Genesis2chapter 2

Genesis 2:1-3

The work stops because it is finished, not because God tires, and Isaiah says plainly that the Creator of the ends of the earth does not faint or grow weary. The seventh day is the only one of the seven with no evening and no morning attached to it, and Hebrews reads that open ending as a rest God still invites people into. Verse 3 is also the first time anything in the Bible is sanctified, and the thing set apart is a piece of time rather than a place or a person. Exodus 20:11 grounds the Sabbath command on this verse rather than on anything given at Sinai.

Genesis 2:4

This is the first of eleven toledoth lines, the recurring these are the generations of that divides Genesis from here to the last account in the book. They fall at 2:4, 5:1, 6:9, 10:1, 11:10, 11:27, 25:12, 25:19, 36:1, 36:9 and 37:2, and each division narrows the field, from the heavens and the earth down to one family living in Egypt. Each one hands the account to the next household rather than to the next event. Missler built his reading of the whole book on these divisions rather than on its incidents.

Genesis 2:5-6

Before any rain has fallen, a mist goes up from the earth and waters the whole face of the ground. Some read this as a different atmosphere in the world before the flood, and others take it as the ordinary ground fog of a dry season. The book records no rainfall at all until the flood in chapter 7, which is the observation the first reading rests on. The text claims only what it says, that the ground was watered and no man was yet working it.

Genesis 2:7

Man is made of two things at once, dust from the ground and breath from God. The Hebrew word for formed is the potter's word, so the picture is hands working clay rather than a command spoken over the deep. Paul carries the verse forward twice, calling Adam the figure of him that was to come in Romans 5:14, and setting the first man Adam as a living soul against the last Adam as a quickening spirit in 1 Corinthians 15:45. That makes Adam one of the figures in Genesis the New Testament names as a type outright, alongside Melchizedek in Hebrews 7.

Genesis 2:8

God plants a garden and puts there the man he had formed. The man is placed rather than left where he was made, which is the first movement in his story. He is driven out of the same garden at the end of chapter 3, so the ground he is set down on is the ground he loses. Eden is given as a location in the account, eastward, with a river and named lands around it.

Genesis 2:9

Every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food is made to grow, and then two of them are named. Only one of the two is put off limits in the next breath, so the tree of life stands open to Adam through the whole of this chapter. It is barred to him at the end of chapter 3, and it appears again in the last chapter of Revelation, growing for the healing of the nations. What Adam lost access to is what the redeemed are given back.

Genesis 2:10-14

Four rivers are named and two of them, Hiddekel and Euphrates, are still on the map. The other two and the lands they run through have never been identified with confidence, and a flood that reshaped the surface would account for that. The passage reads as geography rather than symbol, which is why the writer troubles to say where the gold is good. John's last chapter sets a river and the tree of life together again, this time flowing out from the throne.

Genesis 2:15

Work is given before the fall, so labour itself is no part of the curse. The two verbs here are the ones later used for serving and guarding in the tabernacle, which sets Adam in the garden much as a priest stands in a sanctuary. Adam is put there to keep it, and at the end of chapter 3 cherubim are set to keep the way of the tree of life, the same verb turned against him. What changes is not that man must work but that the ground begins to fight him.

Genesis 2:16-17

The permission is enormous and the prohibition is single, every tree but one. This is the first time the Bible uses the word die, and it comes as a warning rather than as a report of anything that has happened. The Hebrew doubles the verb, dying thou shalt die, and since Adam lived on for centuries after eating, the older commentators read a death that began on the day and finished in the grave. The serpent picks this same sentence up in the next chapter and puts a flat negative in front of it.

Genesis 2:18

This is the first thing in the whole account that God calls not good. The Hebrew is ezer kenegdo, a help answering to him, and it is the first time the Bible uses the word help at all; ezer is the word used most often in the Old Testament of God himself coming to the aid of his people. Clarke reads the phrase as one standing opposite him, neither above nor beneath. Henry read the making of woman from Adam's side, rather than from his head or his feet, as the point the text is making about her standing.

Genesis 2:19-20

formed every beast of the field: Naming in the ancient world was an act of authority, and Adam exercises it over every creature brought to him. The exercise also shows him something, that among all the animals there was none that answered to him. He names the woman four verses on and names her again after the fall, and later in the book God takes the naming back, changing Abram to Abraham and Jacob to Israel. The search comes up empty before the woman is made, so he receives her already knowing what she is.

Genesis 2:21-22

a deep sleep: God does not make the woman from the ground as he made the man. He takes her out of Adam's side while Adam is unconscious, so the man has no hand in her making and no claim over her origin. The Hebrew verb in verse 22 is the word for building, and Jerome took that word and read the church built out of the side of the second Adam. Genesis itself says none of that, so it stands here as what Jerome and the writers after him saw in the verse.

Genesis 2:23

bone of my bones: Adam's first recorded words are poetry. He recognises her before he is told anything about her, and the name he gives, ishshah from ish, is a play on his own name that survives in English as woman from man. Jerome noted that the wordplay holds in Hebrew and does not carry over into Greek or Latin, so the English keeps something those versions lost. What the text records is recognition rather than instruction.

Genesis 2:24

Marriage is defined here before there is a nation, a law or a priesthood, which is why Jesus reaches back past Moses to this verse when he is asked about divorce. The verse speaks of a man leaving his father and his mother, though Adam had neither, so it is said over every reader rather than over the first pair alone. Leaving, cleaving and becoming one flesh are three actions in an order, and the order carries weight. Paul quotes the verse and then says he is speaking of Christ and the church.

Genesis 2:25

were both naked: They were naked and not ashamed, and that is the last line before everything changes. Shame is not native to the human condition in this account, since it arrives in the next chapter with the fig leaves. The covering they sew for themselves does not hold, and God clothes them instead with coats of skins, which costs an animal its life. The verse sits here so the reader feels the loss when it comes.