Josh
I agree that the toledot of 2:4, if it parallels the other “generation” statements, begins within, rather than after, what precedes it, acting as a bridge. But I still see a number of problems for that within the text. For example, it places a “not good” slap in the middle of Day 6, which in 1:31 appears to end “very good” and lead into the “everlasting sabbath” in which history can begin to happen.
But if we’re treating Adam as history, but saying that his story is recapitulating ch 1, then we seem to be committing to the creation account as an historical sequence - and that gives us problems mapping to the world we know from history and science. And in my particular view, I’m suggesting that “Moses” himself was fully aware of a long world history, and of people outside the garden with their own long history - and therefore there’s a need to map the text to his world, too.
Now, mapping a mythical Adam to a mythical creation is OK - God creates Adam in a primaeval world without rain or vegetation, and then creates the creatures for him to name, and it’s only some kind of juggling with the order of things in Gen 1. And there seems no reason for myth to be chronologically consistent.
But if Adam is created (de novo, we’ll say) in history - be that in the Neolithic or long before - then he appeared in a world already full of rain, vegetation and animals (and women!), and suddenly we seem to be mixing events in relatively recent historical time with events before time by dragging in ch 1 as an interpretive tool for ch 2.
Now, in my understanding (and this was indeed derived from Walton, Middleton, Beale and those other "cosmic temple2 scholars, including good old Cosmas Indicopleustes, before I began to take it further), Gen 1 functions as a theological understanding of a phenomenological appreciation of creation as it is. It is therefore not history, and not even a story as such, but a rich background setting in which the stuff in chapter 2 begins to happen. “There was once a good king who lived in a deep forest. And one day he decided to…”
That “stuff”, I suggest, includes the “not good” of Eve’s absence - God is now doing something new, and anything that is missing from this new phase is, of course, detracting from the good he intends.