HELP! Concerning Two Creation Stories in Genesis

[Contortionist]

Why did the members of the male, priestly class responsible for the canonization of the Torah include both account of creation in Genesis?

[Whifflingpin]

Probably because their wives told them to.

[YesNo]

Genesis is a collection of stories from multiple authors. Their motivations for writing the stories may have been different.

Your question, Contortionist, is one that puzzles me as well. Why didn't the Redactor just discard the stories he didn't approve of? Maybe he liked them all. Maybe he didn't like some of them, but by the time he was making his compilation those stories he didn't like were precisely the ones that everyone else knew and expected to be in his final compilation. For me, the most entertaining stories come from the J author, but what the other writers contributed is interesting as well.

For example, the first chapter of Genesis was not written by J but contains two valuable messages that I accept as assumptions. They are embedded deeper in me than any literal interpretation could be, because I don't have to read any text to know they are true.

First, the world (universe) was created through a conscious choice by some Agent. It did not have to exist because of some physical law or state of randomness. We might as well acknowledge that Agent who created everything as God.

Second, that creation was good.

The rest of the details are irrelevant. I don't remember them anyway.

[mona amon]

Why did the members of the male, priestly class responsible for the canonization of the Torah include both account of creation in Genesis?

Why not? Both accounts are complementary not contradictory, or at least more complementary than contradictory. Chapter 1 shows us God in the throes of an inspired artistic frenzy, creating the universe and everything in it. To show God scrabbling in the mud to mould Adam would have been anticlimactic after all that cosmic grandeur. So the creation of man becomes just a footnote in chapter 1, to be elaborated in chapter 2. I do not see why the editor or whoever it was responsible for the book's present form would have felt the need to exclude anything, even if he was male and priestly.

[HalInc]

Why not? Both accounts are complementary not contradictory, or at least more complementary than contradictory. Chapter 1 shows us God in the throes of an inspired artistic frenzy, creating the universe and everything in it. To show God scrabbling in the mud to mould Adam would have been anticlimactic after all that cosmic grandeur. So the creation of man becomes just a footnote in chapter 1, to be elaborated in chapter 2. I do not see why the editor or whoever it was responsible for the book's present form would have felt the need to exclude anything, even if he was male and priestly.

I had the same thought when taking a survey of the Bible in college. Very well stated.

[desiresjab]

Why did the members of the male, priestly class responsible for the canonization of the Torah include both account of creation in Genesis?

Do you have a translation of the second account?