Last week we referred to the Book of Genesis and its basic structure: 50 chapters divided into two major sections — the first contains Chapter 1 to 11, the second, chapter 12 to 50. In the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), the 50 chapters are divided into four parts: the first part, I. The Origin of the World and the Human Race, corresponds with the first major section. This week we are going to begin looking at that section, starting off with a look at the two accounts of creation. The first account of the creation of humanity is described in Chapter 1:26-27: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that creep along the ground.
God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.’
The second account of the creation of humanity is described in Chapter 2: 7; 15-23. In verse 7 it says, “Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils and man became a living being.” Verses 15 to 23 describe how God thought it was not right for man to be alone, and he would make him a helper. After he fashioned the wild animals and the birds giving them to the man, who names them, no suitable helper is found. Then God causes the man to fall asleep, takes a rib from him, ‘closed the flesh up forthwith’ and fashioned the rib into a woman and brought her to the man. The man recognises her as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”