So we pick up where we left off at the end of Chapter 1: doing absolutely nothing. You see God(s) (singular or plural, feel free to pick) had just made everything that there could possibly be.
While we can only see 9,096 stars in the night sky, there are billions of stars we need special equipment to observe. And almost all of them have "two lights", "heavens", and "earths". So by the seventh day, the guy needs a nap.
Enter Chapter 2. God specifies that Day Seven is "nap day" and then we immediately shift focus without explaining why strip clubs and casinos have to be closed. See, the authors forgot to explain some stuff back in Chapter 1, so before we walk any further we need to take a step back.
Two clarifications. First, God hadn't created "rain" yet and there were no humans to water the forests like the humans do today. So God made a mist that covered the entire planet. Pretty ingenious. I was about to pass on this religion until I heard about the Big Mist. Second, when he made the humans, he grabbed a bunch of desiccated worm corpses and gravel, sculpted it into something you'd find on a beach, then gave it mouth-to-mouth.
Unlike all the other creatures that were just "brought forth", the humans had to have a soul. So God gave the first humans a soul with his own breath. But we don't just have a soul--we ARE souls. Buh, ba, baaaaaaaah!!!
Now, while it does not specify, I'm pretty sure we've moved on to Day Eight when God whips up a vacation spot. It's a garden just outside of a town called Eden. While we call it the "Garden of Eden", it's actually the "Garden in Eden" like the "Dairy Queen in Kenosha" or the "Bates Motel in Fairvale, CA".
We know from this Chapter that five things went into the garden: trees that look pretty, trees that made food, one tree of life, one tree of smarts, and a river to make sure "garden" wasn't false advertising.
Turns out that river in the garden is fed by four other rivers (the book says "river heads", which is a synonym for "tributary") and the Christian bible elaborates on where those rivers flow telling us exactly where the garden was located--which it turns out is easier than locating Stalag 13. First tributary of "Eden River" comes from Saudi Arabia. The second tributary pours through Africa from Ethiopia, smashes into the Red Sea, comes back out of the Red Sea, and crosses the Arabian Peninsula. Clearly No. 2 is the most powerful of the tributaries. Third up runs from Syria and the fourth river is the Euphrates (yes, THAT Euphrates), which is so famous that the Christian bible didn't need to explain which land it soaked.
That means that if we follow all four of those rivers to where they join, we can determine that the Garden of Eden was in the middle of the Persian Gulf.
Now some of you might be saying, "Eh, don't rivers three and four both go through Syria?" Aw! How observant you are. Go eat a cookie. Also, you may be saying, "Doesn't the Euphrates flow in the opposite direction?" It's God, you prick. If he wants the river to flow the other way, he'll do whatever he feels like on a non-Sunday.
Anyway, we know from Chapter 1 that our loner god has created a bunch of humans and they're all humping each other a lot because that's what he told them to do. Guys don't need a reason to hump, but "Have you done as God commanded today?" has got to be a fantastic pickup line.
So God snatches one of them up at random and plops him into the Garden Near Eden all by himself. Now this sucks, right, because everyone else gets to have a tonne of sex and this poor bastard is a lonely wanking gardener. So God sees the gardener is all grumpy and says two things.
First, he says to the gardener, "You see that tree? If you eat any of that fruit I will fucking kill you dead. I will tear that soul back out of your body like a rib cage." The book is unclear whether the gardener understood that message. This might come up later.
Second, God says to himself, "Just having a dude all alone" is "not good". Now, this is a critical moment in the history of mankind and our modern world. One of the most important lessons you could possibly learn is right here at the front of the book. God the Father Almighty--maker of Heaven, Earth, and #SundayFunDay--in his very first usage of the phrase "not good", uses said phrase to describe "a man trapped in a garden with no one to fuck". THAT is "not good". God said so. He concludes with something to the effect of, "I'll give him someone to bang".
So he whips up a woman. Now, unlike when he made all the other people out of the carcasses of dead worms and the gardener who he made from dirt and lung exhaust, this woman has a special recipe. God chloroforms the gardener, pins him to the ground, rips out his fucking rib cage by hand, and turns it into a woman.
This is one of my favorite Christian bible stories. That is some bad ass shit. Quentin Jerome Tarantino--where the fuck are you, buddy? In fact, you could say God "broke the mould" on that one! Right? Right?
Fuck you that was funny.
Anyway, the gardener not only has no problem surviving a horrifying gaping chest wound and zero lingering resentment over having one unprotected lung for the rest of his life, but his reward from God is being "allowed" to name every animal on the planet as God moves each animal like chess pieces to-and-from the garden for identification purposes.
Every ant. Every beetle. Two types of camels. All the different monkeys and then the apes who look similar but are genetically different. Every bird: from the parrot to the ostrich. Each freshwater and saltwater fish. Fifteen species of whale (which are not fish, google it). Every living creature named by one dude.
Now, you may be thinking, "Wait. His reward for being rib-ganked by God was five-years of waking up next to horrifying animals like lions and fire ants so he could name them?" Yes, and he was fucking honored to do it because that's how Christians roll.
Sure our favorite deity could have just made a woman out of thin air. We're talking about the guy who made the Andromeda Galaxy (or NGC 224, if you prefer). But treating the gardener like a short rack at Outback Steakhouse was symbolic. That new woman was of that man. They were basically fraternal twins. It's beautiful.
After she's fully assembled (because believe me you don't want to see how the sausage is made), he "presents her" to the gardener and then tells her, "Despite any feelings you may have to the contrary, you have to bang this man right here because not only are you nowhere near any of the other men but his last animal name was 'ardvaark' and we can't keep heading down this path. Fuck your twin brother until he starts naming the animals normal again."
This is not the first sex in the Christian bible. God told the other humans to bone in the last chapter and I doubt they were still considering it by this point. Instead, this is the first ***marriage*** in the Christian bible, because immediately after he tells the two gardeners to get it on, saying "Henceforth, a man will leave his parents' house then jam it into his wife night and day." Now, I'm extrapolating here. The word used was "cleave", but if you look up the definition of the word "cleave"--as in "cleave in twain"--you know exactly what he meant and that shit is super sexy.
Chapter 2 wraps up with the nebulous cliffhanger, "And they were naked and not ashamed." I'm not sure why that suddenly matters, why anyone would be ashamed in a world where God said, "Listen, get out there and make a bunch more of yourselves.", where clothes could be found given God hasn't invented "the mall" yet, or how the gardener didn't get his manhood chewed off by the newly-named honey-badger while he was saying "Creature number 42,195. Smells like bee goo and is of ill-temperament.", but perhaps answers will be forthcoming in Chapter 3.
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