After a hard six days of creating, God finally rests on the seventh then blesses it. God likes his lazy Sundays as much as anyone.
Even though people are mentioned in Gen 1, we back pedal here to the first man, Adam, whom God creates in his own image, then puts in the Garden of Eden. God tells him he can eat from any of the trees, except for the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's like those episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiam" where Cheryl will say something like, "Now Larry, no matter what you do, DO NOT TOUCH my uncle's urn."
Instead of the Garden of Eden being in some ambiguous mystical place, the Bible is surprisingly specific about where it was located: "A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was seperated into four headwaters", the four headwaters being the rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and the Euphratis. That would put the Garden somewhere in Turkey. Why hasn't an Indian Jones movie been made about this yet?
After man is put in the Garden, God tries to find him a companion, trying out various beasts, until finally coming up with the idea of a woman. God takes Adam's rib and creates a woman from it. Ew. Both are naked, but feel no shame.
I'm a little struck by the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2 about man's creation. In Gen 1, God blesses men, tells them to be fruitful and multiply. But here, he creates one man and one woman. And it's only after they disobey God and get thrown out of the Garden that they are told they will have to toil the Earth and painfully give birth to children. This is slightly less cheery than Gen 1. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By the end of Gen 2, Adam and Eve are happily living in the Garden together, unaware of the fate that awaits them.
Pop References to Gen 2: The movie title "Adam's Rib" (never seen it, but stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn). A season 10 episode of "The Simpsons"
