Genesis 2: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The chapter closes the creation account: God finishes his work by the seventh day, rests, and blesses and sets apart that day. It then tells how the LORD God formed the man from the dust and placed him in a garden in Eden, which held the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and a river that split into four branches, and gave him a command about one of the trees. God says it is not good for the man to be alone, brings the animals to him to see what he would call them, and then makes a woman from the man's rib and brings her to him.

Claim by Claim

1. 2:1
   • The heavens and the earth were finished.
   • All the host of them was finished.
2. 2:2
   • On the seventh day God ended his work which he had made.
   • God rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3. 2:3
   • God blessed the seventh day.
   • God sanctified the seventh day.
   • God blessed and sanctified the seventh day because on it he had rested from all his work.
   • The work God rested from was the work which God created and made.
4. 2:4
   • These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created.
   • The LORD God made the earth and the heavens in that day.
5. 2:5
   • No shrub of the field was yet in the earth.
   • No plant of the field had yet sprouted.
   • The LORD God had not caused rain to fall upon the earth.
   • There was no man to till the ground.
6. 2:6
   • A flow of water went up from the earth.
   • It watered the whole face of the ground.
   • The term for what went up from the earth is uncertain, meaning either a mist or a spring-flow.
7. 2:7
   • The LORD God formed the man from dust of the ground.
   • The LORD God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
   • The man became a living being.
8. 2:8
   • The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east.
   • The LORD God put there the man whom he had formed.
9. 2:9
   • The LORD God made every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food grow out of the ground.
   • The tree of life was in the midst of the garden.
   • The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was there.
10. 2:10
    • A river went out of Eden to water the garden.
    • From there the river divided.
    • The river became four heads.
11. 2:11
    • The name of the first river is Pishon.
    • The Pishon winds through the whole land of Havilah.
    • There is gold in Havilah.
12. 2:12
    • The gold of that land is good.
    • Bdellium is there.
    • The onyx stone is there.
13. 2:13
    • The name of the second river is Gihon.
    • The Gihon winds through the whole land of Cush.
14. 2:14
    • The name of the third river is Hiddekel.
    • The Hiddekel goes toward the east of Assyria.
    • The fourth river is the Euphrates.
15. 2:15
    • The LORD God took the man.
    • The LORD God put him in the garden of Eden.
    • The man was put there to work the garden and to keep it.
16. 2:16
    • The LORD God commanded the man.
    • The LORD God said the man may freely eat of every tree of the garden.
17. 2:17
    • The LORD God said the man must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
    • The LORD God said that in the day the man eats of it he will surely die.
18. 2:18
    • The LORD God said it is not good for the man to be alone.
    • The LORD God said he would make for the man a helper corresponding to him.
19. 2:19
    • The LORD God formed every beast of the field out of the ground.
    • The LORD God formed every bird of the air.
    • The LORD God brought them to the man.
    • The LORD God brought them to see what the man would call them.
    • Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
20. 2:20
    • The man gave names to all the livestock.
    • The man gave names to the birds of the air.
    • The man gave names to every beast of the field.
    • For the man no helper corresponding to him was found.
21. 2:21
    • The LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man.
    • The man slept.
    • The LORD God took one of the man's ribs.
    • The LORD God closed up the flesh in its place.
22. 2:22
    • The LORD God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman.
    • The LORD God brought her to the man.
23. 2:23
    • The man said this one at last is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh.
    • The man said she shall be called Woman.
    • The man said she is called Woman because she was taken out of Man.
24. 2:24
    • Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother.
    • A man cleaves to his wife.
    • They become one flesh.
25. 2:25
    • The man and his wife were both naked.
    • They were not ashamed.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

2:1

"Host" in the King James translates a Hebrew word meaning an army or organized array. Applied to the sky it covers the sun, moon and stars drawn up in ranks; applied to the earth, everything that fills it.

2:2

The Hebrew verb translated "rested" means "stopped, ceased", it says the work came to an end, not that God was tired. The related Hebrew noun is the source of the word "sabbath."

2:3

"Sanctified" translates a Hebrew verb meaning to mark something off from ordinary use and reserve it for a special one. It says nothing about being morally pure.

2:4

"These are the generations of" translates a Hebrew phrase, *toledoth*, meaning roughly "this is what came of" or "this is the account of." It recurs throughout Genesis as a heading that introduces the next stage of the story. Where the King James prints LORD in capital letters, the Hebrew has the personal name of Israel's God, four consonants usually written YHWH. Ancient Jewish practice was to avoid pronouncing it and say "my Lord" instead, and English translations have followed that by substituting "LORD" in capitals. Where you see ordinary "Lord" or "God," a different Hebrew word stands behind it.

2:5

The two Hebrew terms here, "plant of the field" and "herb of the field", appear to distinguish uncultivated scrub from the crops that need a farmer. The point of the verse is that neither rain nor human labor was yet in place.

2:6

The Hebrew word behind "mist" occurs only twice in the Bible and its meaning is genuinely uncertain. Ancient translators took it as mist or vapor rising from the ground; many modern scholars, comparing similar words in other ancient languages, take it as underground water welling up as springs.

2:7

There is a play on words in the Hebrew that English cannot carry: the man is *adam* and the ground he is shaped from is *adamah*. "Earthling from the earth" gives the flavor. "A living soul" translates *nephesh chayyah*, a phrase meaning simply "a living creature" or "a living being." The identical phrase is used of the animals in Genesis 1. It does not mean an immortal soul housed inside a body; in Hebrew usage a person is a *nephesh* rather than has one.

2:8

Eden is a place name; the Hebrew word resembles a root meaning "delight" or "luxury," and it may also be connected to a word for a well-watered plain. "Garden" here means an enclosed, planted park of the kind ancient kings kept, not a vegetable plot; the Greek translation used the word *paradeisos*, from which English gets "paradise." "Eastward" gives no fixed point of reference, east of the writer, or in the eastern part of Eden. Both readings are possible in the Hebrew.

2:9

"Good and evil" is a paired opposite of the kind Hebrew uses to mean the whole range in between, like saying "young and old" for everybody. What the phrase covers here is disputed: it may mean moral discernment, or the full breadth of experience, or the practical knowledge of an adult as opposed to a child.

2:10

"Four heads" in the King James means four headwaters, the points where separate rivers begin. The picture is of one stream leaving Eden and then dividing into the sources of four known rivers.

2:11

Havilah is unidentified. Elsewhere in the Bible the name is associated with Arabia; the location of these rivers and lands has never been settled.

2:12

Bdellium is a fragrant gum resin that oozes from certain trees and hardens into pale lumps, used in incense and perfume. The King James simply carries over the Hebrew word untranslated. The stone named here is traditionally rendered "onyx," but the exact gem the Hebrew word refers to is not certain; other suggestions include beryl and lapis lazuli.

2:13

The Hebrew reads "Cush," which the King James renders "Ethiopia." Cush normally means the region south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan and Ethiopia, but that is nowhere near the Tigris and Euphrates named two verses later, so some take this Cush to be a different territory east of Mesopotamia inhabited by the Kassites.

2:14

Hiddekel is the Hebrew name for the river known in English as the Tigris. Assyria translates "Asshur," the region on the upper Tigris that later became the Assyrian empire.

2:15

The two Hebrew verbs are *abad*, to work or serve, and *shamar*, to keep, watch over or guard. Both are ordinary words for farm labor and for standing guard, and both are used elsewhere of the duties of priests.

2:16

"Freely eat" translates a Hebrew construction that doubles the verb, "eating you may eat", for emphasis. English has no neat equivalent; it functions like an underline.

2:17

"Thou shalt surely die" uses the same doubled-verb emphasis as the permission in the previous verse: "dying you shall die." "In the day that" is a common Hebrew idiom meaning simply "when," not necessarily "within twenty-four hours."

2:18

"An help meet for him" is two separate ideas in the King James, not the single word "helpmeet" that later English made of it. "Help" translates *ezer*, one who supplies what is lacking; the same noun is used elsewhere in the Bible of God helping Israel, so it carries no suggestion of a subordinate. "Meet for him" translates a Hebrew phrase meaning "corresponding to him," "matching him," or "standing opposite him", his counterpart.

2:19

The Hebrew verb form here can be read either as "formed" or as "had formed," which is why translations differ over whether the animals are made at this moment or the sentence is looking back at their earlier making. The Hebrew leaves it open.

2:20

Up to this point the Hebrew has said *ha-adam*, "the man," with the definite article, which is not a personal name any more than "the human" is. Somewhere in this stretch of chapters the same word starts functioning as the name Adam, and translators disagree about exactly where; the King James switches here.

2:21

The Hebrew word rendered "rib" is *tsela*, which elsewhere in the Bible almost always means "side", the side of a building, of the ark, of a hill. "Rib" is one possible sense of it here and the traditional one, but "side" is equally defensible.

2:23

The wordplay is in the Hebrew: *ishshah*, woman, is drawn from *ish*, man. The two words are not in fact from the same root, but they sound alike, and the verse deliberately pairs them. English "woman" from "man" happens to preserve the effect.

2:24

"Cleave" in 1611 English means to stick fast or cling to, the opposite of its other modern sense of splitting apart. The Hebrew verb is used of glue, of gripping, and of loyalty. "One flesh" draws on a Hebrew idiom in which "flesh" means kin or blood relation, compare "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" in the previous verse. The phrase asserts that marriage makes family out of two people who were not related.

2:25

The Hebrew word for "naked" here, *arummim*, sounds nearly identical to the word *arum*, "shrewd" or "crafty," which opens the very next verse describing the serpent. The chapter break hides a deliberate echo.