2.1 2.2 creation and the fall

The book of Genesis opens with two accounts of creation, one in chapter 1:1ff and another in chapter 2:4ff. Conservative Bible scholars credited Moses with the authorship of the entire Penteteuch (the first five books of the Bible), and no doubt considered the second telling to be an amplification of the first, rather simple, poetic account. Woman's place in the first story is straightforward, inseparable from the creation of man. On the sixth day of creation, after the introduction of animals, God said:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Gen. 1:26-28.)

In the second account, minus the device of "days" and the gradual introduction of the elements of nature, the writer concentrates on explaining, with the creation story, some of the basic issues of human existence: sex, sin, and suffering. He rather quickly dispenses with the environment in order to deal with man himself: "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 soul" (Gen. 2:7). Then, with intimate details and a personal orientation, he relates the familiar story of the Garden of Eden: Adam was given the task of tending the fertile garden and the privilege of eating from all but the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." God, however, notes the unfinished state of his creation and says:

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helpmeet for him. . . . And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord had taken from man, made he woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they be one flesh. (Gen. 2:18, 21-24.)

The serpent then intrudes upon this idyllic setting and induces the woman to eat of the forbidden fruit and to give some to her husband. God's punishment comes swiftly: "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (Gen. 3:16). Adam is resigned to eking out a harsh existence from thorny soil; both are banished from the Garden and inflicted with eventual death.

Modern biblical scholarship affirms that the two accounts were actually written several hundred years apart; the second--the mythic drama--arose out of an early time and a primitive search for meaning that framed questions in relation to the culture as it existed and asked how these conditions had come to be. The "great hymn of creation" Georgia Harkness, Women in Church and Society (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), p. 145. found in chapter one was composed by a priestly poet who wrote four hundred years later during the exile from Jerusalem. His aims appear to be worship and artistic expression, extolling the sovereignty of God and the dignity of mankind in a progression of creative days, each climaxed with God's declaration that "it was good." But Baptists did not read these chapters either as a myth of origins or an ode on creation; rather, they understood them to be literal history, complete with the divine order for life in the present. Still, they had difficulty agreeing as to the precise details of the pattern for woman's character and work.