The Two Creation Stories
An attempt to reconcile two opposing views of nature.
By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch; Reprinted from MyJewishLearning.com with permission from the website of the Jewish Theological Seminary.The opening chapter of a book is often the last to be written.
At the outset, the author may still lack a clear vision of the whole. Writing is the final stage of thinking, and many a change in order, emphasis, and interpretation is the product of wrestling with an unruly body of material. Only after all is in place does it become apparent what kind of introduction the work calls for.
I often think that is how the Torah came to open with its austere and majestic portrait of the creation of the cosmos. An act of hindsight appended a second account of creation. One, in the form of chapter two--which begins more narrowly with the history of the earth and its first human inhabitants--would surely have been sufficient, especially since it argues graphically that evil springs from human weakness. All else is really quite secondary.
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