Are There Two Contradictory Creation Accounts in Genesis?

Dr. Craig discusses the first two chapters of Genesis and comments on the source material.

INTERVIEWER: The standard academic understanding of the Pentatuch which you mentioned is the so-called documentary hypothesis; that in fact, we're actually seeing at least four separate distinct authors – JEPD. Now, I know this has come under some criticism and there have been some refinements of it, but nevertheless the fundamentals still seem to be intact in Old Testament studies. The idea that Moses is definitely not the author of the Pentateuch at all – the first five books of Moses, I mean – that he didn't actually write them. Indeed, nowhere in the book does it claim that he did write them. The point I'm getting at here is not just to mention that the authorship question is quite interesting (that Moses didn't write any of this anyway, it would seem according to most scholars today), but that the second creation account is written by someone other than the first creation account. So it's not surprising we had two different people with different outlooks and understandings of creation and God himself – one very transcendent and very attractive to philosophers, and the second very anthropomorphic as you say where God is portrayed as a humanoid figure who gets involved and asking “Where are you Adam?” He is sort of asking in the cool of the day. A very, very different portrayal. So would another way of looking at this be to say we're looking at a Scripture which is not entirely harmonious and consistent because of its multiple authorship by different people with different views of God (the Elohist, the Priestly, the Jahwist, the Deuteronomist – these are the technical terms for the four documentary authors of the documentary hypothesis).

DR. CRAIG: I have a nice discussion in the book about the sources behind Genesis 1-11 in terms of both source criticism and form criticism. Fortunately, with Genesis 1-11 which is the center of our attention, only the J source and the P source come into view. The other two don't even play a role in Genesis 1-11 and so can be left aside. There's no reason or argument or evidence that these are in fact written documents rather than oral traditions which were then collected and put into the final form by the Pentatuchal author. So I think the final authorship of the book is in one sense really irrelevant. What's important is this pre-literary tradition that gets taken up and put together. I think you're absolutely right that it's very clear, even to the English reader, that in Genesis 1 you have a different tradition than what you have in Genesis 2, and that the Pentateuchal author juxtaposes these without very much concern about ironing out any sort of inconsistencies between the two. I think, again, that is characteristic of myth. The authors of myth are not terribly bothered by logical inconsistencies or fantastic elements because that's not the main point that they're trying to make. The only thing I would add here though is I would follow the commentator Claus Westermann in saying that what we have in Genesis 2 is not a second creation account. Genesis 2 contains nothing about the creation of the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Rather it's a story about the origin of humanity and as such it resembles other Ancient Near Eastern Mesopotamian myths about humanity and how it came to be. So I think in Genesis 1 you do have a creation story and then in Genesis 2 the focus radically narrows down to the Earth and you have a story about the origin of humanity.