You know the first verse of the Bible, right?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Gen 1:1 NET
The word for God here is Elohim. There are some interesting tidbits about this:
The noun is in its plural form. Singular would be Eloah. While this seems really controversial, in most of the usages, it’s paired with a singular verb. AKA “created” up there is masculine singular. So it’s often interpreted as a majestic plural.
Also, the word is kind of impersonal. We often use the word to describe other gods in the bible.
You shall have no other gods before me
Exo 20:3 ESV
In that verse, the word is also elohim, and is often translated as lower capitals to indicate it’s not talking about the Jewish God.
However, something fascinating is that Genesis isn’t consistent with what term it uses for God. Not just in the whole book, but literally by chapter 2. In chapter 2, the writer(s) start using Yahweh Elohim instead of Elohim. My translation notes this difference by writing it as “LORD God” instead of just “God” or “Lord”:
…when the LORD God made the earth and heavens.
Gen 2:4 NET
You can actually pretty easily spot the difference if you check out the Hebrew. Yahweh Elohim looks like this: יהוה אלהים, whereas Elohim looks like this: אלהים. A reminder that Hebrew is right-to-left 🙂. So the difference between these two is just the presence of the tetragrammaton / the personal name of God (Yahweh).
Isn’t that odd? That God changes names within two chapters? Or that it kind of zooms in on specificity in Genesis 2? Another thing that’s odd is that God hasn’t actually revealed his name to the readers / Jewish people yet in the story. Rather, the Jewish people don’t even exist, as it’s the creation narrative. God reveals his name, Yahweh, in Exodus 3:15, as well as a brief etymology in 3:14.
My thoughts are that this is pretty strong evidence that Genesis 2 is a different creation account + has a different author, possibly writing later in time, as this seems to be an anachronism. Another way to think of this is that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 serve different purposes.
Still forming opinions and thoughts, but this is a pretty interesting find for me.