Close readers of Genesis have long noted two different ways of identifying the Creator in its opening two chapters, evident even in English translation. In Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a, the creator is called “God.” Back of this in Hebrew is the word ‘elohim, a plural noun sometimes meaning “gods” (see, for example, Gen 6:2; Exod 12:12; Ps 86:8). But as Hebrew can use the plural to indicate greatness or majesty, ‘elohim is commonly used in Scripture as shorthand for “God of gods” or “God above all gods” (for example, Deut 10:17; Jer 10:10; Pss 80:3; 84:7), and so properly translated “God.”
In Genesis 2:4b-25, ‘elohim is combined with another term in the expression “LORD God” (most English translations follow the King James Version [KJV] and place LORD in all capitals here). Back of “LORD” in the Hebrew is a Name: the personal name of God, which can be rendered from Hebrew into English characters as Yhwh.
In Jewish tradition the Name of God is revered (see Exod 20:7//Deut 5:11). So, when you come to the Name while reading the text aloud, the Name is not pronounced: instead, you say ‘adonai, that is, “my Lord”—hence, the translator’s convention of representing Yhwh as LORD, in all capitals.
Indeed, to help the reader, the Masoretes (the Jewish scribes who preserved and transmitted the text of the Hebrew Bible used in the synagogue, called the Masoretic Text, or MT; the Christian Old Testament is based on this text) began presenting the Name as a deliberately unpronounceable combination of the consonants Y-h-w-h and the vowels of ‘adonai.
Continental scholars transliterated the Name as Jhvh, leading to the designation “J” for the narrative material in the Pentateuch (and Genesis particularly) that prefers to use the Name, and to the term “Jehovah,” a Western Christian attempt to pronounce the unpronounceable Name. The King James translators used “Jehovah” seven times, in places where the context clearly demands a name: see Genesis 22:14; Exodus 6:3; 17:15; Judges 6:24; Psalm 83:18, and Isaiah 12:2; 26:4 in the KJV.
We should remember, by the way, that the division of the Bible into chapters and verses is a comparatively recent innovation, compared to the text itself. Usually, chapter and verse divisions follow natural patterns and themes in the text–but not always! So, the chapter break at Genesis 2:1 actually comes before the end of the first creation account. The first three verses of Genesis 2 read naturally as a continuation of the first chapter: indeed, their description of the Seventh Day is the culmination of that account, which describes creation as spanning the first week of time.
We could conclude from this chapter break that the Sabbath comes after creation is finished (see Exod 20:11). The Samaritan Pentateuch (a version of the first five books of the Bible used by the Samaritans), the Greek Septuagint, and the Syriac all say that God completed God’s work on the sixth day, a reading that the CEB and the recent NRSVue alike follow (see also Exod 20:11; 31:17; 2 Esdras 6:38-59). The versions, influenced in particular by the Exodus passages, are making an understandable decision: after all, how can God be said to finish God’s work on God’s day of rest?
But the Hebrew MT reads wayyikal ‘elohim bayom hashibi’i mela’kto [“God completed God’s work on the seventh day”]. The old NRSV, like the RSV and KJV, stayed with the MT here. I am persuaded that that is the better course. The priestly writers in this unit pursue a sabbatical logic. In Genesis 1:1–2:4a, each day is numbered, from One through Seven (1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31; 2:2-3). Indeed, rather than using the word “Sabbath,” Gen 2:1-3 speaks only of Day Seven, to preserve that numbering sequence. In this context, then, the seventh day is the day of completion, the climax of creation. The NRSV had it right. For the priests who wrote Genesis 2:1-3, Sabbath was part of the very structure of reality, woven into the warp and woof of the cosmos.
Similarly, even a casual reader will recognize that a change occurs in the middle of Genesis 2:4. The first half of this verse looks back to Genesis 1:1—2:3, recapitulating Gen 1:1–note the verb “create” and the phrase “the heavens and the earth” in both places. The first creation account in Scripture, then, is not Genesis 1, but Genesis 1:1–2:4a.
Something new begins in the second half of that verse. Note first the inversion of “heaven” and “earth” in the MT of Gen 2:4b (CEB has “earth and sky”). The Aramaic Targum agrees with the Hebrew here, but in the Greek Septuagint (LXX), the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac, and the Samaritan Pentateuch the order is the same as in Gen 1:1 and 2:4a. Still, it makes better sense that those versions would have altered the order for consistency than that the MT would have changed it. The different order in the MT is so striking that it must be original, emphasizing the beginning of a new narrative:
On the day the LORD God made earth and sky—before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the LORD God hadn’t yet sent rain on the earth and there was still no human being to farm the fertile land, though a stream rose from the earth and watered all of the fertile land—the LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life (Gen 2:4b-7).
For the first time in the Bible, God is addressed by God’s Name! However, the Name occurs here in the curious combined expression Yhwh ‘elohim (“LORD God”), found 20 times in Gen 2—3, but rare elsewhere.
Readers of the English Bible need to be aware that “LORD God,” “Lord GOD,” and “LORD GOD” translate three different Hebrew expressions! The NRSV and many other translations follow the KJV and render the common Hebrew expression ‘adonai Yhwh (“my lord Yhwh”) as “Lord GOD,” to avoid “lord LORD” (for example, Gen 15:2; Exod 9:30; Deut 3:24; the LXX sometimes does render this title as kurie kurie [“lord Lord”]).
In Isa 12:2 and 26:4, NRSV and RSV have LORD GOD for the Hebrew Yah Yhwh. Yah is a shortened form of the Name, often found in names like “Jeremiah” as well as in the expression “Hallelujah” in the Psalms (64 times). In both Isaiah passages, KJV reads “Lord JEHOVAH,” while in Isa 12:2 NRSVue has simply “LORD.”
While “LORD God” (Yhwh ‘elohim) predominates in Gen 2—3 (the only exception is the conversation between the woman and the snake in Gen 3:1b-5, where ‘elohim is used), it is elsewhere found only in a very few, late-dated texts: specifically, in Chronicles (1 Chr 17:16-17; 22:1, 19 [Yhwh with ha’elohim]; 28:20; 29:1; 2 Chr 1:9; 6:41-42 [a citation of Ps 132:8-10, which lacks this expression]; 26:18; 32:16), in Psalm 84:11; and in Jonah 4:6. The two apparent exceptions only prove the rule, as in both Exodus 9:30 and 2 Samuel 7:25, there are questions about the text. In Exod 9:30, most LXX manuscripts read simply kurios (“Lord”), while in 2 Sam 7:25, the LXX and several Hebrew manuscripts suggest that ‘adonai Yhwh is the better reading.
Most likely, the unusual references to the Divine as Yhwh ‘elohim (“LORD God”) in Gen 2:4b—3:24 are the work of an editor, or perhaps of the Priestly writers themselves, integrating the second creation account with the first, and so guiding the reader toward an integrated, canonical reading of these opening chapters of Genesis. Even so, the use of ‘elohim (“God”) in the first and Yhwh (“the LORD”) in the second is an important clue that there are two distinct traditions concerning creation in these chapters.
But these traditions need only be seen in conflict if we believe it necessary to read them as fact statements, rather than as truth statements. The canon itself models such a reading repeatedly. In the Pentateuch, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with their separate and distinctive views of Israel’s identity and its duties before God, appear side by side—and of course, the Christian New Testament begins with four unique and distinctive tellings of Jesus’ story. Reading canonically, we can embrace the implications of each tradition, while still permitting each its autonomy.
For example: in Gen 1:1—2:4a, God calls everything into being, including time and space. While one could say that God creates light on the first day, the text avows, “God named the light Day and the darkness Night” (Gen 1:5). It is more accurate, then, to say that by creating light, God creates the first day, and so every day thereafter: time itself begins here. Similarly, when on Day Two God inserts the solid bowl of the heavens into the roiling waters of chaos, dividing them into the waters above and below (Gen 1:6-8), suddenly space has come into being: there is now up and down, back and forth, right and left. As their creator, ‘elohim stands outside of both space and time.
In Genesis 1, to use the theological language of Karl Barth, God is “‘wholly other’ breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above;’” there is an “‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and man” (“The Humanity of God,” trans. John Newton Thomas, in The Humanity of God [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960], 42)—that is, ‘elohim is transcendent.
But in Gen 2:4b-25, the LORD God formed (Hebrew yatsar, the term for what potters do!) ‘adam “from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils” (Gen 2:7); a very intimate, personal, indeed human-like view of the Divine.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, that we are shaped by the LORD’s hands “expresses. . . the bodily nearness of the Creator to the creature, that it is really he who makes me—man—with his own hands; his concern, his thought for me, his design for me, his nearness to me” (Creation and Fall, trans. John C. Fletcher [orig. Schöpfung und Fall, Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937], in Creation and Temptation [London: SCM Press, 1966], 45). In theological shorthand, the LORD is immanent.
Clearly, believers want and need to affirm both: God is transcendent and God is immanent. If all we had was the first account of creation, we could well think of God as distant, abstract, and uninvolved. If all we had was the narrative in Gen 2, we could well lose the wonder, majesty, and mystery of the Divine. But Genesis 1 and 2 together present God as transcendent and immanent. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.