The garden, the man, and the two trees
4 This is the history of the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens. 5 No plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for Yahweh God had not caused it to rain on the earth. There was not a man to till the ground, 6 but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. 8 Yahweh God planted a garden eastward, in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 10 A river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was parted, and became the source of four rivers. 11 The name of the first is Pishon: it flows through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12 and the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are also there. 13 The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the same river that flows through the whole land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is Hiddekel. This is the one which flows in front of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. 15 Yahweh God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. 16 Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
The narrative returns to the sixth day at ground level, and the man is made a living soul rather than given one.
This is the history of the generations of the heavens and of the earth. The book's own section formula appears for the first time here, and it governs what follows. This is not a second account of creation competing with the first. It is the next section of one book, and its subject is not the making of the world but what came of it — the man, his place, and what he was given to do.
The vantage changes with the subject. Chapter one describes the whole from above and moves in order of days; here everything is arranged around the man, and things appear as they bear on him. There is no plant of the field yet, no rain, and no one to till the ground — three lacks that set up what the man is for.
Then the making of him, in a verse the rest of Scripture builds on: Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The arithmetic of that sentence is exact and worth stating plainly. Dust from the ground, plus the breath of life from God, results in a living soul. The soul is not a third thing added to the other two, and it is not something the man is given. It is what he became when the two were joined. Scripture says he became a living soul; it does not say he received one.
The same phrase describes the animals a few verses later and in chapter one, where the creatures are living souls too — a fact the English translations render variously, which is why the point is easier to see in the arithmetic than in any one rendering. What distinguishes the man in this account is not a different constitution but the manner of his making and the image he is made in.
The reversal is stated in the same chapter's sequel, in the same terms: you are dust, and you shall return to dust Genesis 3:19. Take the breath back and the dust returns to the ground; what does not continue is the living soul that the joining produced. This is the foundation the rest of Scripture reasons from when it speaks of the dead as sleeping and of the breath returning to God who gave it Ecclesiastes 12:7.
The garden is planted, watered by a river that divides into four, and the man is put there to cultivate and keep it. Work is given before anything goes wrong. It is not a punishment and not a consequence; it belongs to the good world, and only its difficulty is added later.
And two trees stand in the middle, with one command attached. Every tree is freely given; one is withheld, on a stated penalty. The prohibition is a single sentence in a garden of permissions, and its narrowness is the measure of the freedom around it.
settled What this mark means