who had arrived at a conclusion or an opinion after laborious thought and search, but rather by one who knows something, and whose knowledge is founded either on his own observation or on undoubted information. The division of the work of creation into six parts, and the manner in

which the hallowing of the seventh day by the Creator is connected with them, plainly points to a divine revelation as the source of the account of the creation. For instance, later, in the giving of the Ten Commandments, it is God Himself who says, "Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maid-servant, thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.”1

But to whom did God reveal this knowledge of the creation? The obvious answer appears to be, to Moses, so that the first chapters of Genesis must be added to those portions of the Pentateuch which, as has been said above, must be ranked with the writings of the prophets. But there are many grave reasons against this opinion, and in favour of the other, namely, that the first revelation of the history of creation was given long before Moses, probably to our first parents; that Moses knew of this revelation by tradition, and with divine assistance truly reproduced this tradition.

First, Moses prefaces revelations which he himself

1 Ex. xx. 9-11.

had received with words which we do not find here; such as "And Jehovah said unto Moses."

Secondly, The Sabbath is apparently not a Mosaic institution, in the sense that the hallowing of the seventh day was first prescribed by Moses; on the contrary, Biblical archæology supplies us with reasons, which need not be enumerated here, but which amount almost to proof, for believing that Moses found that his people already kept the Sabbath, and that it was only more decidedly regulated by his legislation. But the hallowing of the seventh day presupposes the Hexæmeron.

Thirdly, The following fact is pointed out by various modern savants, especially by Kurtz. The legends of all other peoples-north and south, east and westagree so remarkably and minutely with the statement of our Mosaic record, however different the religious spirit which runs through them may be, that we cannot help tracing back all the accounts to a common origin ; for it is impossible to believe that every nation could have obtained the same details from Israel. Therefore the independent author of the first record cannot have been the writer of Genesis, nor, indeed, can he have been any Israelite. There must have been a common source from which Israel and also the other nations drew, and this source must belong to a time when the human race was still in its primæval unity, not yet separated in habitation and language by sharp distinctions of race, and by differences of culture and religion. The nations who became isolated must have derived their similar recollections and legends from

1 Bibe! und Astronomie, p. 57.

this primæval age. According to the different intellectual developments after the separation, this inheritance of their ancestors took different shapes in the mouths of the people or in the traditions of the priests, but always in such a manner that the mark of the common ancestry, the unity of origin, was unmistakeably stamped on it. But if we are thus obliged to go back to the time when the peoples and tribes of the human race were still united, why should we not go a few steps farther back to the time of Noah, and thence to the time of Adam? I will mention only a few of the points in which the cosmogonies of the different, most widely separated peoples so resemble one another and the Mosaic record of creation, that the assumption of a common source for these traditions is forced upon us. The Thohuwabohu of the Bible has its counterpart in all heathen mythologies, and appears under different names, from the Athor of the Egyptians to Chaos, the rudis indigestaque molis of the author of the Metamorphoses. The darkness and the mass of waters are everywhere principal features in the description. The six days, or six periods of creation, are found in several cosmogonies-from China in the East to the Etruscans in the West; and they occur mainly in the same order as in Genesis. Man is held by all peoples, without exception, to be the final creation; most heathen mythologies know of his formation from the dust of the earth, and some also of the formation of the woman from a limb of the man.1

Besides these great resemblances, there are also very

1 Cf. Lücken, Die Traditionen des Menschen geschlechts, p. 28 ff. Stiefelhagen, Theologie des Heidenthums, p. 506 ff. Dillmann, Genesis, p. 5.

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important differences between the heathen cosmogonies on the one hand, and the Mosaic cosmogony on the other. The idea of actual creation is entirely unknown to the heathen. Delitzsch says: "The Biblical cosmogony alone presents the pure idea of creation from nothing, without eternal substance, without the assistance of an intermediate Being or Demiurgos; this idea appears among the heathen, but it is obscured; the heathen cosmogonies either presuppose an existing substance and are therefore dualistic, or they substitute emanation for creation and are therefore pantheistic. Then they are all of a national and limited character, they have been formed by the influence of the particular mythological ideas of the separate peoples, and have been affected by their local and climatic circumstances. There is nothing narrow of this kind in the Biblical account of creation. And how wonderfully the Biblical cosmogony stands out from all the others by its plain and noble historic form! Manu's Book of Laws teaches that the seed of the primeval waters developed into a golden. egg, in which Brahma remained at rest for a whole year of creation, till at length he split it, and from its two halves formed the heavens and the earth; the Babylonians say that Bel cut the mermaid Homoraka in two, and made from one half the earth, and from the other the heavens; that he then cut off his own head, and that the gods mixed the falling drops of blood with earth and made men out of them; according to the Egyptians, Num-Ra, the great divine creator, made gods and goddesses with his

1 Genesis, 3rd ed. p. 83 (4th ed. p. 71).

hands, and formed the son of Isis on a potter's wheel; while the Biblical account of creation shows in its first verses the grand simplicity which is the stamp of truth. The whole narrative is sober, decided, clear, concrete. The history as it is related is suggestive of much profound thought and poetical beauty; but in itself it is free from the influence of human poetry and human philosophizing." A. Dillmann, another expounder of Genesis, expresses himself in a similar way: "As here the just and clear division between God and the world is accomplished, and God is conceived in His full sublimity, spirituality, and goodness, so the account of the manner of creation is sublimer, worthier, and more exact than anywhere else; without intermixture of the grotesque and fantastic, simple, sober, clear, and true. There is nothing which could seem unworthy even of the purest idea of God, and if an attempt must be made to describe in human fashion the secret of the creation, which yet must always remain a secret for man, it could not have been made more sublimely or worthily."

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If, among the different cosmogonies, any one has reproduced truly the original divine revelation concerning the order of the creation, it is without doubt the Mosaic. But to us the Mosaic account of

1 Genesis, p. 10. Dillmann does not trace the Hexameron back to an actual revelation, but to the popular ideas about the origin of the world which obtained among the Israelites, and the great family of nations with which they were connected. These old-established ideas were purified and transformed by the Mosaic writer (p. 9). The Hexameron may be said to be a revelation, for "only where God had revealed Himself in His true form could this history have been composed it is a work of the spirit of revelation," p. 10.

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