Genesis 1-4: in the beginning

Was... not the Word. This is the first thing that's struck me reading these key first chapters - because there are so many versions and some of the phrasing is so magnificent, bits you've heard quoted elsewhere stick in your head - and then you find that the version you're reading doesn't have that bit. So the opening line here is actually:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"

which is much more straightforward, but rather less poetic. But then we get:

"and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"

which is a beautiful image and puts me in mind of a William Blake painting which I shall have to try and track down.
But it's good to have gotten started. Marc has a fairly humane sized edition to read, but the only two that Waterstones had in stock the other day were full complete-with-apocrypha versions of intimidating, not to say crippling, thickness and weight. Just opening it was a feat of psychological strength (especially on the depressing wasteland that New Year's Day tends to be).
And I have an appropriate bookmark picked out, a Crivelli Virgin and Child, from an altarpiece in the National Gallery.
But back to the book in hand, and we have lots of creating of plants and herbs and fowl and beasts, which all seems like a generally good idea until we get onto the Man bit, which today I can't help feeling is where it all starts to go a bit wrong. But I suppose the authors don't agree and I should go with the flow for the moment.
(On the literary references, though, these chapters are just dripping with them - we have out River Out of Eden and Adam's Rib and East of Eden and probably lots of others I'm not spotting).
The other danger of reading this properly is that it's making me want to go and read lots of other things I don't have time to deal with, unless I devote my entire working life to this project and I'm not hearing anyone volunteering to pay the mortgage while I do that. But there are bits of 15-year-old archaeology lectures about the birth of agrarian societies in the Middle East lurking around in the back of my skull, and all of this stuff about Cain and Abel and the competition for status between animal and grain growing ways of life is all very interesting, and can we talk about allegories for the development of complex settlement in the Fertile Crescent?
On the other hand, I am just very confused about where Cain and Abel's wives are meant to have popped up from, unless they're more spare rib jobs??? But some of these early and often-forgotten characters do have the most wonderful names, like Adah and Mehujael and Zillah and the brothers Jabal and Jubal, and it's a great pity they feature in a set of verses which are all about family blood feuds... I guess this starts off as a book steeped in hierarchical concepts, with all that rule and dominion over various living things being allocated, and one of the knock-on effects of that is that people start having conflicts over who gets to do all that dominion-ing. Men. Tssk.