On the Effect of the Fall. Chap. iii. 19. On the Historical Character of the Temp- tation and the Fall. Chap. iii. 22 . § 1. Traditional accounts. § 2. Taber- nacle and Temple. § 3. Seen in Visions of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and St John. § 4. The Cherubim of Para- 43 47 48 49 Difficulties in the Chronology of Chap. v. § 1. Difference of texts. § 2. Longevity of Patriarchs. § 3. Antiquity of Human Race, as deduced from (1) Geology, (2) History, (3) Language, On Circumcision. Chap. xvii. 10. § 1. Reasons for the rite. § 2. Origin of circumcision, whether pre-Abra- § 1. Characteristics of Dead Sea. timonies ancient and modern. § 2. Geological formation. § 3. Were Sodom, Zoar, &c. on the north or On the Chronology of Jacob's life. Chap. § 1. Difficulty of the question. Com- mon reckoning. § 2. Suggestion of Dr Kennicott. § 3. Dates on this hypothesis. § 4. Greater facility for explaining the events thus obtained. § 1. Different renderings of the word, § 2. Choice of renderings, either 4 or 5. § 3. Messianic, by consent of IF it be once admitted that the Pentateuch, as a whole, is due to Moses, there can be no difficulty in admitting that Genesis, the most ancient part of the Pentateuch, is due to him. If he wrote the history of the Exodus, he, either as author or compiler, must have written the introductory history of the times of the patriarchs. The unity of design is very manifest throughout. Moses was employed to mould and form a simple and previously enslaved people into an organized nation. He had to give them a code of laws, civil and ecclesiastical, for the guidance of their national life. The infant people was to be a theocracy, the germ and embryo of a theocracy greater than itself, guarded and isolated for fifteen centuries, till by a new revolution it should expand into the Church of Christ. It was obvious therefore, that he, who had to write the earliest chapters of its history, should begin by tracing down its descent from those who had from the first been the depositaries and witnesses of the truth. If, however, adverse criticism has been busy in trying to dislocate all portions of the Pentateuch, to disprove its unity, and so to shake the evidence for its Mosaic origin; it has been signally busy in so dealing with Genesis. If Moses Elobistic and Jehovistic passages Alleged inconsistency with modern science. PAGH 26 28 29 It was sug wrote the later books, he certainly wrote Genesis; and on the other hand, if he did not write Genesis, he wrote nothing. Hence to shake the foundation of Genesis is to destroy the fabric of the Pentateuch. The progress of the criticism has been sufficiently gradual. gested long since by Vitringa, that Moses may have had before him "documents of various kinds coming down from the times of the patriarchs and preserved among the Israelites, which he collected, reduced to order, worked up, and where needful, filled in," schedas et scrinia patrum, apud Israelitas conservata, Mosem collegisse, digessisse, ornasse, et ubi deficiebant, complesse (Obs. Sac.' I. c. 4). conjecture of this kind was neither unnatural nor irreverent. It is very probable that, either in writing or by oral delivery, the Israelites possessed traditions handed down from their forefathers. It is consistent with the wisdom of Moses, and not inconsistent with his Divine inspiration, that he should have preserved and incorporated with his own work all such traditions, written or oral, as had upon them the stamp of truth. A The next step in the theory was, that taken by Astruc in 1753, who taught, that the names of God (Elohim and JEHOVAH), occurring in the book of Gen esis may distinguish respectively the documents or memoirs from which Moses compiled his history. He believed that He believed that there were no fewer than twelve documents, the two chief being the Elohistic and the Jehovistic. Later writers again have varied this theory with every possible variation; some believing that there was one Elohist, and one Jehovist document; others that there were more than one Elohist, and many Jehovists; and exercising a subtle ingenuity, most convincing at least to themselves, they have traced minutely the transitions from one document to another, sometimes even in the midst of a sentence, guided by some catchword or form of expression, which they have, as others think most arbitrarily, assigned to the first or second Elohist, to the first, second, third, or fourth Jehovist, according to the number of authors in which they respectively believe'. Another step has been to suggest, that the different documents, often, as it is alleged, giving different versions of the same story, have been carelessly and clumsily put together. And a further still has been to deny, that Moses could be either the Elohist, the Jehovist, or the compiler and redactor, it being evident that the whole was a later work, due perhaps to Samuel, perhaps to Hilkiah or Jeremiah, perhaps still later to Ezra or some survivor from the captivity, or possibly to a collection of the labours, the piously fraudulent labours, of them all. The salient points in their arguments are these. There appear to be two versions of the history of the creation, the first from Gen i. 1 to Gen. ii. 3, in which only the name Elohim occurs, the other from Gen. ii. onwards, in which the name of JEHOVAH occurs in combination with Elohim. Again, there appear two accounts of the Flood, which though interlaced in the book of Genesis, may be disentangled. These also are characterized respectively by the same variety in the names of God. Similar phenomena are said to prevail throughout the book, 1 An abstract of the different theories from Astruc to the present day may be seen in Havernick (Int. to Pent.' p. 45, Translation, Clark, Edinburgh), and 'Aids to Faith,' M'Caul's Essay on Mosaic Record of Creation,' p. 191. and even throughout the Pentateuch, but these are the two most observable. Then comes the well-known passage in Ex. vi. 3, where the Most High says to Moses that He was known to the fathers by the name of El-Shaddai, but by the name JEHOVAH He was not known to them; whence the introduction of the name Jehovah in the history of Adam, Noah, Abraham, &c., is argued to be a proof of later authorship. It may be well then to shew: First, that the Book of Genesis is not an ill-digested collection of fragmentary documents, but a carefully arranged narrative with entire unity of purpose and plan. Secondly, that the use of the names of God is neither arbitrary nor accidental, but consistent throughout with the Mosaic authorship, and the general scope of the history. out. I. Unity of plan and purpose through First then, as to the organic structure of the book, though it may be somewhat obscured by the modern division into chapters and verses, as it was of old by the Jewish division of the Pentateuch into perashim or sections; careful examination will shew, that the arrangement is methodical and orderly from first to last. The book begins with a general introduction, from ch. i. 1 to ch. ii. 3, wherein the creation of the universe is related in language of simple grandeur, very possibly in words handed down from the remotest antiquity, than which none could be more fitted here for the use of the sacred historian. After this the book consists of a series of Toledoth, or genealogical histories, the first of which is called "the Toledoth of the heavens and the earth," ch. ii. 4; the others being the respective histories of the different families of man, especially of the ancestors of the people of Israel, from Adam to the death of Joseph'. The 1 The word Toledoth has by some been rendered "origins, as generations" cannot pro perly be used of the creation of heaven and earth; but it is not necessary to drop the figurative language in a translation. By an easy metaphor, the word, which described well the family history of a race of men, was applied to the history of the material creation. The word, moreover, as used in Genesis, does not mean a 4. "The generations of Noah," giving the history of Noah's family till his death, from vi. 9 to end of ix. 5. "The generations of the sons of Noah," giving an account of the overspreading of the earth, from x. I to xi. 9. 6. "The generations of Shem," the line of the promised seed, down to Abram, Nahor, and Haran, the sons of Terah, xi. 10 to 26. 7. "The generations of Terah," the father of Abraham, from whom also in the female line the family was traced through Sarah and Rebekah, from xi. 27 to xxv. II1. 8. "The generations of Ishmael," from XXV. 12 to xxv. 18. 9. "The generations of Isaac," containing the history of him and his family from the death of his father to his own death, xxv. 19 to end of xxxv. 10. "The generations of Esau,” xxxvi. I-8. those who descended from them. Thus the 66 history of the mode in which persons or things came into existence, but rather the history of Toledoth of Adam" gives the history of Adam and his posterity. In like manner the Toledoth of the heavens and the earth" is the history of the material universe and its productions. See Keil on the 'Pentateuch,' Vol. I. pp. 70 sqq. (Clark, Edinburgh). 1 It seems strange that the "generations of Abraham" should not be given distinctly from those of his father, and Quarry thinks that the title may have existed, and have fallen out of the MS. just before the last clause of xii. 4. The reason, however, which he himself assigns, seems sufficient to account for the omission, viz. that the history contained in this section is that of Abraham, Lot, Sarah, and of Isaac and Rebekah (all descendants of Terah), down to the death of Abraham. Some of these sections relate only to collateral branches and are brief. The larger sections will be found to have subdivisions within them, which are carefully marked and arranged. As a rule, in each of these successive Toledoth, the narrative is carried down to the close of the period embraced, and at the beginning of each succeeding portion a brief repetition of so much as is needed of the previous account is given, and with it, very often, a note of time. Thus the Introduction is ushered in with the words "In the Beginning." Then the second section, referring to what has just been recorded, announces "The generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," ch. ii. 4. Then again ch. v. 1, having the same note of time ("In the day," &c.) refers back to the account of creation, "In the likeness of God made He him, male and female created He them," &c. The next section, vi. 9, "The Toledoth of Noah," recapitulates the character of Noah, the degeneracy of man, and God's purpose to destroy all flesh. In xi. 10, the age of Shem and the birth of his son two years after the flood, are named. The like plan is observable in the "Toledoth of Terah,” xi. 27; "the Toledoth of Ishmael," xxv. 12; "of Isaac," xxv. 19, "who was forty years old when he took Rebekah to wife;" "of Esau,” xxxvi. 1, where his marriages are recorded again : and lastly, in the case of Jacob (xxxvii, 2), we find, in the verse immediately preceding (viz. xxxvii. 1), a note telling us the position of Jacob at the time, and again in vv. 2 and 3 the age of Joseph ("Joseph was seventeen years old"), taking us back to a point of time twelve years before the death of Isaac, which had been before recorded, that so we might see the new starting-point of the history. Space will not allow the tracing of similar recapitulations and notes of time in the smaller sub-sections of the history. It must suffice to observe that they are very characteristic of the whole book, and are had recourse to wherever perspicuity of narrative seems to require'. 1 They are traced at length by Quarry (Genesis,' pp. 326 to 340). This brief review of the divisions of Genesis shews that it was not a loosely compacted structure, carelessly or clumsily thrown together by some one, who found a variety of heterogeneous materials and determined to mass them all in one but that it was drawn up carefully, elaborately, and with distinct unity of purpose; whether from pre-existing documents or not it matters comparatively little to enquire. 2. Of the names of God as used in the Book of Genesis. The names by which the Supreme Being is called in the Old Testament, and especially in Genesis, are chiefly two, Elohim and JEHOVAH, the one generally rendered in the versions God, the other LORD. We meet also with El (which is but a shorter form of Elohim), with Elion, Most High, (in the Pentateuch occurring only in Gen. xiv. 18 in connection with El; El-Elion, God most High, though in the Psalms it is found with Elohim and Jehovah, and also stands alone), and Shaddai, Almighty (in the Pentateuch generally with El, ElShaddai; elsewhere standing alone). The name Elohim is derived either from the Arabic root Alaha, "to fear, reverence, worship," or, much more probably, from (alah) = "to be strong, to be mighty'." It is the simple, generic name of God, "The Mighty." It does not occur in the singular in the earlier books of Scripture, except in the abbreviated form of El. The plural is probably a plural of excellence and majesty. As in Prov. ix. 1, "wisdom," occurs "wisdom," occurs in the plural Chochmoth, to signify wisdom in the abstract, including in itself all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; so Elohim in the plural is applied to God, as comprehending in Himself the fulness of all power and all the attributes which the heathen ascribe to their several divinities (see Smith's 'Dict. of Bible,' Art. JEHOVAH). Still the word is a title rather than a name. It is applied to false gods, as well as to the true. The heathen nations round about the Israelites would have recognized the existence and the divinity of El and of the Elohim. 1 It is more probable that the verb to signify fear and worship" is derived from the name of the Deity, than that the name of the Deity was derived from the verb signifying to fear." 66 JEHOVAH, on the contrary, is as clearly a proper name as Jupiter or Vishnu. Elohim and Jehovah are therefore as distinguishable as Deus and Jupiter; the difference being only in this, that, whereas the worshippers of Jupiter admitted 'gods many and lords many," a multitude of Dii, the worshippers of Jehovah, on the other hand, believe in no Elohim except JEHOVAH. We may see at once, then, that there may be good reasons for expecting the title Elohim to be chiefly employed in some passages, whilst the proper name JEHOVAH Would be chiefly employed in others. For instance, in the general account of creation it is very natural that Elohim, the Mighty One, the God of creation and providence, should be the word in use. So, where foreigners, people of heathen nations, as Hagar, Eliezer of Damascus, the Egyptians, &c. are introduced, it is most natural that the word Elohim should be more frequent than JEHOVAH, unless where some distinct acknowledgment of JEHOVAH is intended. On the contrary, when the history of the chosen people or their ancestors is specially concerned, and the stream of the Theocracy traced down from its fountain head, then the special name of Him, who was not ashamed to be called their God, would probably be of more frequent use. This, if kept clearly in view, will explain many of the so-called Elohistic and Jehovistic phenomena in Genesis. Another thing to be noted is this. The Semitic tongues, especially the more ancient and simpler forms of them, deal much in repetition, and where our modern Aryan languages would put a pronoun, they very frequently repeat the noun. From this general habit of repetition, and especially the habit of repeating the noun rather than using the pronoun, when in any one chapter or section we find either the word Elohim or the name JEHOVAH, we are very likely to find the same frequently recurring. In consequence of this, the several passages will to an European eye look as if they were strongly marked either by the title Elohim, or by the name JEHOVAH. For instance, it is alleged that in the first account of creation, ch. 1, ii. 1—3, Elohim occurs thirty-five times, and |