THE

CHAPTER II.

PARADISE.

GEN. II. 4-24.

HE first book of the Bible is generally called by a Greek name, Genesis, that is, Origin. It is the first of a group of five books called, in Hebrew, the Thorah (that is, the Law), and, in Greek, the Pentateuch (that is, the book in five parts), the writing of which is referred by tradition to Moses, since the laws which make up the greater part of it were ascribed to him. We have already told you how little ground there is for this tradition, in the Introduction, and by-and-by we shall establish the point more fully.

Now, this book of Genesis comprises a great number of legends, all of which take us back to a hoary antiquity, and make up a kind of preliminary history of Israel. In speaking of the earliest generations of mankind, and especially of the tribal fathers of the Israelites, they give us an insight into the modes of thought of the writers, and on that account are very precious contributions to our knowledge of the Israelite religion. Besides this, they give us a certain amount of information, though of a very vague description, as to the origin of the Israelite people and the tribes connected with it.

The book of Genesis was not written by one man, but was put together from works of very different dates; works, too, whose authors by no means all stood upon the same religious level. This very chapter will furnish us with illustrations of the fact, for immediately after the first account of the creation, which we have just examined, a second follows, which by no means agrees with it.

Here, then, is the second account of the creation :

When Yahweh made earth and heaven, no plants were to be seen growing upon the earth, and no herbs coming up, for as yet he had caused no rain to fall, and there was not a man to till the ground. But then a mist rose from the earth, and there came rain out of it, by which all the earth was watered. Then Yahweh made the body of a man out of the moistened dust of the earth, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. So man became a living being. Yahweh then made a garden in the eastern portion of the land of Loveliness (Eden), and

there he put the man whom he had formed. Then he made all kinds of beautiful fruit trees come up out of the earth, and planted the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden.

Now, from the land of Loveliness a river flows, which waters the garden and then runs off into four branches namely, the Pison, which washes all Havilah, that is India, the land where fine gold and spices and precious stones are found in such abundance; the Gihon, that is the Nile, which runs round all Ethiopia; the Hiddekel, that is the Tigris, which flows through Assyria; and the Phrat, or Euphrates.

Into this garden Yahweh brought the man, to cultivate and watch it. He gave him leave to eat of all the fruit trees, except of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, for he was to die at once if he ate any of its fruit.

But Yahweh saw that it was not good for the man to be alone, and determined to make a being for him similar to himself, who might be able to help him. But first he made out of the earth all the beasts of the field, as well as the birds, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, intending to keep as the name of every living thing the word which he used for it. And the man gave names to all the animals, but he did not find one like himself among them..

Then Yahweh made a deep sleep fall upon the man, and when he was buried in this sleep, he took one of his ribs, and, having filled up the hole that it made with flesh, he formed a woman out of it and brought her to the man. At once he recognized her as like himself; and, since she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, she must, he said, have the name of "" woman (the Hebrew word for "woman" is derived from that for "man;" as if we were to speak of "man" and "she-man"), and the bond between man and woman must be closer than any other, even than that which binds the son to his parents.

It is obvious that this account of the creation departs in many points from the previous one. In this account the earth is at first a dry plain, in the other the world was a chaos, covered with water. While in the former account God first creates the plants, then the animals, and finally man, here the succession is quite different, for the plants do not grow up until after the man has been made, and the garden in the land of Eden has received its occupant before the animals are made, while the creation of the woman closes

the series. There are other points of difference which we shall have to notice when we speak of the sequel of the two narratives. Thus, for example, in the first account of the creation, grain and herbs are given to man as food from the moment of his creation, whereas, according to this writer, he only eats fruits at first, and the use of grain for food is treated as a consequence of his sin. This narrative is far more varied in its coloring, and, therefore, more lively than the first, which excels in lofty simplicity. Of Yahweh, who makes a man out of clay, and blows the breath of life into his nostrils, lays out a garden, and forms a woman out of a rib of the man, we gain a very different impression from that of the God of the first' account, who, throned above the sky and the clouds, calls everything into being by his creative word. Even the idea of man's being formed out of dust moistened by rain, and being made a living being by Yahweh's breathing into him, may seem rather childish in our eyes, but the idea of the woman being made out of a rib of the man strikes us as almost ludicrous. But, to avoid misunderstanding the people of antiquity, we must always bear in mind their love of clothing their thoughts in tangible forms. This representation, like so many others, is symbolical. The ribs lie in a man's side, and so the story that woman was formed out of a rib of man signifies that she ought to stand by his side. It is, therefore, a part of the same whole as the words which are put into the man's mouth when he sees the woman, in which he expresses the closeness of the marriage tie.

While the writer of the first account places the creation of mankind on the sixth day, without saying how many men were created or where they lived, here we have a detailed statement on these points. It is true that the writer does not say in so many words that all mankind are descended from a single pair, and indeed he soon forgets altogether, as we shall see by-and-by, that, according to his account, there were only two human beings upon the earth; but he only tells us about a single man and a single woman, and gives us detailed information as to the place of their abode. This was the land of Eden, between the four rivers that rise out of a single stream flowing through Eden, all of which he mentions by name. Two of these can be pointed out with certainty, namely the Euphrates and the Tigris; nor is it difficult to recognize the Nile in the Gihon, which washes the land of Cush, that is Ethiopia; and even the first, the Pison, is indicated with sufficient clearness by the further statement that it flows round

the region of gold, that is India, from which it appears that the writer had either the Indus or the Ganges in his mind. It will be useless to look in the maps, however, for any place where these four rivers rise out of a single stream, and we must forgive the ancient Israelites for not being very well up in geography, and for imagining that the sources of one of the Indian rivers and of the Nile were to be found close by those of the Euphrates and the Tigris, for they had no maps in those days, and were almost entirely without the means of forming a correct idea of the position of the various countries of the world. But it is evident whereabouts the writer looks for the cradle of our race, namely in central Asia, on the table-lands of Armenia. There are other ancient legends of the Israelites which allude to these regions, from which they originally came.

It is worth noticing that one of the Persian accounts of the creation has certain points of similarity with this Israelite story; in the description of a pleasure garden, for instance, the position of which is defined by mentioning the rivers near it, and agrees with that of Eden. This has made some people think that the ancestors of the Israelites and the tribes related to them once lived with the ancestors of the Persians, at the foot of Mount Caucasus, and that there one and the same cosmogony was current amongst them all, but that when the tribes had separated from each other it gradually got so much altered that the stories made out of it only just betray their common origin in one or two features. This is quite conceivable; but it is also possible that when the Israelites came into contact with the Syrians and Assyrians they picked up a certain cosmogony from them, and that the writer of this narrative worked it up in accordance with his own ideas, and gave an Israelite tinge to the story. This opinion is supported by a certain trait in the narrative which is altogether un-Israelite, as we shall see when speaking of what follows.

The picture of the condition in which, according to this writer, the first human beings lived, is a matter of greater interest to us than the fixing of the site of their abode. They lived in a garden in the land of Loveliness. In the middle of

this garden stood a tree the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As yet they had not eaten of its fruit, and they were even forbidden to taste it. So they were not morally and religiously developed human beings, for so far from bearing themselves bravely in the good fight the fight against sensuality to say nothing of having gained the victory, they had not as yet so much as entered upon such a contest at all.

So they were happy in their ignorance. The Apostle Paul thoroughly understood the old story of Paradise when he said1 that in contrast to Jesus, whom he called the second Adam, the first Adam was earthly, sensual. The golden age, therefore, or rather the golden day, with which the history of mankind begins, was a state of ignorance and innocence, soon succeeded by strife, by sin, by misery.

Each one of us has lived in a paradise like this; for as long as we were children we were ignorant, and, therefore, innocent. There is something so pure and sweet in this condition that it is easy to understand why Jesus loved and blessed the children. But the careless joy of ignorance which falls to the lot of a child soon passes by, for it learns before long what duty means. Its parents strive to teach it what is good and what is bad; and, as soon as it has eaten of the tree of this knowledge, its paradise is lost.

THE

HE same writer whose work we have just been considering continues his narrative as follows, and tells us how paradise was lost, chiefly through the guilt of the woman: Happy in their childlike condition and their ignorance the man and his wife lived in paradise. They went entirely naked, but with no sense of shame, and did not eat of the tree that stood in the middle of the garden for fear of the threat that they would die at once if they did so. But one of the beasts of the field that Yahweh had made was cleverer than any of the others; it was the serpent. It knew the secret thought of the Creator, and betrayed it to the woman. For one day it said to her: " Has not God forbidden you to eat of some of these trees?" To which the woman answered: “We may eat of all the trees except the one that stands in the middle of the garden, for if we so much as touch that one so God told us

"That is not true.

we shall die." But the serpent replied: God knows very well that if you eat of

1 1 Corinthians xv. 45-47.