writer at the time, well, how could you say he's, he's doing it with others when it says clearly?
And it's like, oh yes, but look at this verb form. This verb form is plural. And so we, we want to argue tense and, and number. And maybe the ancients were not as precise with their grammar.
Carey Griffel: This is one of the most frustrating things for many of us in Bible study, but I have learned that the deeper you get into Bible study, the more you have to just let go of so much of your certainty [00:42:00] and allow things to have options. And if you can allow things to have options, you know, maybe the more you learn.
The more we learn the more we can kind of land on an answer and sometimes we just can't and that's hard for us I think
Geoff Johnson: just in my mind. You don't even have to go all the way back to biblical Language to appreciate that people had a, a less strict understanding of how language should work before modern times, probably before the invention of movable type and Gutenberg, because movable type and the printing press fixed language into a particular form, and you could reproduce it consistently from that point forward.
Before that, everything was handwritten and handwriting is notoriously. Flexible with how people write and if you go back and read, [00:43:00] you know, my name is Geoffrey spelled with a G. And so I was an English major in college. There's no way I'm not getting, getting out of studying Geoffrey Chaucer for whom I was named.
So I took a class in, in Chaucer. If you read his original writing, which is a middle English, he spells his own name like three different ways and different places. And. He also has, and spelling as a general rule was so flexible, so not only are you dealing with the fact that you're trying to read Middle English, which is, you know, not like modern English in certain ways, certain words we just don't use anymore, even words we do use.
They spelled differently, and in fact spelled differently in different places. What we call spelling, or what is technically known in linguistics as orthography, was just not a thing in the days of Middle English. They spelled it the [00:44:00] way it sounded to them, and if it sounded to them like it had a Y, then they spelled it with a Y.
If it sounded to them like it had an I, they spelled it with an I. And it just, it was spelled the way it sounded. And they were fine with that because somebody could read it and oh, okay, he spelled it with an I and not a Y, but I know what he said. Uh, and, and I think that there's a certain degree of that in all pre Gutenberg language.
Then maybe we're seeing a little bit of that with the grammar of scripture.
Carey Griffel: See, as long as people can understand you when it was read aloud, because that's how most people would consume the literature anyway, if you could be understood read aloud, Then, what did it matter how you spelled it? Or... You know, these very particular things that we zone in on this little grammatical structure.
And it's not that the Bible isn't written very precisely because it is, [00:45:00] but there's still going to be these elements of ambiguity because that's just the way language has worked for most of humanity. And that's just fascinating. Yeah. I don't know what
Geoff Johnson: the right word might be off the top of my head, because on the one hand, it is very meticulous as Tim Mackie is wont to say, the writers of scripture were literary ninjas.
They were extremely meticulous with how the imagery worked and how the linguistic connections were made and how the illusions worked off of one another to build up to something extremely meticulous. But they were not obsessed with spelling, per se, necessarily, uh, not like we are. Yeah, I, I see every once in a while in like the Greek language studies, people asking for like grammars from the ancient world.
There are not a lot of them. [00:46:00] And I know of none for something like Hebrew from the ancient world. It's not until modern times that people have written grammars based on what was written in the ancient world. But in the ancient world, grammar was not a science. It was not something that people fixed in rules.
Language was just the way you spoke. It was an intuitive thing. Everybody knew how to say what they needed to say. So, it's, the things that we sometimes treat loosely, the ancients took very seriously, like I said, meticulously. And things that we are so meticulous about and so particular about, the ancients probably didn't prioritize.
Carey Griffel: It makes a lot of sense when you consider that most people were not writers, most people were not literate, most people were not even reading the text. They were hearing it, and that's kind of a living use of [00:47:00] language rather than this fixed thing that's on the page that you have to kind of,
Geoff Johnson: I mean, there, there came a point when the language became written and scribes did become meticulous in their copying of what was there. But before the Septuagint, which is the first time that we I don't know that there had been written copies, of course, because of the translation. But prior to the creation of the Septuagint, I don't know that we have even anecdotal evidence for the scribal process of taking something and copying it for a later generation.
By the time of the Septuagint, that's assumed that it's happening, but we don't have a description of a process of that happening. And then we have the Septuagint translation into Greek from the Hebrew, and we have a lot of, at least. anecdotal [00:48:00] stories about that process. And then from then on, it certainly became a scribal point of honor to be correct in your meticulous copying of the text.
And textual criticism, which is kind of what this has some bearing on, is a fascinating study. But it's fascinating what we, what we can figure out. Sometimes it's just amazing what we can figure out by looking purely at copies of the text. And yet, We can also be jaw droppingly amazed at what we don't know about
Carey Griffel: how this happened.
Absolutely. I can get really lost in those kinds of things sometimes.
Geoff Johnson: Yeah, we've wandered a little bit away from the text of Genesis chapter 2, but... You know, it's just an interesting way to think, uh, that we're trying to understand the scripture that has been around for thousands of years and bridge all of these gaps.
It's amazing that we can even begin to
Carey Griffel: do so. Yeah. It is astounding to me that we can [00:49:00] have such ancient documents and we can know so much about what they were thinking and how they were presenting their ideas. So we're kind of getting towards the end of our time, but let's talk a little bit about As created by God, and the ideas surrounding that entire creation.
So, we have the traditional idea that there were zero humans. And right here in this verse, in verse 7, this is where we have the first creation of any kind of humanity at all. That's the usual idea. But of course in Genesis 1, it says God created man, and he created the male and female. And up till verse 7, we don't have any females, or at least that's what we're thinking, that we don't have females.
But again, this term man doesn't necessarily mean [00:50:00] one particular man named Adam. Like, it says the man, so it's a particular instance, perhaps, but there's a whole lot of different interpretive theories regarding this.
Geoff Johnson: Yes, uh, there's some suggestion that there are somebody else besides the people we've been reading about because Cain marries someone, uh, a woman that has not been mentioned before from a family that has not been mentioned before.
And then, of course, Cain is also afraid for his life from some threat. And there are Jewish theories that were in the Second Temple literature that the length of time was so long between the creation of Adam and Eve and Cain's murder of Abel that they had produced other offspring and had other clans.
Those were the people that threatened Cain. That's one theory. Another theory is [00:51:00] that God's creation of man in chapter 1 of male and female was of humanity in general. That's another theory. And here in chapter two, we have a creation of one particular man and that other people still existed, but now God has created this one man to take care of the Garden of Eden and those plants of the field that he created here.
And that's possible. It would explain where Cain's wife came from and the rest of the people that were threatening Cain, that they came from this other group that wasn't from the special one. And you know, there's already, even within the idea of the rather Concordist picture of like the traditional view here that I had, which was that God created special examples of animals to bring to Adam to name.
And he had created a subset of plants for [00:52:00] Adam to take care of. That's why it doesn't conflict with the order in Genesis 1. It's not a huge jump from that to say that Adam is a particular example of humanity. Just like the animals brought to Adam later are particular examples of the beasts of the field and the birds.
So maybe Adam is a particular example and you brought to the table the idea that this is about a particular place on the earth. That in this particular place, there had not been rain. In this particular place, there had not been plants of the field. So it isn't necessarily a universal comment. There had not been any plants of the field to be taken care of.
It was in this place of concern. Somewhere. I guess, as would be described when it talks about the waters of Eden in the Middle East, that this place did not have these things. And here God was creating a man to take care of this particular example of plants and animals of the field.
Carey Griffel: [00:53:00] And with Eden as an example of sacred space in particular, of course, we could say that all of creation would be a sacred space, as we see in the first account of creation.
We have The idea that God is setting up his cosmic temple. So the whole cosmos might be seen as sacred space. But Eden is clearly being set up as something special in the world. It's, it, Eden is not all of the world. It's got a particular, a description, and so it's a particular place, and the garden is even a particular place within Eden, probably.
So it's a very specific sacred space compared to all of creation. It doesn't have to be an either or. And, of course, as Joshua Sherman and I have been discussing in the imaging series, the creation of mankind here very much echoes the creation of an idol. If there is a specific sacred space being created, then there [00:54:00] needs to be a specific kind of idol to be placed within that sacred space.
And that's what seems to be happening in verse 7
Geoff Johnson: here. I was tracking with that, that's very interesting. I am trying to balance that idea though, if this is a special creation, mankind being imagers of God, and that being a kind of idol equivalent. Being the image of God is to be the idol equivalent for the living God, because we are living idols for the living God, unlike the stone idols for the so called gods, if you will, the divine beings that aspire to godhood.
But if this is a special creation of just Adam being His idol. Does that reflect poorly on the rest of humanity that are not? Presuming that there is a rest of humanity,
Carey Griffel: right? Well, and that's always the question that comes up with this, right? If Adam [00:55:00] wasn't the first human and he is being created as the image of God here Then how can all of humanity be created in the image of God or what about the rest of humanity?
That's not in Eden. Aren't they imagers of God? What do we do with that? And I think that's what we see here, though, is general creation of humanity, they are also imagers. So we can't say that they're not imagers and that Adam is the only imager. Adam is a very specifically designed imager. He's described in idol language here, when he is formed from the dust of the ground, when the breath of life is put into his nostrils.
That's an image of an image being created, the image of the idol being created. And So Genesis 1 assures us that all of humanity is created also in the image of God. So I don't think, just like in these other, I think, false dichotomies [00:56:00] of, these are two entirely different accounts, and I think that what we're seeing, rather, is that there's the general idea and there's a very specific idea, and the specific idea is helping us see it in a more concrete, exact form, I guess, if that makes any sense.
So we have this idea of, well, if Adam is the image of God, that doesn't disqualify the rest of humanity also being God's imagers. Of course, there's the idea also that maybe they weren't. Maybe they were Neanderthals, and this is the first indication that we have of real humanity being created. But then if there's other people outside the garden that Cain marries, Is he marrying somebody who's not an image of God?
So I think that's the wrench that is being thrown into this whole idea. But I think if we compare Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, there's no indication that [00:57:00] there's any of humanity, any people anywhere that are not created in the image of God.
Geoff Johnson: Now, I can follow with that logic, that what we have here is a kind of close up view of a process that's described broadly in Chapter 1, the creation of imagers.
And in Chapter 1, it's just described as God's imagers without the process being described. Here in Chapter 2, with this one particular imager, the process is given in more detail. But that doesn't say that the imagers of Chapter 1 weren't created with the same process. It just doesn't describe the process in chapter one.
Carey Griffel: And it's not like we don't have to be an imager by literally being created out of dust. Right. That doesn't make any sense because then Adam would be the only imager. And we see later in Genesis that Adam's sons were also created in his image. And in Genesis nine, of course, where all of [00:58:00] humanity is said to be still in the image of God.
So I think if we compartmentalize too much, this is where we're getting into with the you. Supposed contradictions, and I just don't really think that they're there. I think we're making them up because we compartmentalize too much.
Geoff Johnson: Yeah. I'm thinking back to the creation of animals in day six of chapter one.
And in verse 24 of chapter one, God says, let the earth bring forth living creatures, according to their kind, cattle, moving things, wild animals, according to their kind. And it was so. So the whole description there is let the earth bring forth living creatures. In chapter 2, when it talks about the animals being created, it says, Out of the ground Yahweh formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought each to the man.
It's not a lot more specific, [00:59:00] but it does sort of reflect something similar happening the way God created. Uh, well, in, in, in chapter one, it's basically like the earth just spontaneously gives forth animals. Let the earth bring forth animals. And so it just does here. It says God formed out of the ground.
God formed every piece of the field. So God's hands are more involved, his metaphorical hands involved in the process of forming the beasts. Whereas in chapter one, it just says, let the earth bring forth. So even with the animals. It seems like there is a more particular description in Chapter 2 after a very broad description in Chapter 1.
And so it could be the same kind of principle here that God creates humanity, then He creates Adam and Eve in Chapter 2. There's no real strong distinction. Although in Chapter 2, Creating the female is a special process, uh, [01:00:00] because in chapter one, it says God created the male and female. He created them.
So just very broadly here, of course, Adam has to be put into a deep sleep. God takes his side and then forms the woman and then seals up the side of Adam. So it is a very detailed process to create a woman in chapter two.
Carey Griffel: And she's not really that, that's not the process of idol making the process of Eve being made.
It's absolutely the case that women are the image of God just as much as men. And so we have to really balance both of these chapters and say they're really saying the same thing, but chapter 2 is giving us this specific image in the way that it is because it has specific reasons for doing that. And it's, it's really describing Eden as that temple sacred space.
So I think that all of these ideas where we think there's contradictions, we need to look a little bit more [01:01:00] closely at And see where the differences are actually bringing out some theological points that can be very useful.
Geoff Johnson: I know we're going to have to wrap it up pretty quickly here. But one point about the woman that I don't think gets brought out too often is that Adam calling her woman in verse 23, he says, she is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.
She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man is the continuation of God's task of Adam to name the animal. Because he gives the task, then he creates each animal and brings each one to the man to see what he will call him. And then he creates the woman, after no suitable match is found. Does the same thing, he brings the woman to Adam to see what he will call her.
Doesn't say it with that exact wording, but he brings her there and then he calls her. And the verb for calling her is just all over that. She shall be called [01:02:00] woman for she was taken from man. So he calls her Isha woman because she was taken from Ish man. And so they have that shared connection. I don't think you can at all say that woman is not the image of God because when God created man.
In chapter two, he has created both of them in a sense, because she's taken from man. So she is also the image of God in as much as man was the image of God. So they are, they are
Carey Griffel: together. Well, and I like that you brought up the Hebrew of the man and the woman, because just like in English, we have man and woman, and those words are very connected.
It's the same in Hebrew. The words are also very connected.
Geoff Johnson: Right. Ish and Ishah. Adam does actually name her twice because he names her woman here in chapter two, and then he calls her Eve towards [01:03:00] the end of verse 20. In chapter three, the man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all
Carey Griffel: life. I was kind of hoping we could get into the idea of soul and spirit, but I think we need to wrap it up.
Yeah.
Geoff Johnson: Well that's another Pandora's box. We can open another time draft because Yes, the whole idea of of man becoming a ne fish, uh, Nefesh Havah, a living being, is definitely a deep one with ramifications throughout the whole rest of the Bible.
Carey Griffel: Yeah, for sure. I really appreciate you coming on and reading the first seven verses of, well, not even the first seven, we only read three verses because we started in verse four, but this is good stuff.
That's true.
Geoff Johnson: But we've touched on, we've touched on passages throughout.
Carey Griffel: We touched on a lot in this chapter, so it's really good stuff, and I really appreciate
Geoff Johnson: it. Anytime, and I'd love to do it again. [01:04:00] Either we can continue reading here or somewhere else, or, you know, just talk about that nefesh. nephesh is, the word nephesh alone could fill an hour of discussion.
Carey Griffel: For sure. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you very much, Geoff.
Geoff Johnson: All right, Carey. See you again sometime.
Carey Griffel: So, thanks again for listening, and maybe someday... I'll be really good with doing audio. Yeah, no, probably not. But I hope you enjoyed this episode. I love learning new things and thinking about new ideas, and I hope you do too.
Once again, I will mention my new website, GenesisMarksTheSpot.com, and will mention if you do leave your email there, I can send you what I'm up to. Even if social media goes bonkers. For those who are interested in sending in questions or comments, my email is
[email protected]. [01:05:00] Thank you for those who comment and who share this episode.
Please consider leaving me a review wherever you listen. You can also leave a review on my website. Oh, and if you're not aware, I do have a podcast focused Facebook group that you're welcome to join if you'd like. Alright, so, thanks for listening, and I hope you guys have a blessed week.
