Two Creation Stories: A Comparative Analysis

“When God began to create heaven and earth- the earth being unformed and void with darkness over the surface of the deep…Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one in flesh.”

At first glance, the fact that the bible has two creation stories is puzzling. Which story should be the basis of the Catholic belief system? Why put both stories in the bible? Many people agree that the two stories cannot be reconciled with one another. However, when reading these two stories, it seemed like the two stories were somehow linked.

In the first story, God is portrayed as an outside figure in the creation of the world. He is not hands-on with creation and just states what he wants and it is created out of nothing. From a literary perspective, the story is repetitive with statements like “God said” and every paragraph ends with “a first day” and so on. This gives a poetic like structure to the first story. The story states that the earth and all

In Genesis 7:7-12, Noah, his family, and all the animals went into the ark and the flood waters came and covered the earth. In the very next lines (7:13-19), the text states that Noah, his family, and all the animals board the boat and God shuts them in. Why is the Old Testament stating that the flood started twice? One interpretation of these inconsistencies in the text could be the way in which these stories where eventually written down. Before writing instruments were available, stories were passed down by oral tradition. By the time stories could be written down, the story probably changed a handful of times. Also, when one recites a story from memory, they tend to repeat themselves and add other facts that they missed in their first recount of what happened. This may have been what happened with the flood narrative and can be the reason for all these inconsistencies in the