God’s First Menu

What is the very first thing God said to humanity after he created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden of Eden? “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (Gen. 2:16). God’s first words are a menu—a comprehensive, hunger-satisfying, pleasure-giving menu.

One of the striking features of this is that the account of creation in Genesis was almost certainly used to counter the creation stories of the Babylonian Empire. And in the Babylonian creation story, humanity was made to provide food for the gods. But with our God, the true God, it is the other way around: God provides…