A reader named Kim left a long and thoughtful comment on my previous post, “What are the Roles of Men and Women toward Each Other and in Society?” This post is a response to that comment—which I’ll quote for you in a minute.
In my previous post I said:
From a literary perspective, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were not originally meant to be read sequentially. Each is a self-contained creation myth telling its own story. These two ancient creation stories were collected from two different oral traditions, written down, and placed one after the other in the Bible. Despite the valiant efforts of Biblical literalists to harmonize the two as if they were two different angles on same story, they simply don’t agree with each other in the overall order in which God created things or in the details of exactly how God created the earth and all the plants, animals, and humans that populate it.
That paragraph is a compact and simplified version of a very complicated reality. We won’t get into all the complications here. But in order to respond to Kim, we need to look more closely at the two very different creation stories contained in the first two chapters of Genesis. What we’ll find is that attempts to collapse these two stories into one story on a literal level run into serious complications and contradictions.
But as I said in the very next paragraph of my previous post:
From a symbolic and spiritual perspective, though, the two stories harmonize perfectly. They are like two different verses of the same song. The story of the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 and the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2 represent two different phases of human spiritual and social development, one following after the other.
In other words, a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2 doesn’t work very well. But a spiritual reading gives us great enlightenment on the human condition in general, and on the relationship between man and woman in particular.
First, let’s let Kim speak.
For more on the two creation stories in Genesis, please click here to read on.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 