Plants were created before humans.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so .... And the evening and the morning were the third day.Genesis 1:11-13 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them .... And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Genesis 1:27-31
Cited passages
God said, “Let the earth yield grass, herbs yielding seeds, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with their seeds in it, on the earth;” and it was so. The earth yielded grass, herbs yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with their seeds in it, after their kind; and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a third day.
God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them. God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” God said, “Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree, which bears fruit yielding seed. It will be your food. To every animal of the earth, and to every bird of the sky, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food;” and it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. There was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Genesis 1:11-13 brings forth vegetation on day three — grass, seed-bearing plants, and fruit trees — well before humans appear on day six. Genesis 2:4-9 reverses the order: YHWH forms the man from the dust, then plants a garden in Eden and causes 'every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food' to grow, placing the appearance of plants after the human. The pivot is Genesis 2:5: 'no plant of the field had yet sprung up... for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.'
The strongest harmonization, advanced by Cassuto, Kidner, and Walton, leans on the precise Hebrew of that verse. It does not say no vegetation existed; it says specifically that the siach ha-sadeh ('plant/shrub of the field') and eseb ha-sadeh ('herb of the field') were not yet present, and it gives two interlocking reasons: there was no rain, and no man to till the ground. On this reading the two named categories denote cultivated, agricultural vegetation — the crops and field-shrubs dependent on rainfall and human husbandry — rather than the wild flora of day three. So Genesis 1's general creation of plant life and Genesis 2's absence of cultivated crops describe different things and stand in no conflict. Cassuto in particular argued that eseb ha-sadeh anticipates the post-fall agricultural labor of Genesis 3:18-19, framing Genesis 2:5 as a setup for the cursed toil of farming. This is a careful reading of the Hebrew, and for Genesis 2:5 it works.
The difficulty is that the harmonization covers verse 5 better than it covers verses 8-9. There YHWH 'planted a garden eastward in Eden' and 'out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food,' including the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. These are not specifically cultivated field-crops; they are trees, pleasant and food-bearing — the same category Genesis 1:11-12 already created on day three ('the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind'). If the world's full plant complement, including fruit trees, was already in place from day three, the J narrative's fresh planting of a garden and growing of trees for the newly formed man reads as a second, independent act of vegetation-creation, not a horticultural supplement to an existing biosphere. The mist-and-irrigation logic of Genesis 2:5-6 likewise presupposes a starting point of bare ground, which fits J's own arid-earth premise rather than the already-verdant world of Genesis 1.
The source-critical reading accounts for this without strain: Genesis 1 is Priestly, with plants created on day three as part of an ordered cosmogony; Genesis 2 is Yahwistic, beginning from a dry, plantless, manless earth and proceeding through irrigation, the forming of man, and the planting of a garden. Friedman assigns the chapters accordingly, and Westermann reads Genesis 2 as an independent tradition with its own sequence. So the cultivated-plant harmonization genuinely neutralizes the sharpest form of the contradiction at verse 5, but the planting and tree-growing of verses 8-9 remain difficult to fold into the Genesis 1 sequence. The tension is real, if narrower than the bare question implies.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable at Gen 2:5; genuine tension at Gen 2:8-9.
Sources for this reading