Were plants created before or after the first man?

Genesis 2:5 does not speak of all plants but of two kinds: “every plant of the field” (Hebrew siach ha-sadeh, ‘shrub of the field’) and “every herb of the field” (‘esev ha-sadeh). The word sadeh, ‘field’, means open country or farmland, not the whole earth, and the two reasons the verse gives point the same way: God “had not caused it to rain upon the earth”, and “there was not a man to till the ground”. Tilling has to do with crops. The same phrase comes back after the fall, when God tells Adam, “thou shalt eat the herb of the field” (Genesis 3:18): the grain he would now grow in the sweat of his face. So the verse sets the scene before the man is formed by naming what was still missing, farmed crops and a man to farm them. It says nothing against the grass, seed-bearing plants and fruit trees of Genesis 1:11–12. Keil and Delitzsch add that the verse is about plants growing and sprouting, which depends on rain and human work, not about their first creation, which did not.

The trees of Genesis 2:8–9 grew in one place. God “planted a garden eastward in Eden”, and there he made “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” spring up. Planting an orchard for the man is not the first making of trees. As the question on the two creation accounts explains, Genesis 2 comes back to the sixth day to tell of the man and his home; it is not a second list of the order of creation.

Wild shrubs and grain

Some Hebrew scholars, such as Mark Futato (cited by Answers in Genesis), take siach as the scrub of the open steppe, the kind of bush Hagar laid Ishmael under in the wilderness (Genesis 21:15, the same word), which springs up after rain, and ‘esev ha-sadeh as cultivated grain. Each of the two reasons in 2:5 then explains one of the two missing kinds of plant. Umberto Cassuto went further and read 2:5 in the light of 3:18, as if the thorny scrub and the farmed crops both came only after the fall; Derek Kidner thought that link unconvincing.

The land around Eden

Some, following E. J. Young (as Apologetics Press notes), read 2:5 as describing the region where the garden would be, not the earth at large: the land there was not yet planted, and God then planted it for the man.

A garden planted earlier

John Gill read 2:8 as ‘had planted’, so that the garden itself grew on the third day with all other plants, and read 2:5 with the KJV as saying that God made the plants before any grew from seed in the earth.

Two sources

Many critical scholars assign the two chapters to different sources with different orders of events. Even on that view, the editor who set them side by side evidently saw no conflict between them.

Scholars do not agree exactly which plants siach and ‘esev ha-sadeh name. Derek Kidner weighed several possible contrasts, such as wild against farmed, long-lived against short-lived, or large against small, and thought that the pair together stands for all growing things; on that reading the answer rests on Keil’s point that the verse is about plants springing up, not about their first creation. Meredith Kline argued in 1958 that the verse’s appeal to rain shows God working through ordinary means during creation, and used it to support a non-literal reading of the days; young-earth writers such as Robert McCabe reply that the verse speaks only of two particular kinds of plant in Eden. That debate is about how to read the days, not about whether the two chapters conflict.