Have you figured it out yet?
When we left off, at the end of part 10, you had just come to the description of the four rivers, running out of the garden. The question on your mind was how this continued the parallelism to version one.
How could four rivers be parallel to the sun, moon, and stars?
I gave you a hint—that most of the parallelism between the two chapters so far had been structural:
| Version 1 | Version 2 |
| Darkness/Emptiness and The Deep/Formlessness | Dryness and No Tiller of the Soil |
| Light and Time/(structure) | Water and Human |
| The Sky, A Space for Creation | The Garden, A Space for Life/Cultivation |
| Dry Land and Vegetation, Completing the Space | Plants, Completing the Garden |
| The lights in the Sky, The Times and the Seasons | The Four Rivers |
Dryness and lack of a gardener parallels darkness and emptiness because both are descriptions of chaos. Water and a human parallel light and time because they each address their respective chaos. The garden parallels the sky because they are both spaces set off from chaos.
The lights, in version one, are an extension, and a fragmentation, of the light created on the first day. Like that light, they help separate day and night, but they also extend the idea of time, by marking the times and the seasons.
You (the ancient Israelite you, who is reading this for the first time) find yourself wondering how this pattern is repeated by the rivers, and the first thing you notice is that, just as the light becomes many lights, the water has now become many waters. Then you wonder about the larger theme. Light was the marker of time. What is water the marker of, in this passage?
Agriculture, gardening, civilization! And it hits you. Of course. The great civilizations are all based on agriculture, and all are near a source of water—usually a river.
So the second version is still paralleling the first.
You read on, expecting a parallel to the the creation of the birds and the fish, who populated the sky and the sea in version one. In this version, the space is not the sky, but the garden. And a garden would be populated with plants, and perhaps people...
Yahweh gods took the human and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and care for it.
He told the human, "You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
For on the day that you eat of it, you will surely die."
So, the space has been populated, and you are looking forward to seeing how the poet parallels the creation of the animals, and humans (especially since the human has already been created).
