The Creation of the World

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God speaks, and everything takes shape in six days: light (day 1), the sky (day 2), dry land and plants (day 3), the sun, moon, and stars (day 4), fish and birds (day 5). On the sixth day, he makes the land animals, then man and woman, created “in his own image.” God sees that everything is “very good.” On the seventh day, he rests and sanctifies it. Chapter 2 zooms in on the man: the LORD God forms him from the dust, breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and places him in Eden to tend and keep the garden. There is only one prohibition: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Finally, from a rib of the sleeping man, God forms the woman, “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.”