The treatment, finally, of the microcosm in the two accounts, reflects the difference between them.  In chapter i. man is directed at the very outset to the ground on which he moves to this day:  “Replenish the earth, and subdue it,” he is told; a perfectly natural task.  In chaps. ii. iii. he is placed in Paradise, and his sphere of activity there, nestled, as he may be said still to be, in the lap of the Deity, is very limited.  The circumstances of his life as it now is, the man’s toil in the fields, the woman’s toil in bearing children, do not answer to his original destiny; they are not a blessing, but a curse.  In the Jehovistic narrative man is as wonderful to himself as the external world; in the other he is as much a matter of course as it is.  In the one he sees astonishing mysteries in the difference of the sexes, in marriage, in child-birth (iv. 1); in the other these are physiological facts which raise no questions or reflections:  “He made them male and female, and said, Be fruitful and multiply.”  There his attitude towards the beasts is one of mixed familiarity and bewilderment; he does not know exactly what to make of them; they are allied to him and yet not quite suitable society for him; here they are beings not related to him, over which he rules.

The chief point in which the difference between the two accounts comes to a head is this.  In Genesis ii. iii., man is virtually forbidden to lift the veil of things, and to know the world, represented in the tree of knowledge.  In Genesis i. this is the task set him from the beginning; he is to rule over the whole earth, and rule and knowledge come to the same thing—­they mean civilisation.  There nature is to him a sacred mystery:  here it is a mere fact, an object; he is no longer bewildered over against nature, but free and superior.  There it is a robbery for man to seek to be equal with God:  here God makes him at first in His own image and after His own likeness, and appoints him His representative in the realm of nature.  We cannot regard it as fortuitous that in this point Genesis i. asserts the opposite of Genesis ii. iii.; the words spoken with such emphasis, and repeated i. 27, v. 1, ix. 6, sound exactly like a protest against the view underlying Genesis ii. iii., a protest to be explained partly by the growth of moral and religious cultivation, but partly also no doubt due to the convulsive efforts of later Judaism to deny that most firmly established of all the lessons of history, that the sons suffer for the sins of the fathers. 1

***************************************** 1.  A coarser counterpart to Genesis ii. iii, is Genesis vi. 1-4.  Here also there is a kind of fall of man in an attempt to overpass the boundary between the human race and the divine.  In the priestly narrative (Q) the gulf between spirit, which is divine substance, and flesh, which is human substance, is bridged over by the doctrine of man’s creation in the image of God. *****************************************