"And he studies his teaching day and night"

What a great passage with which to begin a new year - Psalm 1. If we desire to grow in our knowledge of God and his will for our lives and be assured that we will bear fruit, we must start with a determination and a decision to "study his teaching day and night." To put it in Paul's words, in order to no longer conform to the world, we must renew our minds. To put it in the vernacular, "garbage in, garbage out." The person who desires to live a righteous life must study (ponder, meditate on, utter, etc.) God's Torah (i.e., instruction, teaching, law) daily.

In Genesis 1-3, we are reminded that God/the LORD God, is the one who brought everything into existence. Why did he do this?  We don't know the why, but only that he it was his will/desire to do so. God, by definition, is self-sufficient. He doesn't need humanity. In contrast to numerous Near Eastern creation myths, the authors/redactors of Genesis wanted to communicate that it was God, YHWH God, who was the creative designer behind the world as we know it.

If taken literally, word for word, this passage presents many challenges, especially when comparing Genesis 1:1-2:4a with Genesis 2:4b-24. As Brettler notes (in How to Read the Jewish Bible), "Genesis 1-3 is inconsistent. It recounts several events twice - for example, the creation of humankind is narrated first in 1:26-28 and then in 2:7-23...[and] these two accounts differ significantly in their detail" (pp. 31-32). He continues that Genesis 1-3 should be taken as a myth, but not as something "false" (our usual understanding of "myth"), but as a metaphor which is neither right or wrong that "are often true - often profoundly so - on a figurative level" (p. 39).

In the big picture, what I learn from Genesis 1-3 is that YHWH Elohim (the LORD God) is the creator, and that humankind is not an accident of impersonal and temporal physical and chemical processes, but the chosen purpose and plan of a Creator who wants us to know that, in some respect, we all have been created in his image.