The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth of both Judaism and Christianity. It is made up of two stories, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first (Genesis 1:1–2:3) Elohim, the Hebrew generic word for God, creates the heavens and the earth in six days, starting with light on the first day and ending with mankind on the sixth, then rests on, blesses and sanctifies the seventh. In the second story God, now referred to by the personal name Yahweh, creates Adam, the first man, from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden, where he is given dominion over the animals and Eve, the first woman, is created from his side as a companion. A common hypothesis among modern scholars is that the first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch (the series of five books which begins with Genesis and ends with Deuteronomy) was composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE (the Jahwist source) and that this was later expanded by other authors (the Priestly source) into a work very like the one we have today. The two sources can be identified in the creation narrative: Genesis 1:1–2:3 is Priestly and Genesis 2:4–2:24 is Jahwistic. Borrowing themes from Mesopotamian mythology, but adapting them to Israel's belief in one God, the combined narrative is a critique of the Mesopotamian theology of creation: Genesis affirms monotheism and denies polytheism. Robert Alter described the combined narrative as "compelling in its archetypal character, its adaptation of myth to monotheistic ends". Misunderstanding the genre of the Genesis creation narrative, meaning the intention of the author/s and the culture within which they wrote, can result in a misreading. Reformed evangelical scholar Bruce Waltke cautions against one such misreading, the approach which reads it as history rather than theology and so leads to Creationism and the denial of evolution. As noted scholar of Jewish studies, Jon D. Levenson, puts it: "How much history lies behind the story of Genesis? Because the action of the primeval story is not represented as taking place on the plane of ordinary human history and has so many affinities with ancient mythology, it is very far-fetched to speak of its narratives as historical at all."

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