Trees and roots.

Genesis 2 goes back over what happened in Genesis 1 and expands a little, giving more detail to the creation of plants, animals, and humanity. I wonder why they didn't just cover this in chapter 1, really. Seems like it would be the sensible thing to do.

To me, it comes across as chapter 1 being a written version of a basic myth that everybody already knows, so details don't need to really be thrown in. Then once that's down pat, maybe people figured, "You know, this could use a little more detail. How about some specifics?" So the writers dedicated chapter 2 to that.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7)

Ah, one of the little joys that gets lost in translation. Man being made from dust makes Adam's name a lot more significant if you know that the name actually means dust. He started as dust, then became Dust, then dies and goes back to being dust again.

Adam also goes unnamed from the verse of his creation to verse 19. He's just called "the man" every other time he's mentioned.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. (Genesis 2:10-12)

Why we get an interlude about what precious stones exist in one part of the land, I'm not sure. Is it that vital to the creation myth to know that Havilah has good gold and onyx to mine? Or is this something like one of the old alchemical texts where there are metaphorical hints, things in the form of other things, that the wise can extrapolate from and figure out how to get to Eden while getting some gold along the way?

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

This verse confuses the heck out of me. It's a great piece of foreshadowing, I'll grant you, but it's not completely clear as to whether Adam is doing the speaking here, since the bible has a serious lack of quotation marks. Most other versions of the bible indicate that Adam isn't speaking here, and that's it just narration.

But it's narration of the kind that hasn't been seen before. Granted, we're not far into the bible, but it references a future that Adam and his still-unnamed woman know nothing about. Father? Mother? What are these strange things of which you speak? Adam and Eve had no parents, nobody to leave.

Unless, of course, you count God. God could easily be seen as both father and mother of these two newborns, since he created them. So what it's saying, if you take that interpretation, is that Adam and Eve are going to leave God behind and stick together instead.

Which is pretty much what they ended up doing.

But aside from speculation like that, from a purely stylistic point of view, that verse is clunky and jarring. It's like when you're reading a great story, really getting to know the characters and appreciate the setting, and all of a sudden the book starts lecturing at you. We haven't gotten to the lecturing stage of the bible yet!