Yes.
Cited passages
He answered, “Haven’t you read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female,
God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.
Did God originally create humans male and female?
- Creation & cosmology
- Parallel accounts (distinct sources)
- Old Testament vs. New Testament
- Genesis
- Matthew
The tension
Genesis 1:27 and Jesus' citation of it in Matthew 19:4 state that God made humans 'male and female' from the beginning, as a simultaneous creation. Genesis 2:7, 2:18-20, and 2:21-22 instead describe the man being formed first, followed by a failed attempt to find him a helper among the animals, and only afterward the woman being built from his rib.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
No, God created a man first, then animals, and then a woman.
Cited passages
Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature became its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him.
Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Yahweh God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
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: Widely regarded as 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 1:27 — and Jesus' citation of it in Matthew 19:4 — states that God made humankind 'male and female,' read most naturally as a simultaneous creation of the two sexes as the climax of day six. Genesis 2 tells a different story: YHWH forms the man (ha-adam) first from the dust (Gen 2:7), declares it 'not good' that the man be alone, forms the animals as candidate helpers and finds none suitable (2:18-20), and only then builds the woman from the man's rib (tselaʿ, 2:21-22). The creation of woman is sequential, derivative, and a remedy for the man's solitude — not a simultaneous co-creation in the divine image.
The standard harmonization treats Genesis 2 as a detailed close-up of day six summarized in Genesis 1 — aerial photograph then close-up. Archer, Hamilton, and Mathews argue this. Stated at its strongest, the case is that Genesis 1 simply asserts the fact (humanity, male and female, was created by God) while Genesis 2 narrates the manner, and that 'male and female he created them' is a summary statement compatible with a temporal gap between the two creations it summarizes.
The harmonization founders on the depth of the difference. The two texts diverge not only in detail but in order, method, and relational framing. Genesis 1 presents a simultaneous dual creation, both sexes together, both directly 'in the image of God' (be-tselem Elohim) — a striking term that grounds an egalitarian reading, since the image is predicated of male and female alike, and dominion is given to both. Genesis 2 presents a sequential single creation: the man first and directly from the ground, the woman afterward and derivatively from his body, brought to him as the 'helper' (ʿezer kenegdo) he lacked. Simultaneous image-creation and sequential rib-derivation are not two angles on one moment; they are two accounts of how humanity came to be. The 'helper-search' structure in particular resists collapsing into Genesis 1: in Genesis 1 there is no man who waits, alone, while unsuitable creatures are reviewed, and no moment at which 'it is not good' that anything in the very-good creation should be as it is.
Matthew's use compounds the problem rather than resolving it. In Matthew 19:4-5 (paralleled in Mark 10:6-8) Jesus quotes Genesis 1:27 ('made them male and female') and immediately joins it to Genesis 2:24 ('for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother... and they shall be one flesh'), conflating the two distinct creation traditions into a single proof-text for the indissolubility of marriage. The Matthean redaction is deliberate: the citation formula stitches a P verse and a J verse into one continuous divine intention, treating 'from the beginning' as a single founding moment. The argument works rhetorically and theologically, but it does so precisely by reading the two accounts as one, silently passing over the contradiction in order, method, and the status of the woman. Davies and Allison, and Ulrich Luz, treat Matthew 19:3-9 as a deliberate harmonizing citation in service of the divorce ruling, not as a historical reconciliation of the Genesis accounts; the evangelist is doing halakhic argument, not source criticism.
The stakes are not merely chronological. As Phyllis Trible argued, the interpretive weight one places on Genesis 1:27 versus Genesis 2 carries gender-theological consequences: read Genesis 2 as the originary account and a hierarchy — man first, woman derived as helper — can be built into the text (a reading the Pauline and post-Pauline tradition exploits at 1 Cor 11:8-9 and, in a letter whose Pauline authorship is widely disputed in critical scholarship, 1 Tim 2:13, both of which ground female subordination in the creation order); read Genesis 1:27 as foundational and the two sexes stand as co-equal image-bearers, which Trible argues is the more defensible reading of the Hebrew even within Genesis 2, where ʿezer ('helper') is elsewhere used of God himself and so carries no inherent subordination. James Kugel and Friedman regard the chapters as two traditions the final redactor left standing in tension rather than reconciling.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction; Matthew's conflation is theological harmonization, not historical resolution.
Sources for this reading