The RISV Version, with updates as new information is learned
Chapter 2 "Lush Garden"
1 This is the Book of the Temple Record, in it being planned.
2 At that time, the god Yahweh worked on the earth and the heavens, and before the wild bush was in the earth, and before any wild plant was growing.
3 Even though the god Yahweh had not brought blessings on the earth nor human to cultivate the ground, bringing instead irrigation from the earth to water the face of the ground,
4 the god Yahweh had guided the wild man, and there was breathing in his nostrils, the breath of life, the dead man became alive.
5 And in the Lush Garden the god Yahweh planted of old, now he put there the man he had planned.
6 And the god Yahweh made every tree that is desirable to see and better for food grow up from the ground, the tree of the living in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
7 Now, a river went out of Lush to water the garden, and from there it would divide and become four headwaters.
8 The name of the first was Pishon (That is dried up). It cut through the entire Havilah region, where the gold is, and the gold of the region is good; resin and onyx stone are there.
9 The name of the second river was Gihon, it cut through the entire Cush region. (That is Elam)
10 The name of the third river was Hiddekel (That is Tigris), it runs along the east in Assyria.
11 And the fourth river was the Perath. (That is Euphrates)
12 So the god Yahweh took the man up to the Lush Garden to serve and observe it carefully.
13 So the god Yahweh commanded the man, saying "You may truly eat from every tree of the garden. But from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you may not eat of it. For when you eat of it you truly die."
14 So the god Yahweh said "It's not good that the man has become alone. I will show him an equivalent authority."
15 And the god Yahweh guided every beast of the earth from the land and every bird from the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call to them.
16 And after the man called to each living creature his own name, the man also gave names to all livestock, birds of the air, and every beast of the earth but no equivalent authority was found for the man.
17 So the god Yahweh cast a visionary trance upon the man and he slept.
18 And the man took one like him to his side and surrendered his body beneath.
19 And the god Yahweh revealed the one the man had taken to his side as his wife and married her to the man.
20 So the man said "Finally, she is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. For her, it will be said 'Woman' because a husband has taken her."
21 That is why a husband abandons his father and mother, embraces his wife, and they consummate the union. And when the two are naked, the husband and wife, they are not ashamed.
22 Now the Shining One was more cunning than any beast of the earth that the god Yahweh had made. And they said to the woman "For indeed God has not said you may eat of every tree of the garden."
23 And the woman said to the Shining One "We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but for the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said "You shall not eat from it nor shall you touch it, or else you will die."
24 The Shining One said to the woman "You will not truly die! For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you'll be like gods, who know good and evil."
25 So when the woman saw the tree was good for food, had a pleasing appearance, and a tree for providing wisdom, she then took and ate of its fruit.
26 And she also gave some to her husband and he ate with her. And the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made a rudimentary covering for themselves.
27 Now they heard the voice of the god Yahweh traveling through the Garden as a powerful windstorm, so the husband and wife hid themselves, in fear of the god Yahweh, among the trees of the garden.
28 So the god Yahweh summoned the man and said to him "Why hide?"
29 So he said "I heard your thunder in the garden and I feared because I was naked, so I hid."
30 And He said "Who declared that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you 'you may not eat of it'?"
31 And the man said "The woman you put with me, she has given me fruit, and I ate."
32 And the god Yahweh said to the woman "What is this that you have done?"
33 And the woman said "The Shining One caused me to go astray, and I ate."
34 So the god Yahweh said to the Shining One "Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all the livestock and more than every wild beast. You shall crawl and eat dirt all the days of your life.
35 And enmity I’ll set in place between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He’ll strike you on the head, you’ll strike him on the heel!”
36 He said to the woman "I'll make great your toil and pregnancies, with anguish you'll bear children, since your devotion is turning toward your man, and he'll rule with you!"
37 And to the man He said "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree that I commanded you, saying 'you may not eat of it', the ground is cursed because of you.
38 In pain you'll eat from it all the days of your life. Thorn and thistle it will grow for you and you'll eat the grain of the earth. By the sweat of your face you'll eat bread.
39 Until you are buried in the ground, for from it you were taken, for you were dust, and to dust you will return.
40 Now the man gave his wife the name 'Eve' because she became the mother of all that lives.
41 And the god Yahweh made leather ponchos for the man and his wife and clothed them. And the god Yahweh said "Behold! The man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.
42 And now, he might reach out his hand and take fruit from the tree of the living, eat, and live forever." So the god Yahweh sent him out of the Lush Garden to serve the land that he had been taken from.
43 So He sent the man out. And He placed winged sentries to dwell in the east of the Lush Garden and a flaming whirlwind of a sword to seal the way to the tree of the living!
My Thoughts
I decided to keep the first few verses of Genesis 2 "familiar" with Genesis 1 and start this with the verse that seems to indicate a shift in style. This line "This is the Book" wasn't enough on its own but rather I saw more to the expounding on the nature of the Book being what is to follow rather than what proceeded. This could easily clear up some of the confusion behind the two chapters and if 2 is a telescope of day 6 in chapter 1. I do not think it is but rather, as we will see, it is a continuation that has a new meaning.
Verse 2 is calling back to the 'planning' that the God did in Genesis 1 as he did this "before the wild bush" bringing us to think about what comes next as being what he had already set in motion. God is in control of bringing these events. That is, until there is someone to be in communication with, God guided all things so that they would arrive on the scene.
Not until verse 5 RISV do we see what the prior verses are talking about. There was no blessing nor human 'here' but instead there was irrigation by way of an underground spring. Then God fills the human with his spirit, giving him a state of life from a state of death (likely spiritual) by a breathing. Not until after the human had this life did the God put the man in this garden. Here the pants were not wild, there was no rain, no prior humans, and the garden was watered from a spring.
In verse 6, here we see the two trees. It could be that the tree of the living and the tree of knowledge are both in the middle of the garden. I didn't see this as being the case but rather this is just a list of trees that makes a point to say that the tree of the living is in the middle. This will be important later. Either can be the case.
The river that flows, flows out of "Lush" and into the rest of the garden, drawing a small separation of the two location terms. Lush is the larger region and the garden is to where God brought this human. The mention of it dividing after the garden is important for identifying its location but also for understanding something in later chapters because it is language that identifies its location.
It becomes 4 rivers from one location, saying that all 4 of these identifiable rivers have a connecting point. I've used the names more closely associated with the Hebrew for the rivers while keeping the more up-to-date names in the parenthetical, but also used this to identify that, for example, the Pishon never got an updated name. The description of this river still gives us enough information to locate it, provided we use the date of ground penetrating radar to confirm our suspicions. The clues being the "Havilah" region, the gold, and the other resources, one of them being resin.
The Gihon, with help from radar, can be identified as going through an area that was once called "Cush" and is also known as "Elam" today. With the other two rivers that remain to this day and using the location of the Pishon, we can see the spot where they all four would connect and thus be the location just outside of the Lush Garden.
All this concludes with restating the action of God taking the human to this place but adding that they are there to serve it.
Verse 13 is God giving the human a command, the first they would ever be given in record, saying that they may eat of all the trees but one. While God gave the human life with his spirit, the fruit of this tree will bring the man death.
The following is still part of the Lush Garden narrative but does make a slight shift in focus. Now that this man is in the garden, they can be in communication with the God but God has also drawn them out here alone. God says that it is not good and he needs to show the man who will be his helper. The God puts the man to sleep and shows him, using his side, that the woman is his equal to be an observer of the garden with him. But first, God has the man call out his name to every one of the animals but none of them responded. So the man named them and was still alone for the animals could not be in communication to the man as the man was with the God. This is why his helper was like him and yet different. Divided by sex but united in purpose.
Verse 18 is consummation of marriage in the vision so that God could show the man that taking a wife is a bond of partnership and no longer a primal act for reproduction. Now when they are together, they are not ashamed.
The 22nd verse RISV brings another focus with the Shining One. Here, this Shining One talks to the woman 'the wife of the man' and tells her that the fruit she is not to eat will make here like the gods. The woman takes and eats, gives some to her husband and he eats.
When God returns, he asks why the man hid from him and the man tells that he ate, the woman tells that she ate and the Shining One was the reason. God punishes the Shining One by demoting him, having him crawl away on his belly in the dirt. God also says that the Shining One's offspring will be punished as well.
The rest of my thoughts on this are clear enough from my translation choices.
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