In ninth grade I submitted my first take on the creation story to my young Bible teacher, Yossi Ofer. Now a prominent professor, Ofer had just begun his first teaching job; his approach sparked my lifelong love-affair with the Hebrew Bible. His sensitive response to my comparison between Genesis and the Big Bang included, however, a warning: “It is precisely those commentators who tried in the past to be ‘modern,’ to base their exegesis on the ‘latest science’ of their day, it is they who got antiquated.” Over 40 years later I’m still chewing on the very same questions, and his warning still rings in my ears.

Yet, despite the reasons for skepticism, in this essay I am going to offer a novel reading of the first eleven chapters in Genesis precisely in light of modern discoveries in evolutionary biology, geology, and human development. My goal is not to reconcile the Bible with science. Nor is it somehow to prove the truth of the Bible by demonstrating that it foresaw the discoveries of the past century. The discrepancies between the story told in Genesis and that told by physicists, paleontologists, and biologists are not what sparked the intellectual quest that led me to write this. My aim is rather to unlock the understanding of reality found within the biblical account of the origins of the world and the beginnings of human history. It is thus a continuation of essays I have written on the books of Job and Ecclesiastes that likewise seek to detect the philosophical understandings they convey.

Unlike these challenging books of what modern scholars call “wisdom literature,” which express structured ideas, the opening chapters of Genesis—however great their literary merits—seem at first glance to show the Bible at its most primitive. But over the past many years, I have come to the conclusion that, hidden within these origin stories, is a coherent theory of the cosmos and of humankind. This essay will cite the expansion of the universe and the Cambrian biological explosion because, as Maimonides argued nearly 1,000 years ago, only through understanding Genesis in these terms can one access its dramatic philosophical backbone.

I came to this essay’s interpretation through a surprising route: an encounter with Kabbalah. In my previous efforts to probe ancient Israelite philosophy, I had always ignored the Jewish mystical tradition, which to me had seemed irrational. Not only did I discover I was wrong, but it was kabbalistic insights, of all things, that led me to focus on the most modern of sciences.

Accepting my own conclusions required me to go through a psychological and intellectual shift. That shift began with the COVID pandemic, during which I began daily Torah-study sessions with my late father, a learned and elderly rabbi who found himself suddenly cut off from human contact. Also joining these sessions was my brother, a prominent scientist in his own right, who suggested we tackle the Sefer Yetsirah, or “book of creation,” an early and seminal kabbalistic text likely dating to the 1st century CE. The choice was bold since none of us, Maimonidean rationalists all, had ever ventured into the esoteric. What we found was the exegetical equivalent of Alice’s adventure in Wonderland. I was left not only with a spark of enlightenment, but with a new set of puzzles that made me question everything I had previously believed.

In what follows, I want first to explain how, in my reading of it, Sefer Yetsirah reframes one of the most basic and oldest questions about the biblical creation story, and in doing so expands what actually makes up this story. Then, after outlining Sefer Yetsirah’s vision, I’ll explain my own Yetsirah-inspired interpretation, and then move through text, from Day One to Day Seven, outlining how it all fits together not only to produce a more coherent reading, but also to expose the biblical conception of man’s nature and his place in the world.

Sefer Yetsirah and the Conundrum of Creation

To any careful reader, Genesis presents a very obvious textual puzzle: there are two contradictory creation stories. The first, in Chapter 1, begins with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and proceeds, day by day, through the creation of the light, the seas, plants, and so forth, culminating with man and woman and the Sabbath. The more mythical second account, which starts with Genesis 2:4, begins with the earth already in existence, and narrates the creation of Adam and Eve (now distinct individuals) and proceeds with the Garden of Eden, the forbidden fruit, and so forth. Typically, the second story is read as filling in some details of the previous one, but there are contradictions that remain: were plants created before man, or man before plants? Were man and woman created together, or was woman later split off from man? They also differ in outlook: the auspicious first account ends with God seeing that creation is “very good” and sanctifying the seventh day, whereas the bleak second account ends with sin and expulsion.

The rabbis of the Talmud saw these discrepancies as grounds for exegesis and midrash, while their medieval successors carefully struggled to reconcile them. Modern critical scholars concluded that the two accounts are simply two separate traditions, which the redactors of the Bible slapped together, one after the other. In the 20th century, Joseph B. Soloveitchik famously saw a description of man’s dual nature and his dual mission. But Yetsirah attempts, almost impossibly, to show the two as mirror images. Using Yetsirah as a guide, and bearing in mind Maimonides’ dictum that “the Bible’s creation story isn’t all as it seems,” I tried to figure out how this might be.

Sefer Yetsirah’s central idea is that God formed the world as a manifestation of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the digits (s’firot) from one to ten—the language of God through which creation unfolds. But what struck me most was the book’s chronology. It seems to follow the steps of Genesis, day by day, until it stops abruptly with the fourth day, and then jumps ahead to Abraham’s realization of God.

This surprising move—omitting the last three days while bringing Abraham into the account of creation—suggests a complete reframing of the second creation story. Normally, this story is understood as ending with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, i.e., it runs from Genesis 2:4 to 3:24. Yetsirah suggests instead that this second account of creation itself stretches through Genesis 11—incorporating Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel—and culminates only with God addressing Abraham and telling him to go forth to the land of Canaan. It isn’t a continuation or an alternative of the first story, but a parallel, expanded narrative, so that the creation of Adam in Genesis 2 parallels Day Four of Genesis 1, and Abraham’s realization of God parallels Day Seven.

In other words, Yetsirah deliberately poses a riddle: why does it skip ahead to Abraham after Day Four? The text is challenging us to find the missing days from four through seven, which can only be done by looking at the creation narrative as I have suggested: as a narrative that extends until the appearance of Abraham. Let me give a general sense of how this works. (I’ll explain in greater detail below.) The first creation account ends on Day Seven, and we have established that the second account ends with Abraham. Therefore, we can conclude that Abraham’s encounter with God corresponds to the end of the seventh day.

From here, we can work backwards and conclude that the story of Noah occurred on Day Six. In the first creation story, the sixth day ends with God resting; in the second it ends with Noah’s ark—bear in mind that Noah in Hebrew means rest—resting on the mountaintop. Further study in this vein yielded further parallels, so that every event from the beginning of Genesis 2 through Genesis 11—the snake, the expulsion from Eden, Adam’s children, and even the Tower of Babel—fits into the formula of creation’s seven days.

To reconcile the two creations, it’s necessary to realize that core terms change their meaning across the biblical creation narrative. Before earth starts spinning the term “day” obviously means something else (a period of time). The same is true for the terms earth, heavens, and water, which must have their own meanings before dry land appears, before the sun and stars are fixed in the sky, and before the planets themselves are created. Thus Adam (“human”) also has two separate meanings, as Yetsirah itself implies: one meaning in Eden, when its initial adam was created before the animals (Genesis 2:19)—and another on Day Six of Genesis 1 when adam—a human as we know it—was formed as the culminating step of creation. That the initial adam of Eden was a different kind of biological creature is evident from his being hermaphroditic, blind (until Genesis 3:7 when “his eyes were opened”), and not yet reproducing through pregnancy (until Genesis 3:16).

That realization brought me to my most radical conclusion: the adam we encounter in Genesis 1, as created on Day Six, stands for the species homo sapiens; the adam we first encounter in Genesis 2, however, is a far more theoretical term depicting the evolutionary seed out of which humankind grew. This use of the term is similar to our saying that a pregnant woman has a person in her womb when the creature is still but a zygote, far from human in form: we call it human because we know it must develop into a human.

The second creation narrative is in fact a story of biological development, the gradual formation of the very characteristics that make us homo sapiens. In fact, it’s only the discoveries of Darwin and his successors that reconcile Genesis’s two conflicting creations. At the end of Day Seven—as writing was invented—God chose the first mentally awakened creature to father His nation, bringing the creation of the world to a close. Only with Abraham’s enlightenment does God’s forming of nature end, and human history begin. From Genesis 12 onward, the story is no longer an elaborate biological allegory but a series of stories about concrete, individual members of the species homo sapiens.

“Today marks the pregnancy of the world,” says a Rosh Hashanah hymn, and indeed the Garden of Eden stands for the archetypal womb from which humans are expelled at birth, and the tales that follow are a human coming-of-age story, from zygote and embryo to a fully realized adult homo sapiens.

There is a hefty price to pay for seeing the biblical creation narrative in this light. Christians will be deprived of their original sin. Academic scholars will have the carpet pulled from under their Documentary Hypothesis. Insightful readings of Eden that we have come to love (or Brueghel paintings for that matter) may seem obsolete. And we all will have to set aside the idea of Eden as a past (or future) utopia. But perhaps this lesson of Eden still prevails: the price of knowledge is always a loss of innocence.

This may all seem very far-fetched, but my hope is that, when actually applied to the text, it will begin to make as much sense to my readers as it does to me. Below, I outline the basic points of this interpretive scheme. This essay won’t try to explain every aspect of my theory, or share every exegesis on which it’s built, but rather make my case for a very different way of reading the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible, one where—just to give an example—the Tree of Knowledge will turn out to depict a vertebrate’s spine. So let’s embark on this interpretative journey, day by day.

Day One: From nothing to luminous stars

Genesis 1:1–1:5

¹ In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
² And the earth was frenzied and chaotic; and darkness upon the crest of the abyss, and the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters.
³ And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
⁴ And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
⁵ And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And it was evening, and it was morning—one day.

This day alone can be seen without reference to the second creation story. Genesis 1:1 describes the birth of the cosmos itself, in a way familiar from the accounts of modern physicists and cosmologists. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” incorporates the initial creation ex nihilo of the Big Bang, but also something else. Whether using scientific or biblical terms, this verse’s “heavens” can’t refer to the sky (not created until on Genesis 1:8), and “earth” cannot refer to the dry land on our planet (not created until Genesis 1:10). The text is instead telling us that God created ex nihilo both a metaphysical reality and physical one.

The physical reality, Verse 1 continues, was “frenzied and chaotic,” as, in the moments immediately after the Big Bang, the laws of physics themselves, let alone the structure of atoms and molecules, had not yet come into being. The next stage is what scientists calls the Cosmic Dark Ages: “And [then] darkness on the crest of the abyss.” Finally, cosmic music—“like bells,” says Einstein—is described as “the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters.” These waters cannot refer to H2O (not created until Genesis 1:10); instead, the primordial term depicts the “magnetic waters”—a swirling flow of quarks and short-lived particles—that cosmologists today speak of when describing the young cosmos.

Then, a few hundred million years later, the first star came into being: “And God said, Let there be sunlight, and there was sunlight.” The emergence of this first sun, a lone spark in the vastness of black, was a direct result of the gravitational ripples caused by this cosmic music.

Day Two: Earth’s primordial soup

Genesis 1:6–10 / Genesis 2:4–6

⁶ And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
⁷ And God made the expanse, and divided the waters below the expanse from the waters above the expanse: and it was so.
⁸ And God called the expanse heaven. And it was evening and it was morning—a second day.
⁹ And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
¹⁰ And God called the dry land earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he seas: and God saw that it was good.

The second day of creation is probably the most puzzling. Its centerpiece is the creation of a raki’a, usually rendered “firmament,” whose purpose is to divide “the waters below the raki’a from the waters above the raki’a.” Then God calls the firmament “heaven.” Is this different from the heaven mentioned on Day One? Why do the waters need dividing? Are the waters above the raki’a clouds? Some other sort of supernal matter? What happened to the “abyss” of Day One, and why is there water below the firmament now, but no seas until later?

The first problem here is that “firmament” implies something “firm.” The word raki’a comes from a verb meaning “to stretch out,” like the beating of a bar of metal into a broad, flat, sheet. Thus some modern translations are more on the mark with the word “expanse.” Now let’s imagine this expanse not as a division between two discrete bodies of water, but something more diffuse, like space itself.

We can now read this passage as a description of the period cosmologists call the “inflationary epoch,” during which the universe expanded outward from the central point of the Big Bang. Matter at the time was mostly in the extremely hot form of plasma, streams of which were being stretched out as part of this expansion. At the same time, space itself was expanding—the raki’a—and there came to be gaps between clusters of nebulae, which, over the course of billions of years, would cool into galaxies and stars. That is, the expanse of space separated the various “waters” of primeval matter, separating one nebula from another. From our perspective, the tiny (but seminal) speck of primeval “water” destined to become planet earth is “under the raki’a,” under the sky, and everything else is “above” it.

The second day, as many commentators have noted, stands apart in that, during it, God at no point observes, “That it was good,” as he does on the other five days. Instead, Day Three has two occurrences of “That it was good.” The great medieval exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra explains that the first of these (1:10), after the formation of continental dry land (“earth” in its revised meaning) and of the basin of oceans (“waters” in its revised meaning), actually marks the true completion of the work of Day Two, thereby each day has its own affirmation. Thus, following Ibn Ezra, Day Two takes us through what geologists call the Hadean Eon, which began 4.5 billion years ago, and concluded about 500 million years later—when the earth’s crust cooled and solidified.

Now we can compare this to the second creation account, which opens thus:

This is the genealogy of heaven and of earth as they were created,
on the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. (Genesis 2:3)

This certainly sounds like the beginning of a creation story. If the Bible began here, it would be entirely coherent. In fact, this verse is quite similar to Genesis 1:1. But one subtle difference gives us a hint about what’s going on: the omission of the definite articles. God in the first account “created the heavens and the earth.” In that same account, the terms lost their definitive articled as they were redefined. Thus, here, it’s “the genealogy of sky and land” that’s being addressed, making “the day” in question corresponds to Day Two in Chapter 1’s enumeration. The second narrative continues with an apt description of the state of things at the end of the Hadean Eon:

No shrub had yet to be on the earth, and no plant had yet grown, for the Lord God had not yet sent rain on the earth. . . . Steam [eid, sometimes rendered “mist”] rose from the earth and flooded the entire face of the ground. (Genesis 2:5–6)

This matches the state of the planet about 4 billion years ago, when, on the one hand, it was too hot for condensation and thus for rain, and, on the other, hot geysers bubbled up through hydrothermal vents to create a “primordial soup” which covered the entire planet.

Day Three: The first trees and the waterlogged womb

Genesis 1:11–13 / Genesis 2:8–9

¹¹ And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its species, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
¹² And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its species, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its species: and God saw that it was good.
¹³ And it was evening and it was morning—a third day.

In Genesis 1, the main event of the Third Day is the creation of plant life. Day Three presents a particularly difficult problem when compared to the second creation account. Here I’ll present the verse cited above, and what follows, in full:

No shrub had yet to be on the earth, and no plant had yet grown, for the Lord God had not yet sent rain on the earth and there was no adam [i.e., no living thing] to work the ground. Steam rose from the earth and flooded the entire face of the ground. Then the Lord God formed adam from the dust of the ground and breathed in his nostrils a breath of life, and the adam became a living being.

Now the Lord God planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the adam he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. (Genesis 2:5–9)

Thus, in Chapter 1, we have plants first (Day Three) and man later (Day Six); in Chapter 2, man first, then plants and trees. This bothered all the major medieval commentators, but it is again Abraham Ibn Ezra’s exposition that is most helpful for my purposes. True, he says, the verse in which God bestows the soul in Eden precedes the one in which He plants the garden, but nonetheless the garden came first. Genesis 2:8, he asserts, should be read in the pluperfect: “the Lord God had planted a garden”—in anticipation of adam.

With this in mind, let’s now read the planting of the Garden of Eden and third day in parallel, using the scientific account to help make sense of what we’re reading. Remember that the whole world was originally covered in water, and that the biological record shows that the first plant life was aquatic; terrestrial flora would evolve later. Instead of the standard translation of these two verses:

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its species . . . (Genesis 1:12)

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food . . . (Genesis 2:9)

We have:

The ocean bed produced algae and fern, flowering and bearing seeds according to their species.

And the Lord God grew from the ocean-bed all trees pleasing to the eye and good for food.

This waterlogged Eden, perhaps, is what Song of Songs 4:12 describes as “A locked-in garden, . . . a locked-in wave”—a contained, but flooded area, brimming with plant life. In the book of Ezekiel, all of Chapter 31 is devoted to describing God’s garden as waterlogged.

The purpose of the second version of the creation story, in my reading, is to focus on the genealogy of the human species here on earth, and in this light we should read the description of the Garden of Eden that follows. The Trees of Life and Knowledge are vascular and proto-neural networks that evolved in plants and that were evolutionary precursors to the circulatory and neural systems that give animals (including humans) the capacity for life and thought. At the same time, we can read this passage in relation to embryonic development: the waterlogged garden is the womb; its food-providing trees are the placenta, while their branches are chorionic villi—the tiny, fingerlike fetal blood vessels through which the fetus receives nutrition. The “river that goes out of Eden to water the garden” (2:10) is the umbilical cord itself, and its “four riverheads” match the four main arteries that take the blood to the limbs: the two subclavian arteries for the arms, and the femoral arteries for the legs.

Day Four: Lights, souls, and the precursors of the human animal

Genesis 1:14–19 / Genesis 2:7, 2:10–25

¹⁴ And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of heaven to differentiate between the day and the night; and let them be for signs, for dates, for days, and for years.
¹⁵ And let them be for lights in the expanse of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
¹⁶ And God made two great lights; the great light that rules by day, and the lesser light that rules at night, and the stars.
¹⁷ And God set them in the expanse of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
¹⁸ And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
¹⁹ And it was evening and it was morning—a fourth day.

Least obvious and most complex, this pivotal axis of the creation week was the last I was able to figure out. Regarding the following days we will submit rather straightforward, hopefully even delightful, evolutionary explanations of the biblical scenes, but Day Four requires us to discern an unfamiliar theoretical framework, one of parallel realities.

This day’s main event is the formation of “Lights in the expanse of heaven, to differentiate between the day and the night” (Genesis 1:14), including the “great light that rules by day, and the lesser light that rules at night, and the stars.” We’ve already established that the first star came into being on Day One. Like our own planet, all stars were already cooling down and forming on previous days. What Day Four is about is not the creation of sun, moon, and stars but the establishment of their fixed orbits and patterns—the assembly of a cosmic clock, specifically from our prospective (e.g., day and night). Thus, the text tells us, they can now serve, “for signs, for dates, for days, and for years.”

The cosmic clock itself, however, carries a much greater weight in biblical thought, one of a holy astrology. Indeed, according to the Sefer Yetsirah it is the Merkavah—the divine chariot described in Ezekiel 1 that is the subject of much rabbinic mystical speculation—that came to life on Day Four. In this reading, the angelic beings that accompany the chariot in Ezekiel’s vision are in fact animal-like personifications of the celestial bodies seen in the canopy of heaven.

The Jewish prayerbook, in the daily morning service (and even more so in its Sabbath variation), treats the lights and constellations of the skies as angelic beings, imbued by God with “knowledge, understanding, and intelligence, strength and power.” Not only that, but the liturgy treats these heavenly entities as interchangeable with the hosts of angels and seraphs that Isaiah envisioned as chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy!” before God’s throne. In this view of the cosmos, so foreign to us moderns, God allocates power to rule over worldly events to the heavenly bodies as a collective—it is through their concerted motions, their functioning as a giant astronomical clock for earth, that the stars get their power.

The celestial Merkavah of Chapter 1’s fourth day has its parallel in the formation of a terrestrial Merkavah in Eden’s narrative—“as is above so is below,” in a mantra often cited by Ibn Ezra. It starts with the soul of adam, the terrestrial sun, and ends with the separation of woman, the terrestrial moon, from his body, and the star formations of all animal phyla. But for this to make sense we must decipher what truly stands behind Eden’s imagery: the drama of the Cambrian explosion, which occurred exactly as the Solar System was fine-tuning its alignments.

When a woman gets pregnant, we consider the tiny creature swimming in her belly as human, based on what it will become. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 57b) in fact describes an embryo in its mother’s womb as “an adam within an adam.” Similarly, God tells the pregnant Rebbeca that there are already, at that early embryonic stage, two “nations” in her belly (Genesis 25:23). Some parents name an expected child even before it has developed its human characteristics. I propose that we understand God’s creation of man as a process of conception, gestation, and birth, and that it is this process that the second creation describes. God impregnated nature with the ability to bring forth humankind when he first created plants, which preceded animals. God took a plant—an evolutionary ovum, if you will—and turned it into the first animate creature, embedding it with a potential to evolve into homo sapiens. He thus named it upfront as adam, based on its future trajectory: “Before I formed you in the belly [of Eden]—I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5).

This move from flora to fauna is the creative act described in Genesis 2:7, which is usually rendered thus:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed (va-yipah) into his nostrils (b’apav) the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

This translation misleads in several ways. First, the Hebrew word afar should be translated as “soil” rather than the “dust.” The word contains the root letters P-R, which connote fruit or fertility. That is, God formed the adam out of a plant organism. Next, as I have argued elsewhere, the key verb here, va-yipah, refers not to breath or wind but to fire, and should be translated as “kindled” rather than “breathed” or “blew.” As the book of Proverbs has it: “A candlelight of the Lord is the soul of man.” This flame parallels the burning light of the stars.

Where did the kindling take place? Rather than “in his nostrils,” one should read “in his metabolism” as the Hebrew root A-F connotes fumes; the act God performed to produce animal life ignited vital heat. That the spark of life (nishmat hayyim) is of fire explains why this term for soul is cognate to the fiery sun (shemesh), the fiery heavens (shamayim), and the mysterious substance, hashmal, of Ezekiel’s divine chariot.

Finally, there is the thing that adam becomes: nefesh hayah, in the translation above, “a living soul.” Throughout the Bible, nefesh stands for the basic animal life force, or animation. Putting this all together, we get a new translation:

And the Lord God formed the adam of soil from the ground, and ignited in its tempers a soul of life, and the adam became an animal being.

Understood thus, this kindling of the soul refers to God’s miraculous transformation of flora to fauna, of the creation of the first primitive animal from which all subsequent animal life would descend. (Indeed, most biologists now believe that all living animals had a single animal ancestor.) This phase of Genesis 2, therefore, isn’t about the literal creation of homo sapiens, but the creation of the animal kingdom, a momentous evolutionary event without which our very animal natures would not exist. It is not yet the genesis of the first human, but the very beginning of the terrestrial Merkavah, which gradually develops over the course of time.

What happens next? God says, “It is not good that the adam be alone; I will make it a counterpart” (Genesis 2:18). This verse is remembered as the prologue to the creation of Eve, but what follows immediately is that God introduces Adam to the vast array of animal life. We should therefore understand these verses as a reference to what is known as the Cambrian explosion, the period a little over 500 million years ago when the planet saw the rapid expansion and diversification of life, and especially of animal life. The ancestors of most of the various families of animals that exist today originated during this time. During this period, the primordial ancestors of the human confronted an abundance of species. In other words, God brought before adam “every animal of the field and every bird of the sky.” Naming the animals represents the cognitive process of “naming” stimuli from the senses, parallel to the point in embryonic development in which the inchoate nervous system begins codifying the electronic signals received from external stimulation.

Only after this confrontation with biodiversity, does God at last create the female. Again, standard translations are our bane. He creates woman from Adam’s tsela, which could mean “rib,” but also simply “side,” or “flank.” This marks not the creation of the first human female, but another evolutionary milestone: the emergence, very early in the history of animals, of what biologists call “gonochorism”: a system in which each individual is either male or female, and one member of each sex is required to produce offspring. In the parallel to pregnancy, by the end of Day Four we have reached the emergence of sex-specific traits in the seventh week of gestation.

Now we can return to Day Four of Genesis 1 and see the parallel between the biological and the celestial developments. God first creates “the great lights,” undifferentiated, and then divides them into “the greater light that rules by day” and “the lesser light that rules by night.” As in the story of adam in Genesis 2, the central event involves an existential duality.

Day Five: The reptile brain and the Tree of Knowledge

Genesis 1:20–23 / Genesis 3:1–24

²⁰ And God said, Let the water spawn crawling animal beings, and every flier that may fly above the earth in the expanse of heaven.
²¹ And God created the great sea-monsters, all the writhing animal-beings that the waters spawned to their species and every winged flier after its species: and God saw that it was good.
²² And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fliers multiply in the earth.
²³ And it was evening and it was morning—a fifth day.

Days Five and Six represent the course of animal evolution from primitive aquatic creatures to increasingly sophisticated terrestrial animals and finally to homo sapiens. The next phase of the Eden story, found in Genesis 3, is concerned with the same developments, as adam gradually acquires various faculties on the journey to humanity.

Like the previous two, Day Five takes place completely underwater, in the “locked-in wave,” the garden womb. The description of this day in Genesis 1 outlines a clear progression: first God says, “Let the water spawn crawling animal beings,” meaning the first primitive vertebrates. Then God creates the “great sea-monsters,” which should be understood not as mythic creatures but as amphibians, from which would evolve semiaquatic reptiles and later fully terrestrial ones. (The word classically rendered as “sea-monster” is tanin, which is also thought to mean “crocodile,” the crocodile being a semiaquatic reptile.) And then there appear “all the writhing animal-beings that the waters spawned to their species,” which are fish and other marine life forms, and then “all winged flier to their species,” which are dragonflies and other flying water insects. Actual birds, which we now know evolved from reptiles millions of years later, don’t appear until the Noah’s Ark story. Thus Day Five describes the three branches of marine life that evolved during the Paleozoic era: fish, amphibians, and insects.

In the parallel Eden narrative, Day Five features a Shakespearean love triangle between a woman, a man, and a snake. Ending with the expulsion from Eden, this day is the most dramatic. The clue that it should be read as the parallel of Day Five is the snake, which should be taken as a representative of the reptiles, and perhaps especially the aquatic kind. Amos 9:3 straightforwardly, and Isaiah 27:1 more obliquely, speak of the snake as dwelling at “the bottom of the sea.” This story is an allegory about the evolution of the animal brain, as it takes the first steps from its most primitive form towards the fully conscious and sophisticated human mind.

To understand the text thus, it’s necessary to break free from the straitjacket of conventional readings. Today, even for Jewish students of the Bible, it is hard to ignore entirely the influence of Christian notions of original sin. Traditional Jewish interpretation, moreover, still tends to see this as a tale of commandment, transgression, and punishment. Lastly, there is a tendency—more pronounced in the Christian tradition, but present also in the Jewish tradition—to read the Eden story as an allegory about sexuality. I propose rejecting these moralistic interpretations entirely.

Observe first that none of the various Hebrew words for “sin” appear in this story in any form whatsoever. Second, note the order in which the key events take place:

1. “And the Lord God commanded the adam, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” (2:16–17)
2. God creates woman. (2:21–23)
3. The snake asks the woman about the fruit. (3:1–3)
4. The snake tells the woman, “You shall not surely die,” upon eating the fruit. Rather, it claims, “God knows that on the day you eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Woman was not present when God forbade the eating of the fruit. And since adam is not human at this stage but animal, perhaps this should be taken not as a commandment or a taboo but as a law of nature or instinct. But woman does have a choice: to weigh the report about the fruit presumably conveyed to her by adam against the conflicting information conveyed to her by the snake.

The drama here is playing out within God’s creatures. The Tree of Knowledge is a breathtaking metaphor for the spinal cord—the trunk from which the rest of the nervous system branches out. The evolution of this structure is what separates the oldest, most primitive animal organisms from the rest. Organizing the nervous system around a central cord makes possible the evolution of the reptilian brain, primitive, perhaps, compared to the brains of whales and apes, but far more sophisticated than anything that preceded it. Thus we can imagine the story of the Tree of Knowledge as taking place at a time when “the snake was cleverer than any animal of the field which the Lord God had made.” That is, in the Paleozoic era, when reptiles were the most intelligent of all species.

The reptilian brain, awakened in this episode, knows how to process stimuli, form a concept of reality, and act accordingly. Reptiles can even dream. As opposed to earlier slugs, vertebrates know how to distinguish what is good for them from what is bad, what is desirable from what is not. Cold or hot; sweet or bitter, attractive or repulsive, friend or foe—these are all reptilian-brain judgments of “knowing good and bad.” A plant makes no such judgments, and neither did the sponges who had no concern about the future nor eggs to protect. This is the early phase of a child’s intellectual maturation Isaiah refers to when he says, “Butter and honey shall he eat knowingly; to reject the bad and to choose the good” (7:15).

With the awakening of the animal brain comes the instinct for self-preservation. In the Bible, the language of death and dying is never applied to plants, which only wither. You need a brain to die, and death in this sense only became possible when our animal ancestors first tasted the fruit of greater intelligence. It is of this newly formed consciousness that’s the “you will surely die” of which the text speaks.

Partaking of knowledge results in further cognitive development, paralleling the woman’s dream. She had said the tree was pleasing to the eyes, thus, after eating the fruit, “both their eyes opened”—they developed binocular vision, and a perception of space and depth. When the man and woman realize that they are naked, they are becoming aware of their own vulnerability. (The Hebrew word for “naked” used here, arum, always connotes vulnerability and bears no sexual connotation—as opposed to its cognate, ervah, which always is used in a sexual context.)

When the adam soon testifies, “I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid” (Genesis 3:10) he is saying, “I realized my vulnerability, so I took shelter.” And when the pair “sewed fig leaves and made themselves hagorot,” they are weaving nests and storing food, as they are now aware of the need to plan for future danger and scarcity. (The Hebrew hagor, quaintly rendered by the King James Version as “aprons,” often denotes storage.)

Finally, we must make sense of the expulsion and the divine verdict that follows, which is not in fact a terrible punishment but simply the birth of the next evolutionary transition. Most of us remember illustrations from high-school biology textbooks of the first brave amphibian that used its fins to first crawl out of the primordial ocean, seeking a safer nest on dry land. This illustration depicts, in effect, the expulsion from the watery Eden—the movement of life from seas to land. This transition, in Genesis 1, is the transition from Day Five, when life is created in the seas, to Day Six, when it was created on land.

Note that only the snake and the earth are described as cursed—but not the man and the woman. The snake’s curse is to “crawl on its belly” because until then it swam! And with the evolution of mammals, reptiles no longer reign supreme, but must be subordinate to this new form of life.

As for the woman, her “punishment” must be understood as the fate of the newly emerged mammals. “I will greatly multiply your pangs and pregnancy” (Genesis 3:16–20), since mammals, unlike previous animal forms, experience pregnancy and birth rather than laying eggs. “Your desire shall be for your man,” because reptiles don’t go into heat, nor form emotional attachments with their mates. “And he shall rule over you,” because only mammals form social hierarchies and partnerships intertwined with the roles of the sexes. A baby too, as it is born, switches from an amphibian state to being a four-legged breathing mammal.

Now we can make sense of the strange placement of the naming of Eve, which appears after the eating of the forbidden fruit and the divine verdict. The post-expulsion woman—now representing a land mammal—receives a matching new name for her Day Six persona. Henceforth she is to be called Eve, “for she was the mother of all alive” (3:20). From this point onwards, breeding females can become “mothers,” rather than incubators and layers of eggs.

As for man, God tells him: “With the sweat of your tempers [apekha] you shall eat bread.” Here too, translation is a problem. The word af—incorrectly translated as “nostril” when it appears in 2:7—is generally rendered “brow” in this verse. But here, as above, I will translate it as “temper.” The meaning of the verse then become clear: only land animals must regulate body heat, hunt, and hoard food. “You shall eat the prairie plants,” unlike the marine creatures that ate each other. Finally, “God produced for them hide garments,” means, literally, hide or skin, to replace scales and shells.

With mammals came the limbic brain on top of the reptilian one. This layer is fundamentally social, responsible for empathy, sense of smell, and body temperature.

Day Six: Species as characters
Genesis 1:24–31 / Genesis 4:1–9:18

²⁴ And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the land after its kind: and it was so.
²⁵ And God made the beast of the land after its kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creeps upon the land after its kind and God saw that it was good.
²⁶ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepes upon the land.
²⁷ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female He created them.
²⁸ And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill up the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
²⁹ And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food.
³⁰ And to every beast of the land, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so.
³¹ And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And it was evening and it was morning—the sixth day.

Day Six, in Genesis 1, begins with the creation of terrestrial life and culminates with the creation of man. That same story is told in the second account, in a dramatic form that begins with the expulsion and Cain’s murder of Abel and ends with the flood and the covenant between God and Noah, who, I will argue, represents the first homo sapiens.

Thus we must read the characters introduced in these stories as representing different species. I won’t venture to try to match each episode, let alone each individual, with its evolutionary equivalent. But by the time we get to Jubal, the sixth-generation descendant of Cain who was “the father of all who handle the harp and flute,” we have arrived at Neanderthals or some other hominid, creating musical instruments. And with Jubal’s half-brother Tubal-cain, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” we have the first forging of tools in fire. There are gnomic statements in the rabbinic tradition that support this view. For instance, Yalkut Shimoni, an anthology of ancient midrash, states that in the generation of Enosh, the grandson of Adam and Eve, people “first received monkey faces.” Perhaps this refers to the evolution of the first primates on the path from the first mammals (adam) to the first hominids.

In the development of the individual, Day Six stretches from birth to adolescence. The parable to personal growth lends itself readily: imagine Cain as a “terrible” two-year-old, at the age when a child may want to kill a new, baby brother. Imagine Enoch, builder of the first city, as a four-year-old constructing a tower of Legos. The latent stage, when sex is suppressed in favor of social skills, is exemplified by Jubal and the other artisans. Following them, the mating of “God’s sons” with “the human girls” (Genesis 6:2) can be seen as the stage of adolescent interest in the opposite sex. Finally imagine Noah—now in God’s image—as having reached the age of bar mitzvah, subject to laws and to a social calling.

To understand why I think the flood itself should be included in the sixth day, note the similarities between these two verses:

And God made the beast of the land after its kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creeps upon the land after its kind and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:24)

And God spoke unto Noah, saying: “Bring forth with you every beast . . . and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creeps upon the land; that they may breed abundantly.”

There is, I would suggest, a parallel between the creation of the land animals and Noah “bringing them forth” from the Ark. Keeping this parallel in mind, let’s take a brief look at this story.

For the rationalist Bible-reader, the Flood may be even harder to swallow than creation, in part because it tends to invite more literal readings. Could two of every beast really have fit upon a single vessel of fixed dimensions? Even if the geological record suggests various catastrophes, floods, and ice ages, they don’t seem to fit very well with the timing of the biblical flood.

I can’t say my allegorical reading resolves all these problems. But I do think it can give us a start, if we see the flood as the final Ice Age, when the earth was covered with water, albeit the frozen kind. We know that the Ice Ages shrunk the earth’s biological diversity, and that is what is represented by the paring down of animal life to two (or in some cases fourteen) members of each species: a great reduction in the number of land animals. And there is also a new role for mankind:

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moves upon the earth, and upon all the fish of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

This postdiluvian promise seems to be describing exactly what some now call the Anthropocene era—the era of human dominance that began in the wake of the last Ice Age. And the commandments that God gives to Noah in the following verses, unlike the single prohibition given to Adam, suggest a moral law that is appropriate for the human species rather than for animals. So too is God’s covenant with mankind, symbolized by the rainbow, which is the first time that crucial word, covenant (brit), appears in the Hebrew Bible. No rainbow could appear in the sky during the frigid temperatures of the Ice Age, thus this phenomenon becomes a symbol of the end of this era of the world’s history.

As for the evil of creatures, the measurements of the ark, the count of days, the dove’s olive branch, and so forth—I am certain they too have allegorical significance, although what it is is beyond me.

Sabbath Eve: The Ark rests

In Chapter One, Day Six culminates when God finally created humans, after which God embraces His creation and rests it down for Sabbath. In the extended Eden narrative the same culmination is dramatized by Noah exiting the Ark after the flood, and God wrapping creation with a rainbow. When “the ark rested (va-tanaḥ) on the seventh month” we hear an echo of the Ten Commandments, “and He rested (va-yanaḥ) on the seventh day” (Exodus 20:10). The only difference between the verbs is that one is feminine and the other masculine. Likewise, Noah’s name comes from the same Hebrew root, the letters nun and ḥet, as those two verbs. We see the verb appear once more when the dove seeks rest (manoaḥ) for the sole of its foot. And when we read that “the waters abated (kalu) from upon the earth” we hear an echo of the first describing the Seventh Day: “The heaven and the earth were culminated (va-y’khulu) and all their hosts” (Genesis 2:1). (Although the transliterations of the two words may look quite different to the non-Hebrew-reader, they are in fact the exact same verb, just in two different tenses.)

Yet another literary hook binds the end of the flood with the end of Day Six. In His post-flood address, “God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth.’” This is summed up by what God says to the first humans in Genesis 1: “God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fliers of heaven, and over all living things.’” Both accounts also grant a privilege to feed upon nature. The permission of eating meat is omitted in Chapter One only because it must be qualified—a taboo on blood which goes beyond the scope of the short seven-day overview of Chapter 1.

Thus Noah after the Flood, in the extended Eden saga, represents the fully formed adam which in Chapter One is created just before the Sabbath—as if Genesis 1:27 states: “God created Noah in His own image, in the image of God created He him.” It is only after the Flood that God finalizes Noah. Here we also find the first use of the Hebrew word for speech (dibbur) rather than forms of the verb to say (amar). Speaking and comprehending speech is one of the defining capabilities of mankind. The potential adam became reality.

Finally, the moment of ending creation was doubly sealed by God, with the covenant and the sign of the rainbow. Noah emerging from the Ark is the fully developed homo sapiens, setting forth to conquer bravely this new world. And since the flood meant a clean slate, the Bible posits Noah as a first adam; we are all his children.

Noah built an altar to the Lord and . . . he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing smell and saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. And He said in his mind: “Never again will I curse the ground. . . . As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” (Genesis 8:20)

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And it was evening and it was morning—the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)

Day Seven: Noah in the vineyard

Genesis 2:1-3 / Genesis 9:18-11:32

¹ Thus the heavens and the earth were culminated, and all their hosts.
² And God finished on the seventh day the craft that He made; and He rested on the seventh day from all his craft that he had made.
³ And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all His craft that God created and made.

The first creation story doesn’t detail Day Seven, so in effect it merges with the second story after the flood. Day Seven starts after the birth of the human species and ends with Abraham. On this day nations and languages evolved, raising humanity to a level where an Abraham can appear. Unlike previous days, during this entire evolution of nations, from the flood to Abraham, God did not intervene; He let history, or nature, take its course.

On this day, the drama begins with Noah planting a vineyard, which will soon get him drunk. This is an allegory for the agricultural revolution that took place about 12,000 years ago. The vines, the rabbis teach with a wink, grew from a shoot of the Tree of Knowledge (which they consider to be a grapevine) smuggled onto the Ark. And just as Adam got drunk on Eve’s gift of wine, so too did Noah get drunk—leading to the first story of human law and order.

The first creation narrative states that, “God finished on the seventh day the craft that He made” (Genesis 2:2). From here, traditional commentaries deduce that He administered some finishing touch on the seventh day itself—otherwise it should read, “God finished on the sixth day.” In the second narrative, this act comes to light as God’s foiling of the Tower of Babel. A bit like a devout Jew breaking the Sabbath because of a medical emergency, God needed to intervene to end the human herd mentality of “a unified language and unified talk” (Genesis 11:1) so that mankind could diversify and evolve as a society of individuals rather than an undifferentiated species. Languages will give birth to the enlightened man, bringing the creation week to a close.

Saturday night: Havdalah

With His command to Abraham to get moving to Canaan (Genesis 12:1), God returns to work—ending His millennia-long sabbath; no longer the producer of nature, God is henceforth the hands-on director of history. In the havdalah ritual that marks the conclusion of the Sabbath, the pivotal blessing praises God “who draws a line between the holy and the profane, between light and darkness, between Israel and the nations, and between the seventh day and the six days of work.” God, in choosing Abraham after the seventh “day,” singles out a particular family and people whose role is to advance humanity as a whole. From here on, the Hebrew Bible will be the story of that people.

Many rabbinic sources refer to Abraham as new “first adam,” and attribute to him the title “The adam who is the largest of the giants” (Joshua 14:15). Sefer Yetsirah emphasizes how Abraham reached enlightenment on his own, without assistance, as befits the seventh day: “Our father Abraham had perceived and understood, and had appreciated and engraved all these things. The Lord most high then revealed Himself to him, sat him on His lap and kissed his forehead.” With this kiss, a mere 400 years or so before Moses authored the two accounts of Genesis, does the Bible stop being allegorical. It is here, only here, that newspapers replace the playbill, and the clock of historical time—our notion of days and years—starts ticking.

Here too lies God’s ultimate blessing, that of sanctity. Regarding the Sabbath: “God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Genesis 2:3). And regarding Abraham: “I will bless you, and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2), by becoming “a sanctified nation to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 14:2). These two agents of sanctity are the final thread tying together the Bible’s two creation accounts, parallel to the final stage of adulthood, where individuals are joined in the sacred bond of matrimony.

Solomon’s temple featured a seven-branched menorah, supported entirely on its middle axis. Yetsirah sees this as the model for the creation week, whereby all seven days pivot around Day Four. Furthermore, it hints that days five to seven are a reincarnation—on a higher order—of days one to three. The higher order is a result of Day Four’s Merkavah—the divine chariot and celestial beings—coming into play. Day Five, in which fauna are created, reincarnates the flora of Day Three. Day Six, which delineates oceanic and terrestrial animals, reincarnates Day Two which delineated ocean from dry land. Finally, Day Seven, the day of human enlightenment, recapitulates the “Let there be light” of Day One. This lends closure to the creation.

But why does the Bible give us this account? What is the purpose of an elaborate allegory of the evolution of man from aquatic protozoa to modern humans? The reason is to explain to us something basic about human nature and the human condition. This is how my investigation of the Sefer Yetsirah brought me to creation and back to my theory of biblical man. What I found through my study of Genesis was a biological formulation of the Bible’s tripartite understanding of the human being, one that gets much attention from mystics in their attempts to make sense of the three different traditional terms for the soul. There is the nefesh (roughly equivalent to the Greek term psyche), which represents the reptilian brain; the ruah (also the word for wind, and used in way similar to the Greek thumos), representing the limbic brain; and the n’shamah (the higher soul; in Greek the nous or mind), representing the neocortex—the most advanced part of the human brain, unique to mammals. The equivalence is almost perfect.

As for my high-school teacher’s beautiful warning, I don’t believe that previous “scientific” readings of the Bible were wrong, going back to Moses Maimonides and beyond, any more than the science that drove them was. It’s just that the language of science evolves and with it, its interpretive prism.

Any religion requires not just a theology, but also an anthropology—a theory of man alongside its theory of God. Long before Darwin, and even before Aristotle, it was clear to humans that we had much in common with the animals, but also something that makes us different. We understand ourselves better by understanding our animal natures. Read in the way I purpose, Genesis shows us how to interpret that nature in a way that emphasizes our humanity while taking us back to the solitary, deep-water worm of our primordial origins. And the process has not come to an end. Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi under the British Mandate and one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, stresses that, in the End of Days, animals, or at least mammals, will talk like humans do now. Just as the creation of adam incorporated the creation of all animal life forms, so too will the ultimate redemption of adam span the entire animal kingdom.

In loving memory of my mother, Dr. Netta Kohn Dor-Shav.