From our perspective, in order to understand Adam & Eve in Genesis, we have to look at the New Testament…
See how many times in the Gospels Christ uses storytelling as a teaching method. So much of His teaching comes down to us in the form of parables. This is no accident. The Jewish method of answering questions (big and small) was to tell a story that illustrated the point. When someone asked Christ “who is my neighbor?” He answered with the parable of the Good Samaritan. He did this because that’s the Jewish teaching style. It was not like the modern style of giving a short, direct answer to a question.
When the ancient peoples (whom we would eventually call Hebrews, then Israelites, then Jews) asked important questions like “how did the world come to be?” or “why do bad things happen in the world?” they answered those questions with stories, just the same as Christ did.
The creation stories in Genesis are not meant to be “natural history” (a discipline that would not exist until recent centuries) but instead are meant to answer spiritual questions. The point of the 7 day creation story is to say that God created the world, and that He did so intentionally; this was specifically intended to contrast with all of the other ancient religious understanding of creation that it was an accident or a mistake on the part of the gods. The people of Abraham said “no, the world did not come about by accident, but God created the world because He wanted to, and it is not a mistake, He saw that it was good.” Creation is not chaos or mistake, but God’s plan—this idea intentionally contrasts all the ancient religions (Egyptian, Persian, Greek, far Eastern, etc.), who all claim that creation was either an accident or some kind of wrongdoing on the gods part.
It also shows that the things other people worshiped as gods (like the greater light and the lesser light) were not gods at all, but created things made by the One God. That’s why those things don’t have names. Genesis does not say that God created the Sun (because that would be using a proper name, in whatever language), but instead the greater light—so the sun is not a person, certainly not a god, but merely an object created by God, which does not even deserve a name, much less deserve to be worshiped.
The point is that the creation stories found in Genesis were never intended to be a literal history or a scientific explanation; no more than the parable of the Good Samaritan was meant to be an historical account. They are all stories meant to teach certain religious Truths. In order to understand them, we have to see them for what they actually are, what they were always intended to be, and not try to force them to be modern scientific textbooks.
well said Nacho
