Genesis 1 and 2 must be among the most hotly debated texts in the Bible. But our obsession with whether and how they can be reconciled with scientific descriptions of the beginning of the universe is distorting our understanding of where these "creation narratives" fit into the wider concerns of the Book of Genesis. In its printed form, Genesis has 50 chapters, only one and a bit of which directly concern the origins of the universe. They are there to set the scene for what follows.
Genesis is, from beginning to end, a theological book. It opens with God, "the beginning", and everything that follows is based on this assumption of the relationship between God and the world. So when we get on to the main action of Genesis, with God's conversations with Abraham and his descendents, we know that what is happening is not just of local significance. The God who calls Abraham is the one we have just seen, making the world, so we know that Abraham's story is one about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
Genesis isn't the only place in the Bible where God is described as the creator. The Psalms regularly speak of God's craftsmanship in spreading out the heaven and the earth (eg Psalm 8); when God is depicted defending himself, as in the Book of Job (38-42), and some of the prophetic books, against charges of unfairness or unfaithfulness (eg Isaiah 45:9-25), the defence often consists partly of describing the human inability to comprehend the creative work of God, as a symptom of how unlikely it is that human beings can see what is really going on. In the Christian tradition, the Gospel of John deliberately refers back to Genesis, and says that the God who created "in the beginning" is the God made known in Jesus Christ (John 1:1-5).
So Genesis isn't just stating what it sees to be the facts: it is making theological points. It is also not doing this in a vacuum. The traditions and stories of the origins of the universe that are found in Genesis are not the only ones that exist in the ancient near east, and there are all kinds of similarities, but the theological points they make are strikingly different.
Other ancient near-eastern traditions, found in, for example, the Atrahasis, Gilgamesh and Eridu epics, agree that gods exist, that they are responsible for the existence of the world that we live in, and that they interact directly with human beings. They also agree that human beings have more in common with the gods than animals do, for example. These are general assumptions in the world in which Genesis comes into being. But there the agreements begin to peter out.
Most of the other ancient near-eastern cultures see the divine realm as quite heavily populated with gods, often having different interests and colourful personalities. The world is usually seen as coming into being through violence, either between squabbling deities or between the gods and a primeval chaos monster, whose slain body forms the stuff of the world. The relationships between human beings and gods are not generally very friendly: either human beings are created to be slaves for the gods, or they may be on good terms with some gods and not with others.
The contrast with Genesis is striking. In Genesis, God is alone, and the measured, ordered creation comes into existence by the sheer benevolent power of God. Sun, moon and stars, often seen in ancient cultures as powerful deities, requiring worship and propitiation, are merely among the things that God creates in Genesis, and God decides their proper role and sphere (1:14-19). In Genesis, God creates human beings with the deliberate intention of sharing the ordering of creation with them (1:26). Over and over again, Genesis emphasises the peaceful origins of the world, and its innate goodness. So the story of degeneration that follows does not reflect an eternal dualism in the cosmos between good and evil, and it does not suggest that there is anything more powerful than God at work.
So it reads as though Genesis is a deliberate challenge to the accepted understanding of the origins of the universe. Genesis is looking at what the culture around it believes about the nature and purpose of the material world, and disagreeing with it profoundly. It is not what we might call a "scientific" disagreement, in that it is not so much talking about the mechanics of how the world comes into being. Instead, it is a "theological" disagreement, which leads to a radical rethinking of what human life is for and how the human and divine realm interact. Genesis is arguing that our lives are not accidental and purposeless, that we are not helplessly caught between good and evil, that the world is not morally neutral, and that we have a role to play in it, based on our relationship with the creator. And all of that is as much a critique of the prevailing cultural assumptions of the 21st century as it was of 10th century BCE.
Translations of the epics of Gilgamesh, Eridu and Atrahasis are widely available on the web at, for example:
Atrahasis: bibliotecapleyades.net (in the translation by Stephanie Dalley, see Tablet 1)
Eridu: GatewayToBabylon.com (by Thorkild Jacobsen)
The two-volume Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis by Gordon Wenham is extremely thorough and informative.