How many accounts of creation are there in the Bible?

Question

Wiki User · Answer

One. Gen 1:1-31 is the overall account of the entirety of creation. Gen 2:7-25 is the breakdown of the creation of man & woman on the 6th day. No different than novels & movies do when they give u the overall storyline & then break it down to explain. There's not 2 different accounts, period. In Gen 2:7 God forms man then in v8 God planted a garden called Eden then in v15 God took Adam & placed him in the garden. One account.

Answer:

There are two different creation stories in the Christian Bible:

The first is Genesis 1:1-2:3
The second is Genesis 2:4-25.

ANSWER EXPOUNDED:

As the last person posted, there were 2 creations of man. 1st man "adam", both male and female (adam = mankind, the word "man" was a bad English translation) and the 2nd man was "haadam".

FIRST CREATION

"adam" the first man in Genesis 1:1-2:3

1:24 A command was given, "let the earth bring forth EVERY kind of living

creature."

1st Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, also birds that fly, all the sea creatures that creep. this is the fifth day.

2nd Let the earth bring forth every living creature: cattle, creeping things of the land, and wild beasts of every kind.

3rd God said, Let us make man (adam) in our image, after our likeness . and the earth brought forth man and woman and this is the sixth day.

4th God made all manner of plant life for food. And this was the 6th day.

SECOND CREATION

"haadam" the second man in Genesis 2:4-25 the LORD God FORMED

1st The LORD God formed "haadam" from the dust of the earth.

2nd God created the garden of Eden.

3rd God made a river to water the garden that branches off into 4 rivers.

4th God placed "haadam" in the garden to till and tend it. (no Eve yet - 1st

creation, "the earth brought forth" both "haadam" and woman

at the same time)

5th The LORD God formed out of the earth, wild beasts, birds that fly, and

man named them.

6th The LORD God formed woman (ishahah) from the rib and flesh taked

from Haadam. "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my

flesh. This one shall be called Woman, for from man she was taken."

These are the two different creations stories, how they are written in the Torah (the 1st five book of the King James Bible) the Jewish Holy Bible which has been around far longer than our King James Bible, and agree that there were two creations. The punctuation, the "colon mark" is an errorin our KJB, causing the reader to understand that the story is expounded on the first accounted creation on the 6th day, but in the Jewish Bible, (which is equivalent to our Holy Bible) called the Tanakah and contains the same books, but carry the Hebrew names instead of the English names. "The Torah" (which consists of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) "The Nevi'im", which are the books of the 21 prophets and the book of the Kethuvim, "The Writings" of Psalms, Prov., Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamat., Eccl., Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Neh., I & II Chronicles.

However, getting back to the story of the creations, in the Torah Genesis 2 which reads . .

"The heavens and the earth were finished, and all their array. 2 On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done. 4 Such is the story of heavens and earth when they were created.

When the LORD God made earth and heavens - 5 when no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, 6 but a flow would well up from the ground and watered the whole surface of the earth - 7 the LORD God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being."

How accurate is the Jewish Bible?

Jeremiah is the first to mention the scribes as a professional group: "How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Lo, certainly in vain make he it; the pen of the scribes (sopherim) is in vain" (Jer.8:8).

The word sopherim literally means "the counters"; the early scribes earned this title because they counted every letter of every book of Scripture to make sure they didn't leave out anything.

After the Jews returned from Exile, they formed communities of scribes to preserve and circulate the Scriptures that had become so precious to them. These scribes ( later called the Masoretes ) tried to explain the variations in different manuscripts. They eventually developed a system of vowel pointing that preserved the pronunciation of the Hebrew words.

Before he began his work each day, the scribe would test his reed pen by dipping it in ink and writing the name Amalek, then crossing it out (cf. Deut. 25:19). Then he would say, "I am writing the Torah in the name of its sanctity and the name of God in its sanctity." The scribe would read a sentence in the manuscript he was copying, repeat it aloud, and then write it. Each time he came to the name of God, he would say, " I am writing the name of God for the holiness of His name." If he made an error in writing God's name, he had to destroy the entire sheet of papyrus or vellum that he was using.

After the scribe finished copying a particular book, he would count all of the words and letters it contained. Then he checked this tally against the count for the manuscript that he was copying. He counted the number of times a particular word occurred in the book, and he noted the middle word and the middle letter in the book, comparing all of these with his original. By making these careful checks, he hoped to avoid any scribal errors.

This was done from generation to generation for thousands of years.

FYI

The first recorded instance of God's Word being written down, was when the Lord Himself wrote it down in the form of ten commandments on the stone tablets delivered to Moses at the top of Mount Sinai. Biblical scholars believe this occurred between 1,400 BC and 1,500 BC… almost 3,500 years ago. The language used was almost certainly an ancient form of Hebrew, the language of Old Covenant believers.

The earliest scripture is generally considered to be the "Pentateuch", the first five books of the Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy… though there is some scholarly evidence to indicate that the Old Testament Book of Job may actually be the oldest book in The Bible. The Old Testament scriptures were written in ancient Hebrew, a language substantially different than the Hebrew of today. These writings were passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years on scrolls made of animal skin, usually sheep, but sometimes deer or cow. Animals considered "unclean" by the Jews, such as pigs, were of course, never used to make scrolls.

When the entire Pentateuch is present on a scroll, it is called a "Torah". An entire Torah Scroll, if completely unraveled, is over 150 feet long! As most sheep are only about two to three feet long, it took an entire flock of sheep to make just one Torah scroll. The Jewish scribes who painstakingly produced each scroll were perfectionists. If they made even the slightest mistake in copying, such as allowing two letters of a word to touch, they destroyed that entire panel (the last three or four columns of text), and the panel before it, because it had touched the panel with a mistake! While most Christians today would consider this behavior fanatical and even idolatrous (worshiping the scripture, rather than the One who gave it to us), it nevertheless demonstrates the level of faithfulness to accuracy applied to the preservation of God's Word throughout the first couple of thousand years of Biblical transmission.

The ancient documents were meticulously copied from generation to generation as the scrolls were worn by use.

Christ said "Salvation is of the Jews". We need to refer to the ancient Jewish writings to "prove all things". The Bible was translated, not by the Jews but by English speaking men using English terminologies.

Wiki User · Answer

The Torah has one creation-narrative, which takes the form of a summary (Genesis ch.1) followed by an in-depth recap (Rashi commentary, Genesis 2:8).
When we see a newspaper whose opening headline is paraphrased in the detailed story, we don't ascribe the repetition to different writers.

But this kind of literary device, which the Torah employs to enrich its text, has been used by Bible-critics in an attempt to reassign and divide up its authorship.

The Jewish sages, based on ancient tradition, identified many of the literary devices used by the Torah, which include:

- recapping earlier brief passages to elucidate,

- employing different names of God to signify His various attributes,

- using apparent changes or redundancies to allude to additional unstated details,

- speaking in the vernacular that was current during each era,

and many more. While Judaism has always seen the Torah as an intricate tapestry that nonetheless had one Divine source, some modern authors such as Wellhausen (the father of modern Biblical-criticism, 1844-1918) have suggested artificially attributing the narrative to several unknown authors, despite the Torah's explicit statement as to its provenance (Exodus 24:12, Deuteronomy 31:24). This need not concern believers, since his claims have been debunked one by one, as archaeology and other disciplines have demonstrated the integrity of the Torah. No fragments have ever been found that would support his Documentary Hypothesis, which remains nothing more than an arbitrary claim:

Refuting the JEPD Documentary Hypothesis

The creation-narrative in Genesis (a Christian author)

The authorship of the Hebrew Bible