God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light!

God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.”

God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” It was so.

God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds and trees on the land bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds.” It was so.

God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years,

God said, “Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”

God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.”

God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” It was so.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.”

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion for him who corresponds to him.”

Then the man said, “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

The Temptation and the Fall

Now the serpent was shrewder than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Is it really true that God said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the orchard’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard;

but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, ‘You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.’”

The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die,

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

And the Lord God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

The man said, “The woman whom you gave me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.”

So the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman replied, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”

The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the cattle and all the living creatures of the field! On your belly you will crawl and dust you will eat all the days of your life.

To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your labor pains; with pain you will give birth to children. You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you.”

But to Adam he said, “Because you obeyed your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ the ground is cursed because of you; in painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.

And the Lord God said, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not be allowed to stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”