SittingNarrativeGenesis 2
The garden
Scene 1 of 4
The same exilic library turns from sky to soil. An older hand asks what a human is, and hands him a garden, a task, and a single limit he is trusted with.
One2:4–7narrative
Dust and breath
The history
This is the second creation account, and an older hand wrote it. The order runs backwards from chapter 1: here the human comes first, before plants and animals. The editors kept both stories side by side rather than smoothing them into one. And the name is a pun: adam, the human, is formed from adamah, the ground. An earthling, out of earth.
Wellhausen · Friedman · Smith
4This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made them. 5Now no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth, nor had any plant of the field sprouted, for the LORD God had not yet sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. 6But springs welled up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
Meaning
The human being is dust and breath in the same instant. Mortal, earthy stuff, and the breath of God, held together. Not a soul trapped in a body, not merely an animal, but both at once: ground that God breathed into.
Theological+
The two halves are a built-in humility and a built-in dignity. You are dust, so you can’t take yourself too seriously or imagine you are your own source. And you are God-breathed, so you can’t despise yourself either. Lose track of either half and something goes wrong.
Archetypal+
The forming of a human from clay or dust, then quickened by a god’s breath, is one of the most widespread images in the ancient world, from the potter-gods of Egypt to the clay and divine blood of Mesopotamia. What recurs is the double nature it insists on: the creature is earth and more than earth, matter that has been breathed into. You are being told, in the oldest terms there are, what kind of thing you are. (The dust quickened by breath, told the world over.)One way to hear it, not the final word.
The turnnames you
Most days you forget one half of yourself. Some days you live as if you were only dust. Other days you act as if you were only breath, above your own limits.
Which half are you forgetting today?