The Sixth Day

The following is a narrative reconstruction of Genesis 1:24–31 and Genesis 2:7–25. Scripture supplies the events and their theological order. Where the text does not give an hour, duration, staging detail, or manner of presentation, the narrative supplies plausible details to make the sequence concrete. Those details should not be confused with the biblical text itself.

The ground was already full of life when the LORD God turned to the dust.

At his word, the earth had brought forth livestock and creeping things and beasts, each according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. Now the sixth day turned toward something different.

For the other creatures, God had spoken. For the man, the text slows down. The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

His first breath came from the One who made him.

God placed the man in the garden.

Trees stood on every side, pleasant to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil given special place in the account.

The charge was plain. Work the garden. Keep it. Eat freely from its trees, with one exception. Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

The man had a vocation and a boundary. He had work before he had a wife, and a command before he had anyone to share it with.

Then God declared something the man had not yet learned by experience: It is not good that the man should be alone.

Six days of "good," and here was the first "not good." God knew what the man lacked. The events that followed would bring the man to recognize it too.

Out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

They came to him as creatures already made, living examples of the order over which humanity would soon be commissioned to exercise dominion.

Adam watched them. Form. Movement. Habit. Difference. Kind after kind was brought before him, and he named what God presented. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

The text does not tell us how long this took. It does tell us where the procession led.

The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

God had declared the man's aloneness. Now Adam had encountered the creaturely order and found no creature corresponding to himself.

He had named what was brought before him. He had seen himself in none of it.

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

The text says that God built the rib into a woman. Then, in a deliberate parallel with the animals that had been brought to Adam, God brought her to the man.

This time Adam recognized what had been absent.

This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

The words mark culmination. God had known. God had declared. Adam had experienced the lack. God had provided. Adam recognized the answer.

The narrator then tells us what this union means beyond the first pair: Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. They stood together, both naked and not ashamed.

Genesis 1 now speaks of humanity together.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

The human office had been inaugurated.

The man had received work and a moral boundary. The woman had been given as his corresponding partner. Together they received blessing and commission: multiply, fill, subdue, rule.

These were commands to be lived out after they were given. Filling the earth takes history. Cultivation takes history. Human families take history. Stewardship takes history.

Genesis does not tell us in these verses how much history passed before the Fall.

It tells us how that history began.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

The sixth day ended. The human commission had only begun.