Do the two creation accounts agree? Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2

The passages

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

Genesis 1:11

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 1:27

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2:7

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.

Genesis 2:19

The problem

Read in order, Genesis 1 has plants on the third day, animals on the fifth and sixth, and humans last, male and female together. Genesis 2 has a man formed first, then a garden planted for him, then the animals, brought to him as possible companions, and only after that the woman. The sequence of animals and humans looks reversed.

The two chapters also differ in tone and vocabulary. The first uses "God" and a measured, repeating pattern of days. The second uses "the LORD God" and tells a story with a garden, a rib and a conversation.

What believers and scholars say

The second account zooms in on the sixth day. Many conservative readers treat Genesis 2 as a close-up of the creation of humanity, not a second timeline. On this reading the verb in 2:19 can be taken as a pluperfect ("had formed"), so that the animals were already made. Some modern translations render it that way. Critics reply that the Hebrew form is the ordinary narrative past, and that the pluperfect reading is a convenience.

Two accounts with different purposes. Walton and others argue that Genesis 1 describes the cosmos as a temple being given its functions, and was never meant as a sequence of manufacturing steps. Under that reading, a different order in Genesis 2 is not a conflict, because neither chapter is giving a laboratory schedule.

Two sources, joined by an editor. Most critical scholars hold that the two accounts come from different traditions, later placed side by side. Wenham and Westermann differ on dating, but both treat the doubling as deliberate. An editor who saw the difference and kept both was presumably not troubled by it.

Where this leaves it

The ordering difference is real on the plain reading, and every way of dealing with it involves a choice about what kind of text Genesis 1 and 2 are. If you read them as reports, they pull against each other. If you read them as theology told in two registers, they sit together without strain. Which reading is fair depends on what you think the author was doing, and the text alone does not settle that.