Adam and Eve

In my history class today, we were discussing the Book of Genesis and it's contradictions or confusing areas.
The one that I found most interesting was:

There are two separate stories of creation that follow one another in Genesis.In the first chapter of Genesis, or the first creation story, God creates both the heavens and the earth and life on it in a matter of days. Humans are created last as the culmination of God's creation. In the second version, however, God creates earth and the animals before he does humans.
Furthermore, in the first version, man and woman are created together and have no hierarchy. They live in an egalitarian society where both are equal and both are created in the image of God himself. In the second version, man is created first from dirt of the ground. Woman is created afterword as a "helper" to man. The very word, helper, signifies a hierarchy as she is there only to help and support man in any way she can. Woman was also created out of the rib of man, so in some ways, she owes her life to man. Later in the 2nd chapter, man gets to name this new creation. He names her woman, just as he named the rest of the animals that were brought before him.

These two different versions of creation could mean different things entirely if you wished to look at the relationship between man and woman. It just depends on which version you look at. However, my professor pointed out that most people link the creation of the universe with the 7-day theory and the creation of humans with the 2nd theory. In this way, people are meshing the two together and creating a different proposal for creation.


Another one that I found interesting but I'm not going to go into much detail about was the story of Noah and the flood. In one version, God tells Noah to bring onto the ark two of every kind of animal. In another version, Lord tells Noah to bring onto the ark seven pairs of clean animals, one pair of unclean, and seven of every kind of bird....