Genesis 2:15-25

Genesis 2:15-25 begins with God taking Adam ("the man," at this point) and putting him in the garden in order to "cultivate and keep it." God gives Adam the instruction that he can eat from any tree in the garden except from the "tree of knowledge of good and evil." God says that Adam will "surely die" if ever Adam eats from this tree.

I want to insert the observation that Eve was not yet created when Adam received this instruction. I also want to insert the observation that the only command God gave, according to the Bible, was that Adam could not eat from the tree. God did not tell him not to go near it, He did not tell Adam not to touch it, He did not tell Adam not to sit under it - nothing of the sort. He only said that Adam cannot eat from the tree. And, the fact that a "Tree of the knowledge of good and evil" existed before the fall of man implies to me that evil existed before this whole fiasco with Adam and Eve that unravels in Genesis 3.

I'm reading a book called "The Orthodox Way," which discusses how evil is not a real substance within itself, but is simply the absence of good. But I'm not so sure that God creates things by "default," when He is God and could have decided not to allow evil to exist at all. And what about the fact that darkness pre-existed light? If light and darkness are true metaphors/symbols for good and evil, then the existence of darkness before light would certainly mean that evil was actually here first. So that instead of evil being the absence of good, good is the absence of evil. Perhaps we lived in a fallen world before we fell.
On the flip side, if good existed before evil, then it means that God actively and with full knowledge created evil.

After God gives Adam his instructions concerning the trees in the garden, He decides that Adam shouldn't be alone and that He needs a "helper." At this point the Bible says that God begins to form beasts out of the ground and birds for the sky, and brought them to the man "to see what he would call them." There are two things I don't understand, here. (1) Why would God declare that Adam needs a partner, and then start forming animals? Didn't God already know that animals would not be the type of partner that a human needed? (2) In Genesis 1, God created all the animals before he created man. Now, only one chapter later, the Bible has God creating all the animals after he created man. Why? Or is it that God created animals before man - but those animals were outside of the garden, and these new animals are inside of the garden? Of course, we don't really know which day humans were created, either - the Bible implies that humans were created on Day 6, but then turns around to imply that humans were created on Day 2. So, I really don't know.

After being unable to find a suitable helper among the animals, God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep and took a part of Adam's rib to form another human - a woman. Adam says his famous line: "This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman (Ishshah) because she was taken out of Man (Ish)."  

And the Bible goes on to narrate that it is for this reason (what reason? Because woman was taken out of man?) a man will leave his mother and father and cling to his wife. The Bible has a kind of 'circle of life' thing going here: The woman is taken out of man, and only by man re-entering woman can a new man (or woman) be made. And so the Bible says that the man and woman "shall become one flesh," which I assume refers to sex. The last verse in chapter two states that the man and woman were naked and not ashamed. I think this will be an important statement to refer to in Genesis 3.

And, I haven't forgotten about Yetzer Tov and Yetzer Hara, which I will be discussing next post!