I’m not sure how you get from:
…to a different creation. Again, they are two different stories. In Genesis 2, it tells the story of the ERETZ where God planted a garden. Seeing how the ERETZ where the garden was planted was in the Eden region, that is, the EDEN ERETZ, you could say it was the story of “The Story of Man in Eden Land.”
As many scholars have pointed out for as long as the Hebrew text of Genesis has existed, the word ERETZ means land, country, nation, region, wilderness (in the KJV Bible), and in some contexts dirt, soil, or even “the ground”. To say it means “planet earth” is to anachronistically plant modern day notions into the Hebrew text–and even to plant them into the 1611 KJV were “earth” in the English language of the time more often meant dirt and “the ground” than “planet earth”. (Much like in Hebrew, “earth” at that time USUALLY meant soil as in “a tiller of the earth” and the opposite of the heavens, as in “falling to the ground.”) ERETZ YISRAEL in ancient Israel meant “Land of Israel” or “Nation of Israel” just as it does today in modern Israel. Nobody has ever assumed ERETZ YISRAEL means “planet Israel”. So it always frustrates me when people see ERETZ in Genesis and assume “planet earth”. Yes, it is a popular tradition dating back to the KJV itself, and most modern translations have to retain the word “earth” despite the confusion it spawns—but in the footnotes at the bottom of the page, they show the better translation for ERETZ: “or land, country.”
I assume that when the Book of Genesis was written, the author(s) wanted a “preface” to the story of the creation of the Children of Israel, and the two best known origins stories were chosen to describe the backdrop, where the God of Israel is declared to be the creator of everything. This in no way detracts from divine inspiration. Indeed, probably all of the pericopes of Genesis 1 to 11 were popular oral stories known in that area of the world. And what could be more grand that opening the book with a HYMNIC TRIBUTE to ELOHIM, where the story of creation is told as a six stanza hymn with a repeating chorus which depicts God as the creator of all of the domains of the universe, in contrast to the neighboring cultures where each of those same domains was attributed to a different deity. Israel’s God is so powerful that he made everything in a single workweek. This is a perfectly sensible literary device and the structure of Genesis 1, with lots of chiasms, the use of sevens and threes, and so many other beautiful features of the genre underscore that this is not a science lesson on the origins of the universe. It is theology.
Of course, in the ERETZ EDEN story that follows in Genesis 2:4ff, none of those features are seen because it is a different literary work from a different source and a different purpose. Moses and Joshua and other likely editors weaved these stories into a beautiful whole to the glory of God. If that is jarring to those who were originally taught that Moses sat down each evening under the glow of the pillar of fire by night and wrote out the entire Torah as his original work–like it was jarring for me long ago–I can only recommend careful reflection that God’s ways are not our ways.
Of course, once one recognizes the separate components of the book of Genesis, there is nothing wrong with regarding the ERETZ EDEN story as a summary of various highlights of the original creation hymnic tribute in Genesis 1. The editors of Genesis probably regarded it that way.
Is there anything heretical about this view? Not that I can see. Does it mean that the authors of Genesis got the history wrong? No. We just have to understand history as ancient people understood it.
I once had a conversation with the man in an office next to mine when I took a job in the university’s computer center when I went back to graduate school in mid-life. He had a PhD in Physics from his native nation of India. One day he asked me questions about my Christian faith and academic background so I asked him about his. In a very tactful way I asked him how his Hindu view of our planet resting on the backs of four elephants fit into his understanding of science. He found my question perplexing because he thought that a Christian who “believed in Genesis” would be faced with the very same kind of situation. He did indeed consider the world to rest on four elephants, but it was very difficult to even discuss the idea of “literal meaning.” He would always say that “yes the world rests on four elephants”—but that statement didn’t mean the same thing to him as what non-Hindus would assume. I can’t say that I even understood him, but I think he understood that statement as a very PHILOSOPHICAL idea. He most certainly considered it true. But if you asked him how the universe was formed and how the earth related to the sun and other planets, you’d hear a conventional astronomy lesson that we would all accept. It just wasn’t a conflict for him.
I suppose when I say that I consider Genesis 1 to be true, most non-Christians would be just as perplexed that my scientific background would allow that. But I consider the word “literal” one of the most ambiguous and confusing words we could tap for these types of discussions. It is a word that creates more confusion than clarity. (I would even say that Genesis 1 uses the word YOM in a literal sense in that it is a hymnic genre where the days don’t stand for billions of years. I say that despite the fact that I affirm the billions of years of the history of the universe. I see Genesis 1 as using a single work-week to illustrate God’s power and dominion over the universe, not a science lesson. So the author used a work-week to teach us about God, not the origins of the world in a scientific sense.)
This is probably murky as mud, so let me know if it has communicated anything worthwhile.
of English and Latin orthography.