Why are Genesis 1 and 2 divided in a spot that doesn't make sense?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve taken to reading some parts of the Bible, and I’m curious about why Genesis 1 and 2 are divided where they are. The 1st chapter presents the on the first day, on the second day, etc. story of creation. The 2nd chapter presents the version where God makes Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib as well as the formation of the garden of Eden. These are clearly two different creation stories.

The question that arises, however, is why Genesis 2:1-3 are not included in Genesis 1. These three verses describe the seventh day of the first creation myth, the whole God saw it was good and rested on the seventh day bit. The second story then starts with Genesis 2:4.

Given the popularity of the material, google is of little help. My searches all turn up the actual verses in question, but no mention of why the division of these two chapters seems to be in such an unusual spot. So the question is, who divided the chapters in this spot, and why did they do so?

2

Might it not be that two separate oral traditions were at some point included in the Bible, but because they were originally distinct, they were separated in that way?

Somewhat similarly, the four Gospels tell essentially four different, semi-overlapping versions of the same story. They differ because they were originally the only Gospel developed in a specific place and time for a specific audience, and later were all seen as valuable and worth saving as a whole, despite discrepancies and redundancies.

3

It’s definitely two separate traditions. The problem is that the last 3 verses of the story of the first tradition (which is actually the younger of the two) were removed and stuck onto the beginning of the second tradition. The question is who did this and why.

4

True. It switches in mid-verse.

I think the blame is usually laid on the ancient shoulders of whoever knitted the various source materials together.

I recommend Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman. ETA: he refers to the culprit in question as the Redactor, and he lists not just these two sources (the two consecutive Genesis creation tales) but several others (J, E, D, P, and some minor source documents).

5

The first five books of the bible, including the creation story, is a mishmash of several traditions, not very expertly stitched together to form the story we find today. The three main traditions in Genesis are called J (for Jehovah or Jahwist), E (for Elohim or Elohist) and P (for priestly). The southern J and northern E traditions are thought to predate the Babylonian Exile (and probably derived from some of the same sources), while P was an attempt to reconcile and combine them during the Exile, as well as adding an emphasis on ritual. Then there is an even later D tradition (for deuteronomic), but it probably had little or no influence on the text of Genesis. For more information, see any good modern non-literalist biblical commentary (e.g., The Jerome Biblical Commentary).

6

That does help. What I’m looking for is not the name of a particular individual. I was actually wondering if the discrepancy was present in the source material or if was introduced when the Christian bible was being put together in the days of the Roman Empire.

7

My understanding is that there were no chapters in most of the old testament (or punctuation for that matter) and they were added later.

8

Could it be something similar to how the verses were numbered? AIUI, each verse was a single line in one specific translation, Luther’s, I think. Which is why verse breaks are often within sentences. Perhaps the chapters were all the text that fit on one page or something like that.

9

Yes, the present chapter divisions are a Western Catholic tradition, less than a thousand years old.

Perhaps someone can tell us how the paragraph marks and daily reading divisions are placed in modern Jewish traditions?

10

From an evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant point of view, Why Is the Bible Divided into Chapters and Verses?, and from a Jehovah’s Witnesses point of view, Chapters and Verses​—Who Put Them in the Bible?. I’m not endorsing the theology of either of those web sites, but those both seem to be pretty good summaries–and, importantly enough, seem to agree with each other on the historical details, even though their authors have very different belief systems*. (It also kind of makes sense that very religious people would be the most concerned about these things.) Both authors also make the reasonable point that the chapters and verses were added later, don’t always represent natural divisions in the original texts (as the OP noticed), and can hinder rather than help in understanding what those texts were actually originally saying.

*The Jehovah’s Witnesses, while they might seem like just another “Protestant fundamentalist sect”, actually have very significant theological differences from Protestants, or most other Christians.

11

The Hebrew Bible as it existed for its first few millennia, was divided into verses, paragraphs (of two types), and books. But the chapters that we’re familiar with are only a few centuries old. I don’t recall exactly who devised the current chapter numbering that we’re so familiar with, but I know that it was not a Jewish source. Even so, Jewish writers have gone along with it because it is such a very efficient way of identifying exactly which verse we’re discussing.

Even so, there are occasional differences between the way Jews count the verses and the way non-Jews tend to. This is most obvious in the Book of Psalms. Many of the Psalms begin with a sort of title or introduction; among the Jews it is still part and parcel of the psalm so it counts as Verse 1, but non-Jewish bible tend to start the counting afterward. For example, in Jewish texts, Psalms 92 has 16 verses, of which “A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day” is verse 1. But non-Jewish texts tend to begin the count after that, leaving only 15 numbered verses.

I mentioned that there are two types of paragraph breaks. One is for a major break, the other is for a minor break. (I suppose their function is comparable to what periods and semicolons do in a sentence.) A minor break is accomplished by leaving a lot of space between verses without a line break. Major breaks are shown by leaving the rest of the line blank and then continuing on the next line. Anyway, some paragraphs (of either kind) can be very short, or they can be very long, all depending on the style of the context and of the author (or Author). None of that will be visible in an English translation, even a Jewish one. The style of most translators seems to be to either begin every verse on a new line, or to break the paragraphs according to how the translator feels would be most readable. The only way to see these breaks, in my experience, is by looking at the Hebrew text. And even there, you’ll have better success looking at an actual hard copy (i.e. printed on paper or written on parchment) because online versions usually break at every verse.

A good starting point for more information would be the Wikipedia article “Chapters and verses of the Bible”.

Anyway, to answer the OP, here’s my guess: In the Jewish tradition, Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 is considered a unit, in the sense that the entire passage is read in the synagogue on the holiday of Simchat Torah. The holiday reading might have stopped after Gen 1:31, but Jewish tradition sees Gen 2:1-2:3 as an integral part of the creation story.

Did Creation last six days or seven? The Jewish perspective is that it lasted seven days; although nothing physical was created on the seventh day, God’s restraint on the seventh day - as described in Gen 2:1 to 2:3 - was so significant that it too is considered part of the creation of the universe. The only reason I can imagine for putting these verses in a separate chapter is that the seventh day was considered to be less significant than the first six. If anyone can offer an alternate suggestion, that’s what this thread is for.

12

Many years ago, when I was a wee lad in 4th or 5th grade, the priest at the Episcopal church I attended explained the seventh day as the day God created the Sabbath. I don’t know if that’s the official Episcopal interpretation, but it sounded pretty good to me back then.

13

That’s a good point as it is written: "The Sabbath was made for man , not man for the Sabbath . (Mark 2:27).

Thus the Sabbath was made, so an act of creation.

14

I could see it as the exact opposite: that it was so important that they wanted to put it in a position starting the chapter. It is “set apart,” separate from the rest of the days, just as the Sabbath is supposed to be.

But your theory makes sense, too, especially given who made the chapter division. The Sabbath isn’t unimportant to Christians, but it’s not nearly as vital as it is to Jewish people. And there was the Christian tradition of the Sabbath being moved to Sunday (the first day) because that’s when Jesus arose. (I could easily argue that Jesus stays dead through the Sabbath because God rests during that time, but that’s my own interpretation.)

Looking it up, there’s also the idea the split is actually between two parts of verse 4. Given that, it could be just picking the closest large paragraph break before the split. Though the bibles I am familiar with treat verse 4 as part of the second half, since, otherwise, it would be repeating verse 1 in the first half.

I could also see verse 4 vs. verse 1 being an actual division among scholars on where the creation story ends. And so the chapter dividers wound up splitting after the first conclusion sentence “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.” instead of the second “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

Neither verse to me seems to connect with the second story, BTW. That story assumes that the Earth and the heavens already exist. So it isn’t a description of how they were created.

15

Genesis 2:2 and 2:3 both refer to “God” as Elohim (the grammatically plural form of the Hebrew word for “god”, likely a “plural of majesty” that could be rendered in English as “God”, that is “god with a capital G”), as is consistently done throughout chapter 1 of Genesis. Starting with Genesis 2:4, God is now referred to as Yahweh, or in full Yahweh Elohim, which I suppose could be translated as “the god–with a capital G!–Who is named Yahweh” and is traditionally rendered into English as “the LORD God”. (“Yahweh” has also been more traditionally rendered into English as “Jehovah” for reasons having to do with the Jewish reluctance to actually pronounce the “Divine Name”, and the resulting replacement in the Hebrew text of the vowels in Y-H-W-H with the vowels for a Hebrew word meaning “lord”).

The evidence is thus very strong that the split between the two creation stories does in fact occur between “And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made” and “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens…”

Modern Biblical chapters were instituted by Stephen Langton in 1227; people didn’t really start to grasp how the Book of Genesis had been put together from disparate sources until the 18th century. So it’s very unlikely the division of the Book of Genesis into chapters has anything to do with a scholarly dispute over where the first creation story ended and the second creation story began. In 1227, everyone would have said there was only one creation story, and Stephen Langton put his chapter division where he did for some other reason. Modern scholarship would now pretty universally put the division between Genesis I and Genesis II (or the “E version”–for “Elohim”–and the “J version”–for “Jehovah”) between Genesis 2:3 and Genesis 2:4.

16

There are still two different stories there, though even if you don’t know about the different sources. You’ve got the broader world creation, which includes a Sabbath, and then a second story that clearly must occur in between parts of the other story. Woman and plants already were created in Chapter 1. So Chapter 2 must be a more detailed account of what happened–it can’t be woman and plants being created after Day 7.

I could see there being a debate at the time of chapterization whether the first story ended in 2:1 or in 2:4, since they are nearly identical. And I could see that the reason we have both verses is that, when the book was compiled, there was a debate over whether creation ended at six days or seven, hence having two nearly identical ending verses to the first creation story.

Or just two versions of the source. The one thing I do know about the compilation of Genesis is that, when it sources disagreed, the compiler would often include both, rather than try to sort them out. That makes sense for including two endings.

(See also three different versions of a patriarch going to Egypt, saying his wife is his sister, and pharaoh falling for her before the Lord rebukes him.)

17

One theologically-motivated interpretation of what’s going on is that chapter 2 is simply a “more detailed account” of what’s going on in chapter 1, and that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden “clearly must occur in between parts of the other story”.

But if the two creation stories were simply two totally independent stories that were mashed together to form the first part of the Book of Genesis, then woman and plants could have totally been created after Day 7. Or more accurately, in the second creation story, there is no “Day 7” of creation, the exact time it took for the events to take place is not specified (unlike in the first creation story) but could have taken many days or weeks or who knows how long–just how long would it take Adam to be presented with all the animals, name them, and look each one over as a possible helpmate?

There’s nothing internally inconsistent in the second creation story’s picture of the LORD God forming a man in a world that had already been created at some previous point, then planting a garden full of plants (some of which are good to eat), then forming various animals, then making a woman from the man’s rib.

None of that is internally inconsistent, but it is inconsistent with the completely different creation story in which God (with a capital “G”, but no proper name) creates the whole universe in seven days–including creating plants on Day 3; marine animals and birds on Day 5; and finally land animals on Day 6, culminating in the creation of human beings (both male and female).

18

Another theory is that the first account was the ‘perfect plan’ without the fall, what could have been and how short the Bible could be. The second was the off the tracks plan B version.

19

And the context under discussion was of a Christian in the 13th century, and how they would read the scripture.

So I was arguing the worst case scenario (for lack of a better term). I was saying that, even if you take the stories as true, there’s still clearly two separate stories here. If you allow for them to be inconsistent with each other, then it’s even more obvious.

My point is that you don’t need textual analysis to see that there are two stories, and thus I do think it likely this played a role in the chapter divisions.

20

One theory is that the line in Gen. 1:2, “darkness was on the face of ‘the deep’” is how it is usually translated, but “the deep” is actually t’hom, which is NOT a Hebrew adjective that you would use for “deep water,” refers to Tiamat, an earlier goddess, whom HaShem has either literally killed, or figuratively conquered.

Anyway, HaShem does not start with a completely blank slate. He creates heaven and earth, but not the waters between them, which already exist, and which were the place Tiamat lived.

The first word of the Torah in Hebrew is literally “beginning.”

Then HaShem organized and populated everything, and subsequently “owned” creation.

Chapter 2 begins with the rest day, because it is another beginning.

Chapter 1 begins with conquest, and new creation, but it is all ordinary. And work, work permitted during the week.

Chapter 2 begins with the day that is hallowed-- Shabbat is considered by Jews to be separate from the other days of the week in that is is holy while the other days are ordinary. HaShem’s only action on the seventh day is to bless it, and saying a blessing is an action that is permitted on Shabbat.

The rest of chapter 2 is commentary. It is permissible to discuss commentary on Shabbat. Chapter 2 ends with the man and woman still in a state of innocence. Chapter 3 opens with the story of the serpent.

So, basically, the answer in that chapter 2 describes the holiness of Shabbat, Shabbat rest, and commentary on creation, but does not address any unholy acts. The “fall” is yet to come. Note that there is no mention of the conquest of the waters in chapter 2.

Chapter 2, the chapter describing the creation of Shabbat is, like Shabbat itself, separate from the rest of the story of creation.