On the 6th day gods made man and woman in their image and gave them instructions - be fruitful, multiply, and (re)fill the Earth, etc... After the 6th day ended we are told God planted a Garden eastward in Eden and God took a/the man there to work.
What happened to the woman?
The Adam was a generic term for mankind and basically means earthling. So the text doesn't tell us if there were multiple men & women, but if those 6th day people were following their instructions and multiplying then the individual named Adam may have been their offspring.
The 2nd chapter is not another creation event. It was the 6th day event, and the Garden was already there before the 6th day. It was prepared before the human, unless the human was in stasis somewhere. Time is not really relative to God, so it could have been done all at once, but
we have to have some order and chronology of time. But unless it specifies that it was not done on the 6th day or that it was done at a later specific time, then it is the same account with a different perspective.
See Hebrew legends for Adam's first wife.
Adam is the generic baseline model who seemed to be humanities link to God, and represented the rest of humanity for God.
Mesopotamian myth says people were modified, the serpent deity Enki was in charge of our development as a species (the Adapa story) and thats what we see in the Garden story - the serpent and the acquisition of a god-like power.
I cannot find in accepted mythology where Enki was a serpent. Sounds like a made up point to fit the account. Enki or Ea: Son of Anu, husband of Damkina, and father of Marduk. Ruler of all the gods after Apsu. (Sumerian son of Nintu and ruler of the earth.) Enki/Ea represented fresh water after Apsu/God was killed. It was the mixture of fresh water and salt water, ie Apsu and Tiemet that combined and started the creation of the solar system. Remember that they all thought that water came first. Fresh water and salt water coming together and giving birth to the cosmos.
Ea represents the earth out of which man was made. "Dust of the earth" Ea may be representative as the double helix which is "snake" like. The only connection would be if you replaced Satan as the serpent, Lord of the Earth. Satan was never associated in Hebrew or Christianity nor any other myth (as Satan) as being the giver of life and fertility. Now the Hebrews and by extension Christianity may have hid the point as they gave El or God all the personality of all the gods. They did not divide God up, nor stated that God had divine offspring. They state clearly that God created all beings, including Sons of god, humans, or angels and demons. IMO, God created all human forms on day 6. The Sons of god left the earth or were destroyed in the Flood. They were the angels and fallen angels. Adam was the one who God changed from a Son of god, and we are all human from his offspring with Eve.
The Indian religions have a near similar term Atman meaning "spririt". We today have the term atom which at one point represented the smallest known substance. There may be no correlation between the words, but at the time of the account dust was the major building block. God breathed the Spirit into the Earth and man became a living soul; Adam. The soul being the point of eternal life. When the Flood happened God said that the spirit or eternal life was removed from man. When Adam sinned, he lost his connection with God and had to actually go to work for his subsistence.
I understand that the Mesopotamians believed in evolution. I have mentioned that throughout the thread. God evolved and had offspring without being anthropomorphized. It was heavenly bodies at first and then evolved into human counterparts.
Eve was the mother of the living and made from a rib. This stems from the Mesopotamian myth of Ninhursag and Enki, the two primary deities responsible for making us. One of her epitaphs was lady of life and she healed Enki's rib, so she became lady of the rib too.
I have no problem with God creating a clone. There is one God and creator of all. That is not the same thing as evolution though.
Or her pain would be more severe than the women made on the 6th day. Or somebody else... Maybe our hominin ancestors who were giving birth to babies with smaller heads/shoulders. I think thats another clue about the antiquity of these stories. Anyway, Cain was her first-born and he was conceived after Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden.
I do not see evolution in the Genesis account. At least not until chapter 30 and verse 37. I see God creating all humans in the first chapter. I see God cloning Eve from Adam. I see people having babies, but no evolution.
Cain and Abel were never in the Garden, the whole point of kicking Adam and Eve out was to block their access to the tree of life. Their boys brought food to God as an offering and Cain murdered Abel. Do you think God was raising Cain and Abel from birth?
There is no proof they were not in the Garden, but there is proof that they were. Cain complained about being forced to leave the Garden. He was the first person who was stated to actually do any gardening. Adam named the animals and was supposed to do something. All we see Adam doing is eating from trees, and getting his wife pregnant, and knowing human nature not necessarily in that order. I am sure that Adam more than likely wanted to have fun before he contemplated something that would take his fun away. Where in the account does it say that if they ate of the tree they would have children, or if they had children they had to leave. I am not seeing it.
I think that Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel lived in their own Garden like all natural human families do. There is no reason to think that for at least 100 years there was no need for the family unit to split apart, until after the age of 100, the boys were ready to leave and go settle their own gardens with their own wives, the offspring of local families in the area. Of course nothing is ideal even, in a perfect setting. God even warned Cain that sin was waiting at the entrance of the Garden and he should not invite it in. Cain decided to let it in by killing Abel. He then had to leave before his time to leave actually came. I do not think that it matters who sinned first. Cain was not the father, nor married the mother of all humans. That was still Adam and Eve, and there is no indication that they did that on day 7 or day 8 or probably only years after they were put in the Garden. When did Adam name all those animals even before Eve was cloned? Did he have no age, until he sinned? Loosing both her sons may have been a tipping point to listen to the Serpent. Some Hebrews claim that Eve did not even eat right away, when tempted by the Serpent, but that it was an ongoing attempt by the Serpent and it may have taken quite some time, even years.
So why do you think Cain was living in the Garden while his parents were living east of it?
I don't. Cain had to leave before his time to leave came, and Abel dies there, and both were there and left before Eve ate of the fruit and gave it to Adam and he ate.
God didn't want people proliferating in his Garden and having access to eternal life. Thats why he kicked them out, one of the modifications produced by the serpent and tree was the ability to procreate. What happens right after their expulsion? They conceive Cain.
The Garden was not God's garden. It was a place where sin was not present as God and sin cannot be present in the same place. That is the whole point of Holy ground. All things belong to God as in a sense of all are created by God. Sin is why Cain, Eve, and Adam were not allowed back into the Garden. What happens after they left is that Seth was born in the image of Adam and humans were no longer Sons of god, or the godlike humans of whom the legends are based on.
According to those myths Enlil and Enki were not in complete agreement about humanity. The latter warned the Sumerian Noah about the flood in defiance of Enlil's command it remain a secret. Genesis combined both gods, one who wants to see us wiped out and another who saves us.
Genesis states there is only one God, and everything else in the universe was created by God. Outside of God, there is nothing. God, the Word, and Spirit were the creator, physical embodiment of all creation, and the force that kept all the universe connected. When it says that God spoke that was the Word that gave the physical created universe. The hovering Spirit, and the Light was the force and energy that allows the universe to have form and motion. It was the Mesopotamians who seemed to be confused on who and what were gods and planets.
These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 7And 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.
Sounds like a recap and segue to the Garden.
Yes, because the Hebrews thought that the Accounts that took place in this Garden were important in the history of mankind. It was the "house" and home of Adam and Eve and their two sons, Cain and Abel, the model family of what not to do. Abel was the only human living in the Garden who obeyed God, and he ended up being killed because he was pleasing to God. If there is a metaphor to be had, it was that the tree was named "Knowledge of Good and Evil". God told Adam not to eat, and Adam disobeyed and ate. Metaphorically Adam lost his innocence and found out what sin and disobedience was.
The coded reference to procreation was the description of Adam and Eve following the tree of knowledge (not life), they were naked and ashamed so they covered up their genitalia. And they left the Garden and conceived two boys... No kids in the Garden, two upon expulsion.
The account about Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel were two accounts redacted from different sources into one view of humans at the beginning of Humanity when humans were still Sons of God, and before they lost their connection to God.
Most of the creation accounts tell how there was a God and humans lost that God. One of the points with astrology and later images of "the gods" was that humans claimed it was their only way to connect and communicate with the gods that existed before the catastrophic event that caused a global flood, and humans lost contact with the world that existed before the Flood. Are there stone carvings with writings from before the Flood? Humans cannot even agree when the Flood actually happened.
