Two Creation Stories in the Bible (With Video)

Several months ago, I found a website called Living the Questions (www.livingthequestions.com) that is devoted to people like myself who choose faith in the midst of spiritual uncertainty. Recently, LTQ posted several excerpts of its videos to Youtube, with one of those videos being a brilliant discussion of the two conflicting creation stories found in the book of Genesis.

I have written about our fear of admitting that the Bible is not inerrant, but did not expound on the inconsistencies that appear in the Bible. However, this video captures a fundamental inconsistency in a way that I could never capture in writing. (More analysis after video...)



For those of us who are "living out the questions," the commentators in this video hit on several extremely important things. First, as indicated by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, such discrepancies are only a problem for those of us who are uncomfortable with the possibility that the Bible may NOT be inerrant. Many Christians feel that the Bible's inerrancy is central to the credibility of the faith and insist that the Genesis narrative is how it all happened. Most won't admit that such errors exist in scripture, even when they are this obvious.

However, reasonable Christians cannot ignore that in chapter 1 of Genesis, Adam is created after the animals and vegetation, but in Genesis 2, Adam is created first. More perplexing is that in Genesis 1, Adam and Eve are created together near the end of the story, while in Genesis 2, Adam existed for some time before Eve was taken from his rib.

I've known about these inconsistencies for some time now, and would submit to the unyielding fundamentalist (as postulated in the video and by various scholars) that the Bible story is more likely to be a metaphorical story of why than it is a literal story of how. That is, the story when read properly explains that God created man to commune with Him, that God intended for us to have relationships with one another, and that we are to take care of the planet because its resources are "good" and precious in God's sight. Such a concession won't undermine the existence of God or the beauty of the creator's love for us, even if it does challenge our existing dogma.

To read more about the two conflicting creation stories found in Genesis, visit ReligiousTolerance.org...