Genesis opens with two creation stories, and they call God different names
Read the first two chapters of Genesis closely and the seams show. In one account God, called Elohim, speaks the universe into being over six days. In the next, a deity named Yahweh shapes a man from dust and builds a woman from his rib. Most modern scholars think two separate sources were stitched together.
Judaism and Christianity long read the opening of Genesis as one continuous story. Biblical criticism instead sees a composite. Under the documentary hypothesis, the first account, from Genesis 1:1 to the first sentence of 2:4, belongs to the Priestly source, possibly written in the 6th century BC: God creates by command alone and rests on the seventh day, the origin of the Sabbath. The rest of chapter 2 comes from an older source traditionally called the Jahwist and dated to the 10th or 9th century BC, with Adam placed in Eden and given authority over the animals.
The divine names are the clearest clue. The first story uses only Elohim, a form of the ordinary Hebrew word for god; the second pairs Yahweh with Elohim, rendered in English as LORD God. Traditional scholars such as C. John Collins read this as one author varying style for emphasis. Richard Elliot Friedman argues that a later editor added Elohim to the Jahwist material to smooth the join with a Priestly text that says God 43 times.
Dating the final text is unsettled. Many scholars place the first major draft of the Pentateuch in the 7th or 6th century BC; Francesca Stavrakopoulou suggests the written creation account took shape around the 5th century BC from older myths, and a sizeable minority date the first eleven chapters as late as the 3rd century BC. One much-debated theory holds that after Persia conquered Babylon in 538 BC, Jerusalem's rival priestly and landowning factions merged their origin stories to satisfy a Persian demand for a single agreed law code.
The writers drew on Mesopotamian myth and Near Eastern ideas of the cosmos while reshaping them around belief in one God, turning the story into a rebuttal of polytheism. Mosaic authorship, still held as a matter of faith by Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians, has been questioned since at least the 11th century. Scholars call Genesis myth in the technical sense: a foundational story, with no judgement about its truth.
Source: Genesis creation narrative
