Genesis begins again a few verses later from a dry earth with no plants and no rain, and tells of a single man formed from the dust of the ground and animated by breath, placed in a planted garden, given the animals to name, and only afterward given a woman, built from his own side because none of the animals answered to him. The order of making is reversed against the six-day account and the divine name changes. Traditional Jewish and Christian exegesis generally read the second passage as a close focus on the sixth day of the first, while most academic study since the eighteenth century has treated the two as material from distinct sources joined by a later editor, a reading that is standard in critical scholarship and is not accepted by many traditional readers in any of the three traditions.
The Qur'an does not narrate creation once at length but returns to it repeatedly, stating that God made the heavens and the earth in six days and then established himself upon the Throne. There is no seventh-day rest, and one verse states explicitly that no weariness touched God, a point Islamic commentators make against the biblical Sabbath account. The recurring formula is that when God decrees a thing, he says to it be, and it is. Christian reading identifies that same creative speech with the Word of the opening of the Gospel of John, through whom all things were made, which is why the Genesis account is the first reading of the Easter vigil and why the creeds open by confessing one God, maker of heaven and earth.