Was the woman created together with the man, or later, after the animals were named?

Hard question · Creation, the flood and the patriarchs · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate

The passages

The objection

Genesis 1:27 says that God created man “male and female”, as if the man and the woman were made together at one moment. Genesis 2 has the man formed alone, and the woman made only later, from his rib, after he had named the animals and found no partner among them.

The answer

Genesis 1:27 tells us what God made, not how long it took. The word for ‘man’ there is ha-adam, ‘mankind’, and the verse says that mankind was made in God’s image in two sexes: “male and female created he them”. It does not say that the two were made in the same instant. It sums up the sixth day, and chapter 2 then tells that day’s events in order: the man formed from the dust, the garden, the naming of the animals, and last the woman, made from the man’s side. Since Genesis 1 puts the land animals before mankind on the sixth day (1:24–27), a woman made after the animals agrees with it.

Genesis itself holds both together. After telling how the woman was made from Adam, the writer repeats the summary in 5:2: “Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” For him ‘male and female he created them’ and ‘first the man, then the woman’ were not rival claims, but the short and the long way of telling one event. Gill says the same: everything chapter 2 tells of the man and the woman was done on the sixth day.

The New Testament reads the chapters in the same way. Jesus joins Genesis 1:27 to 2:24, saying that “he which made them at the beginning made them male and female”, and adding, “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother” (Matthew 19:4–5). Paul writes, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13).

How long the sixth day was

Christians who take the days as long periods see room on the sixth day for all of Genesis 2. Those who take them as ordinary days answer that Adam named the livestock, the birds and the beasts of the field (2:20), not every species of the world, which could be done within hours.

Two sources

Critical scholars often assign 1:27 and 2:18–22 to different sources. Even so, Genesis 5:1–2 shows that the final writer read ‘male and female’ as fitting the story of the rib.

Still open

Christians differ over how long the events of Genesis 2:7–22 took, depending on how they read the days of Genesis 1. They agree that chapter 2 tells in detail what 1:27 sums up.

From the classic commentators

for all that is said in the following chapter, concerning the formation of man out of the dust of the earth, and the making of woman out of his rib, and presenting her to him, and his taking her to be his wife, were all done on this sixth day, and at this time.John Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Genesis 1:27 (1746–1763)

He created him male and female, Adam and Eve—Adam first, out of earth, and Eve out of his side, ch. 2.Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 1 (1706)