Beginning Again: More Hors D'Oeuvres
Author: Rockdale Temple Sisterhood; Rockdale Temple Sisterhood Staf; Alice H. Balterman
Date: 1981-09-15 04:00:00+00:00
Description: Beginning More Hor D'Oeuvres is a followup to the popular "In the Beginning". Appetizing appetizers have been assembled in this tempting collection of hors d'houvres featuring more soups, canapes, canapes, quiches, dips, spreads, vegetables, drinks,breads, and even more. The soup's chapter is exceptionally outstanding. Soups on!
Publisher: Rockdale Ridge Pr

BEGINNING. ISAAC ASIMOV

A Stonesong Press Book

CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC. New York

Introduction

The Bible is the most-read book that has ever existed, and there are uncounted millions of people in the world who, even today, take it for granted that it is the inspired word of God; that it is literally ‘true at every point; that there are no mistakes or contradictions except where these can be traced to errors in copying or in translation.

There are undoubtedly many who do not realize that the Authorized Version (the “King James Bible”), the one with which English-speaking Protestants are most famil- iar, is, in fact, a translation, and who therefore believe that every one of its words is inspired and infallible.

Against these strong, unwavering, and undeviating be- liefs, the slowly developing views of scientists have al- ways had to fight.

Biological evolution, for instance, is considered a fact of nature by almost all biologists. There may be and, indeed, are many arguments over the details of the me- chanics of evolution, but none over the fact—just as we may not completely understand the workings of an auto- mobile engine and yet be certain that a car in good work- ing order will move if we turn the key and step on the gas.

There are millions of people, however, who are strongly and emotionally opposed to the notion of bio- logical evolution, even though they know little or nothing about the evidence and rationale behind it. It is enough for them that the Bible states thus-and-so. The argument ends there.

Well, then, what does the Bible say, and what does science say? Where, if anywhere, do they agree? Where do they disagree?

That is what this book is about.

It does not argue one way or the other. It offers no

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polemics. It merely considers the verses of the Bible, line by line and, indeed, word by word, discusses the content and meaning, and compares them with the scientific view that pertains to the passage.

Nor does it do this for the entire Bible, for the chief area of dispute lies in the very beginning of the Bible— the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

The Bible, as a whole, deals with the legendary Abram (called Abraham later in life) and his descendants, but in the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, there is a quick overview of earlier events from the creation of the Universe to the birth of Abram about 2000 B.c.

This period of primeval history is based on two docu- ments, according to those who have most carefully stud- ied the Bible: the J-document and the P-document.

The J-document, which is the older, contains dramatic early legends that were current among the people of Is- rael and Judah. The tales of the J-document may have been written down and reached their present form some time before 700 B.c., when Assyria from its base in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (modern Iraq) was the strongest kingdom in western Asia.

Even before Assyria became powerful, the culture of the Tigris-Euphrates dominated western Asia, even as far back as 3400 B.c., when the Sumerians (who lived there then) invented writing. The Sumerian legends and their theories of the creation of the Universe and of early history spread to all the surrounding peoples and exerted a strong influence on them (just as Western theories of the creation of the Universe and of early history have spread to and influenced surrounding non-Western peo- ples today). The P-document is later and was gathered and put to- gether during the time when the people of Judah (the Jews) were in captivity in the Tigris-Euphrates region in the sixth century B.c. At that time, the dominant tribe of the region was the Chaldeans, and their capital was in Babylon, so that the P-document picked up what we might call Chaldean or Babylonian views of cosmic his- tory—which in turn were based on nearly three thousand years of thought dating back to the Sumerians.

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The First Book of Moses,' Called GENESIS ’

Chapter 1 °

1. By ancient tradition, the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses, the folk hero who, according to the account given in the second through fifth books of the Bible, rescued the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.

Modern scholars are convinced that this theory of au- thorship is not tenable and that the early books of the Bible are not the single work of any man, and certainly not of Moses. Rather, they are a carefully edited compila- tion of material from a number of sources.

The theory of multiple authorship of the Bible dates only from the nineteenth century, however.

In 1611, when King James IJ of England appointed fifty- four scholars to produce an English translation of the Bible suitable for English-speaking Protestants, no one questioned the tradition of the Mosaic authorship of the five books. The Bible produced by these scholars is the “Authorized Version” (authorized by the king, that is, in his capacity as head of the Anglican Church). The Au- thorized Version is commonly referred to as the King James Bible. It is the one I am using in this book because, even today, it is the Bible in the minds of almost all En- glish-speaking people. There have been better transla- tions since, to be sure, but none can match the King James Version for sheer poetry.

In the King James, the initial book of the Bible is re- ferred to as “The First Book of Moses.”

2. The First Book of Moses begins, in the original Hebrew, with the word bereshith. It was not uncommon in Biblical times to refer to a book by its first word or words. (Papal bulls, to this day, are named for the two Latin words with which they begin.)

The Hebrew name for the First Book of Moses is there- fore Bereshith. Since the word happens to mean “‘in the

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It seems natural to feel that if all things alive and human-fashioned had a beginning, then the rule might be universal, and that things that are neither alive nor human-fashioned might also have had a beginning.

At any rate, primitive attempts to explain the Universe start with an explanation of its beginning. This seems so natural a thing that it is doubtful if anyone ever ques- tioned the concept of a beginning in early times, however much disagreement there may have been over the details.

And in the scientific view, there is also considered to be a beginning, not only for Earth, but for the entire Universe.

Since the Bible and science both state that heaven and earth had a beginning, does this represent a point of agreement between them?

Yes, of course—but it is a trivial agreement. There is an enormous difference between the Biblical statement of beginning and the scientific statement of beginning, which I will explain because it illuminates all subse- quent agreements between the Biblical and scientific point of view; and, for that matter, all subsequent dis- agreements.

Biblical statements rest on authority. If they are ac- cepted as the inspired word of God, all argument ends there. There is no room for disagreement. The statement is final and absolute for all time.

A scientist, on the other hand, is committed to accept- ing nothing that is not backed by acceptable evidence. Even if the matter in question seems obviously certain on the face of it, it is all the better if it is backed by such evidence.

Acceptable evidence is that which can be observed and measured in such a way that subjective opinion is minimized. In other words, different people repeating the observations and measurements with different instru- ments at different times and in different places should come to the same conclusion. Furthermore, the deduc- tions made from the observations and measurements must follow certain accepted rules of logic and reason.

Such evidence is “scientific evidence,” and ideally, sci- entific evidence is “compelling.” That is, people who study the observations and measurements, and the de-

ductions made therefrom, feel compelled to agree with the conclusions even if, in the beginning, they felt strong doubts in the matter.

One may argue, of course, that scientific reasoning is not the only path to truth; that there are inner revela- tions, or intuitive grasps, or blinding insights, or over- whelming authority that all reach the truth more firmly and more surely than scientific evidence does.

That may be so, but none of these alternate paths to truth is compelling. Whatever one’s internal certainty, it remains difficult to transfer that certainty simply by say- ing, “But I’m sure of it.” Other people very often remain unsure and skeptical.

Whatever the authority of the Bible, there has never been a time in history when more than a minority of the human species has accepted that authority. And even among those who accepted the authority, differences in interpretation have been many and violent, and on every possible point, no one interpretation has ever won out over all others.

So intense have.been the differences and so unable has any one group been to impress other groups with its ver- sion of the “truth” that force has very often been re- sorted to. There is no need here to go into the history of Europe’s wars of religion or of the burning of heretics, to give examples.

Science, too, has seen its share of arguments, disputes, and polemics; scientists are human, and scientific ideals (like all other ideals) are rarely approached in practice. An extraordinary number of such arguments, disputes, and polemics have been settled on one side or the other, and the general scientific opinion has then swung to that side because of compelling evidence.

And yet, no matter how compelling the evidence, it remains true, in science, that more and better evidence may turn up, that hidden errors and false assumptions may be uncovered, that an unexpected incompleteness may make itself visible, and that yesterday’s “firm” con- clusion may suddenly twist and change into a deeper and better conclusion.

It follows, then, that the Biblical statement that earth

and heaven had a beginning is authoritative and abso- lute, but not compelling; while the scientific statement that earth and heaven had a beginning is compelling, but not authoritative and absolute. There is a disagreement there that is deeper and more important than the superfi- cial agreement of the words themselves.

And even the superficial agreement of the words them- selves disappears as soon as we ask a further question.

For instance, if we grant the existence of a beginning, suppose we ask just when that beginning took place.

The Bible does not tell us when, directly. Indeed, the Bible does not date a single event in any of the books of the King James Version in any way that would help us tie those events into a specific time in the system of chronol- ogy we use.

Nevertheless, the question of when the Creation took place has aroused curiosity, and various Biblical scholars have made every effort to deduce its date by using vari- ous statements found in the Bible as indirect evidence.

They did not come to precisely the same answer. The generally accepted conclusion among Jewish scholars, for instance, was that the date of the Creation was Octo- ber 7, 3761 B.c.

James Ussher, the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, Ire- land, decided in 1654, on the other hand, that the Crea- tion took place at 9 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.c. (Ussher’s calculations for this and for the dating of other events in the Bible are usually found in all the page headings of the King James Bible.) Other calculations put the Crea- tion as far back as 5509 B.c.

Thus, the usual estimates for the age of the heaven and earth from Biblical data run from about fifty-seven hun- dred to seventy-five hundred years. It is over this point that the Biblical conclusions represent an enormous dis- agreement with the conclusions of science.

The weight of scientific evidence is that Earth, and the solar system generally, came into being in approximately their present form about 4.6 billion years ago. The Uni- verse, generally, came into being, it would seem, about fifteen billion years ago.

The age of Earth, then, according to science, is about

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six hundred thousand times the age according to the Bi- ble, and the age of the Universe, according to science, is at least two million times the age according to the Bible.

In the light of that discrepancy, the mere agreement between the Bible and science that there was, in fact, a beginning, loses most of its value.

5. God is introduced at once as the motive force behind the Universe. His existence is taken for granted in the Bible, and one might, indeed, argue that the existence of God is self-evident.

Consider: All living things are born through the ac- tivities of previous living things. If there were, indeed, a beginning, as the Bible and science both agree, how then did the first living things come into existence?

If there were indeed a beginning, how did all the natu- ral objects—land and sea, hills and valleys, sky and earth—come into being? All artificial objects were fash- ioned by human beings; who or what then fashioned nat- ural objects?

The usual manner in which this is presented is some- thing like, “A watch implies a watchmaker.” Since it is inconceivable that an object as intricate as a watch came into being spontaneously, it must therefore have been fashioned; how much more must something as intricate as the Universe have been fashioned!

In early times, the analogy was drawn much more tightly. Since human beings can, by blowing, create a tiny wind rushing out of their nostrils and mouths, the wind in nature must, by analogy, be the product of a much more powerful being blowing through nostrils and mouth. If a horse-and-chariot is a common way of pro- gressing over land, then a glowing horse-and-chariot must be the means by which the sun is carried over the sky.

In the myths, every natural phenomenon is likely to have a humanlike creature performing functions analo- gous to those of the human actions we know, so that nothing in nature takes place spontaneously.

These myriad specialized divinities were often pic- tured as at odds with each other and as producing a dis- orderly Universe. As thought grew deeper, the tendency

was to suppose one divine being who is responsible for everything, who directs humanity, Earth, and the whole Universe, combining it all into a harmonious whole di- rected toward some specific end.

It is this sophisticated picture of a monotheistic God that the Bible presents—but one who constantly engages himself in the minutiae of his creation. Even under a monotheistic religion, popular thought imagines myriad _ angels and saints taking on specialized functions so that | a form of polytheism (under a supreme monarch) exists. -

In the last four centuries, however, scientists have built up an alternate picture of the Universe. The sun doesn’t move across the sky; its apparent motion is due to Earth’s rotation. The wind doesn’t have to be pro- duced by giant lungs; its existence arises through the spontaneous action of air subjected to uneven heating by the sun. In other words, a moving sun does not imply a horse-and-chariot, after all; nor does the wind imply the mouth of a blower. |

The natural phenomena of Earth and of the Universe have seemed to fall into place bit by bit as behavior that is random, spontaneous, unwilled, and that takes place within the constraints of the “laws of nature.”

Scientists grew increasingly reluctant to suppose that the workings of the laws of nature were ever interfered with (something that would be defined as a “‘miracle”). Certainly, no such interference was ever observed, and the tales of such interferences in the past came to seem increasingly dubious.

In short, the scientific view sees the Universe as fol- lowing its own rules blindly, without either interference or direction.

That still leaves it possible that God created the Uni- verse to begin with and designed the laws of nature that govern its behavior. From this standpoint, the Universe might be viewed as a wind-up toy, which God has wound up once and for all and which is now winding down and working itself out in all its intricacy without having to be touched at all.

If so, that reduces God’s involvement to a minimum and makes one wonder if he is needed at all.

So far, scientists have not uncovered any evidence that

would hint that the workings of the Universe require the action of a divine being. On the other hand, scientists have uncovered no evidence that indicates that a divine being does not exist.

If scientists have not proven either that God exes or that he does not exist, then, from the scientific viewpoint, are we entitled to believe either alternative?

Not really. It is not reasonable to demand proof of a negative and to accept the positive in the absence of such a proof. After all, if science has not succeeded in proving that God does not exist, neither has it succeeded in prov- ing that Zeus does not exist, or Marduk, or Thoth, or any of the myriads of gods postulated by all sorts of myth- makers. If the failure of proof of nonexistence is taken as proof of existence, then we must conclude that all exist.

Yet that leaves us with the final, nagging question: “But where did all this come from? How did the Uni- verse come into being in the first place?”

If one tries to answer, ‘““The Universe was always there; it is eternal,” then one comes up against the uncomfort- able concept of eternity and the irresistible assumption that everything had to have a beginning.

Out of sheer exhaustion one longs to solve everything by saying, “God made the Universe!” That gives us a start, at least.

But then we find that we have escaped eternity only by postulating it, for we are not even allowed to ask the question, “Who made God?” The question itself is blas- phemous. God is eternal, by definition.

If, then, we are going to be stuck with eternity in any case, there seems some advantage to a science that lives by observing and measuring, to choose an eternal some- thing that can at least be observed and measured—the Universe itself, rather than God.

The notion of an eternal Universe introduces a great many difficulties, some of them apparently (at least in the present state of our scientific knowledge) insupera- ble, but scientists are not disturbed by difficulties—those make up the game. If all the difficulties were gone and all the questions answered, the game of science would be over. (Scientists suspect that will never happen.)

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was like before it took on its present form about fifteen billion years ago. There are some speculations. The Universe may have existed through eternity as an infi- nitely thin scattering of matter and energy that very slowly coalesced into a tiny dense object, the “cosmic egg,” which exploded to form the Universe we now have, a Universe that will expand forever until it is an infinitely thin scattering of matter and energy again.

Or else there is an alternation of expansion and contraction, an endless series of cosmic eggs, each of which explodes to form a Universe. Our own present Universe is only the current member of an endless series.

Science, however, has found no way as yet of penetrat- ing into a time earlier than that of the cosmic egg that exploded to form our Universe. The Bible and science agree in being unable to say anything certainly about what happened before the beginning.

There is this difference. The Bible will never be able to tell us. It has reached its final form, and it simply doesn’t say. Science, on the other hand, is still developing, and the time may come when it can answer questions that, at present, it cannot.

7. By heaven, in this verse, is meant the vault of the sky and the permanent objects within it—the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The Bible views this vault as the Babylonians did (and the Egyptians, the Greeks, and all the early peoples, apparently without exception); that is, as a solid, semicircular dome overspreading Earth. This is the Biblical view throughout. Thus, in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, the final end of the heaven is described thus: “The heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together” (Revelation 6:14). This quoted a passage in the Old Testament (Isaiah 34:4) and clearly shows the heaven to have been viewed as no thicker, in proportion to its extent, than a sheet of parchment.

In the scientific view, however, the sky is not a simple vault, but is a vast outstretching of space-time into which our telescopes have probed for distances of ten billion light-years, where each light-year is 5.88 trillion miles long.

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ated the heaven and the earth’—and there it all was “without form and void,” created so out of nothing.

Or we might assume that the first verse is a mere intro- ductory summary, almost a chapter heading—The Crea- tion of the Heaven and the Earth. Then there follows the actual description of how it was done.

Modern scholars seem to think the second inter- pretation is the more likely. The Anchor Bible, published in 1964, begins Genesis thus: “When God set about to create heaven and earth—the world being then a formless waste...”

This would make it seem that the raw material of the world was there all along and that God’s role in the Crea- tion was that of shaping the raw material of the Universe into the finished form, much as a potter shapes the raw clay into a vessel. In fact, the metaphor is used in the Bible: “But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand” (Isaiah 64:8).

This was the Greek view, too, for in their mythology, there was “Chaos”: (meaning “disorder’’) in the beginning of things. All the material out of which the world was formed was randomly mixed, and creation consisted in imposing order (‘Cosmos’) upon it.

This is not too far different from some aspects of the scientific view of Creation. If we confined ourselves to the solar system, the present view of scientists is that it was formed from a vast cloud of dust and gas. It is easy to see that the original cloud of dust and gas represents matter in complete disorder and is an approach to chaos. As the cloud slowly swirled, its own gravitational field drew it together, causing it to whirl faster and faster in accordance with the law of conservation of angular mo- mentum. Most of the matter finds its way into the central core, becoming the sun, but turbulence produces second- ary, much smaller concentrations that make up the plan- ets, including Earth. Tertiary, still smaller concentrations form the satellites.

Certainly, we see here Cosmos arising out of Chaos, order out of disorder.

The solar system is not, however, all there is to the

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Universe. Our sun, with its attendant planets, is only one such object out of a few hundred billion which, taken together, form a flattened, whirling disk of stars, called the Galaxy.

Scientists think that the entire Galaxy (and each of a hundred billion or so other galaxies) was formed out of a whirling cloud of dust and gas a hundred billion times as massive as the one out of which our single solar system ‘was formed. There again it would seem that order is formed out of disorder, as a mass of swirling gas and dust “without form and void” breaks up into billions upon billions of individual stars (many or most of them with planetary systems, presumably, though for this we do not yet have direct evidence).

In one respect there is a great difference between the Biblical view at this point and the scientific view. The Biblical view would make it appear that Earth and the rest of the Universe were all created at the same time.

In the scientific view, Earth and the entire solar system are latecomers in the Universe. When the solar system formed out of its dust cloud, the Galaxy had already ex- isted in much its present shape for some ten billion years.

The sun is, in fact, a “second-generation star’ formed out of a cloud of dust and gas that contained within it the remains of earlier stars that had lived out their lifetimes and exploded, strewing their material into space.

If we leave that discrepancy out of consideration, there remain two points to be made out of this “Chaos- into-Cosmos” progression, which the Biblical tale of creation and the scientific view have in common.

First, it implies the eternal existence of the raw mate- rial out of which the Universe is fashioned, so that the problem of “But where did it all come from?” is no more answered by the Bible than by science.

Second, there is an important scientific generalization, the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that, on the whole, there is a general, overall progression from order to disorder. The formation of the solar system and of the galaxies would seem to move in a direction coun- ter to that which the second law of thermodynamics would enforce.

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Does this imply that the laws of science are inadequate to explain the creation of the solar system and the galax- ies and that we must postulate the existence of God— who alone is capable of overriding the second law of thermodynamics when necessary? This is something I will return to.

10. The verse goes on to emphasize the chaos in the beginning, for darkness is a symbol of chaos.

That is natural. An orderly nature with everything in its place is clearly evident in the light. Let the darkness fall, particularly in a strange place, and we no longer have the benefit of order. We do not know where any- thing is, and we must stumble and grope as though chaos had come again.

This, too, fits the scientific view, in a way, for the origi- nal cloud of dust and gas out of which the solar system was formed (or the larger clouds out of which the galax- ies were formed) was dark.

11. The word “was” is printed in italics in the King James Version. This does not have the usual indication of emphasis that italics often do.

In endeavoring to translate each Hebrew word of the original Bible into English, there are occasions when ad- ditional English words had to be added to make sense. Thus the Hebrew words, literally translated, would be “and darkness upon the face of the deep.” In English “was” has to be added, and it is italicized to indicate that it does not stand for any word in the original.

Later English translations of the Bible did not display the exaggerated respect for the literal Hebrew words and showed no embarrassment at having to add words to make English sense. In this book, therefore, the italiciza- tions of the King James Version will be ignored.

12. Another symbol of Chaos is “the deep”; that is, the ocean. Compared to the dry land surface upon which human beings live, the ocean is a random tumble of mat- ter, always moving and heaving and, in the course of a storm, raging with a power incomparably greater than anything human beings could control.

translations such as the Revised Standard Version. At the time the King James Version was prepared, however, quotation marks had not yet come into use, and they have been omitted from all later editions of that version.

Nor can I bring myself to insert quotation marks with the same careless shrug with which I omit the italiciza- tions. Quotation marks would somehow alter the flavor of a book which (together with Shakespeare) represents the supreme achievement of the English language, and this I am not willing to do.

This command, by the way, represents a significant de- parture from the Babylonian myth of Creation. In the Babylonian myth, Tiamat lies enveloped in darkness, and from the gods, who approach her and must some- how overcome her, there emanates light. Light is an at- tribute of the gods.

The writers of the P-document, however, will have no aspect of Order coexistent with God—not even light, the quintessential symbol of Order as darkness is the symbol of Chaos. Even light must be created or it cannot exist, and God creates it.

16. There are two places in the scientific view of the beginning of things as they now are where the command “Let there be light’”” might seem to have an application.

First, consider the formless, chaotic mass of dust and gas slowly collapsing on the way to the formation of the solar system. As the mass collapses inward, its energy of motion is converted into heat, and the center of the whole, where the gathering matter is densest, grows hot- ter and hotter. The temperature rises into the thousands of degrees and, eventually, into the millions of degrees. As the heat at the center rises, the atoms of which the matter is composed move more and more quickly and smash into each other in random collisions with greater and greater force. The outer shells of electrons boil off and are smashed off. The bare nuclei at the centers of the atoms smash into each other without being impeded by intervening electrons and fuse with each other into more complex nuclei. This “nuclear fusion” produces a great deal of energy that is, in part, converted into electromag-

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netic radiation that streams out from the central regions of the cloud, which has now condensed into the sun. The electromagnetic radiation streaming out from the sun in all directions, we can detect, in part, as light.

In short, as the cloud condenses to form the sun, there comes a point when the sun ignites with a central nu- clear fire and begins to shine. At that point, the sun “turns on,” perhaps quite rapidly, and it is as though there were the command of “Let there be light.”

Secondly, there is an earlier and an even more dra- matic point at which we might view the command as having been given.

The solar system was formed nearly five billion years ago and the Galaxy, of which it forms part, billions of years before that. The Galaxy, however, is only one vast conglomeration of stars among many others like itself. There may be, in the Universe, as many as a hundred billion different galaxies, each containing many billions (or, in some cases, trillions) of stars.

In the 1920s, it was discovered that these galaxies exist in clusters that are receding from each other. It was found to be consistent with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (advanced in 1916) that the Universe was steadily expanding.

This means that, in the future, the Universe will be larger than it is now and that the matter within it will be spread out more thinly. It also means that, in the past, the Universe was smaller than it is now and that the matter within it was less spread out.

In fact, if we look far enough back in time, we can imagine a period when all the matter in the Universe was clumped together into a single body. The first to propose this was the Belgian astronomer (and Catholic priest) Georges Lemaitre in 1927. Calling the single body that existed at the beginning “‘the cosmic egg,” he suggested that its explosion led to the formation of the Universe as we now know it and that the galactic clusters recede from each other as part of the effect of that long-ago explosion.

Since Lemaitre’s time, astronomers have done their

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light” marked the big bang and the initial period of en- ergy-dominance. Light, after all, is a form of energy.

In fact, we might paraphrase the first three verses of Genesis as follows to make them fit the scientific view of the beginning of the Universe:

“To begin with, fifteen billion years ago, the Universe consisted of a structureless cosmic egg which exploded in a vast outpouring of energy.”

There are some points that must be made, though. The cosmic egg may be structureless (as far as we know), but it apparently represented a very orderly conglomeration of matter. Its explosion represented a vast shift in the direction of disorder, and ever since, the amount of dis- order in the Universe has been increasing. (Scientists have invented the term ‘entropy,’ which, among other things, is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system.) Within the vast shift toward disorder involved in the big bang and the expansion of the Universe, it is possible for there to be local shifts in the direction of order, so that the galaxies can form and within them individual stars, including our sun. Earth can form along with the sun, and on Earth there can be a growth of complexity and order to form life and for that life to evolve. Nevertheless, on the whole, the Universe moves, with time, from order to disorder, from low entropy to high entropy. It is possible that in the final end of the Uni- verse, the situation will be one of maximum entropy, or complete chaos. In short, the Universe is moving from Cosmos to Chaos, from Order to Disorder, in the reverse direction of that imagined by the various mythological accounts of the Creation—including the Biblical account.

The existence of the cosmic egg is, however, itself something of an anomaly. If the general movement of the Universe is from order to disorder, how did the order (which presumably existed in the cosmic egg) originate? Where did it come from?

It is tempting to suppose that we can expand on the Biblical account for the answer. The Spirit of God, mov- ing upon the face of the deep (Chaos), collected all the matter of the Universe into an ultimately compressed

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quired to raise the density to the proper figure will yet be found and that the Universe will yet be discovered to oscillate. Experiments have been performed which seem to show that certain particles, called neutrinos, have a tiny mass. There are so many neutrinos in the Universe, however, that if the conclusions are correct, they may supply sufficient mass to bring about a contraction, and oscillation.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided!’ the light from the darkness.

17. Light and darkness seem here to be viewed as op- posite and, perhaps, equal phenomena that can be di- vided (that is, separated), each into its own domain.

This is a natural point of view for early man, who could not help but observe the alternation of day and night. It had to seém to people at the start that light ruled during the day and darkness during the night and that, on the whole, the time was divided equally between them.

This alternation and this equal division may have helped give rise to the thought that the Universe was a battlefield between the principle of Light and principle of Darkness, and that both had, perhaps, existed from the beginning and were equally powerful.

Light would be a symbolic representation of a god that reduces Chaos to Cosmos, while darkness is an anti-God that strives to turn Cosmos back into Chaos. (There is somehow a whisper of the Oscillating Universe here, where the Universe is formed out of a cosmic egg and then returns to a cosmic egg over and over. We might therefore imagine, if we had a very good imagination, that God’s division of light from darkness marked the establishment of a period of expansion of the Universe and a period of contraction.)

The ancient Iranians worked out this notion of the bat- tle between light and darkness in considerable detail. To

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them, the principle of light and good was Ahura-mazda, while the principle of darkness and evil was Ahriman. Both had an eternal and indestructible existence, and be- tween them the Universe was created as a battlefield. The fight between them (and between immense armies of subordinate beings—angels and demons—on both sides, in which even human beings took part by the devotion of each to good or to evil) forever continues, though gener- ally (perhaps out of wishful thinking) the mythologists assume that good is assured the final victory.

Eventually, when the Jews spent several centuries as part of the Persian Empire, this “dualism” entered their system of thought, and Satan arose as the equivalent of Ahriman, as the “anti-God” trying to negate the Creation.

The P-document, however, was put into writing during the Babylonian captivity, just before the Persian era, and Satan makes no appearance in it. Yet, although God is specifically described as creating light, he does not create the darkness, for darkness existed at the beginning, along with, and as part of, Chaos.

Nevertheless, since God can confine darkness by his word, he is as much master over it as over light, and dualism (the equal existence of principles of Good and Evil) is expressly denied.

From the scientific standpoint, of course, darkness does not have the same kind of existence as light; dark- ness is only the absence of light.

At the present stage of the Universe, with a billion tril- lion stars shining, there is light everywhere (with a few exceptions I will get to), and there is no darkness. To be sure, if one were at a spot in space between the galaxies, where even the nearest galaxies were so far away that the intensity of their light was dimmed by distance to a level indetectable by the human eye, one would be in darkness. That would be a subjective decision, however, for instruments more delicate than the eye could detect the light, so that one would not be in darkness at all, but only in excessively dim light.

Light might also be absent because it was physically blocked by an opaque barrier. On Earth we are ac- customed to a far more intense level of light than we would be in the Universe generally, because of the close-

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ness of one particular star, the sun. The level of light during the day, when we are on that portion of Earth's surface facing the sun, is so much higher than the level when the surface turns so as to face us away from the sun (with the bulk of the opaque Earth itself blocking its light) that we think of the night as representing darkness. If the sky is clear, however, there is the light of the stars and possibly of the moon, so it is not truly dark; it only seems so by comparison.

A cloudy night is darker still, and, of course, we reach the level of virtually zero light if we descend into a deep cave and make no use of artificial light.

The equivalent of a deep cave in open space would be the center of a cloud of dust and gas that does not in- clude an actual star and is not too close to a star. Such clouds actually exist and are called dark nebulas. We can see them when they hide the stars behind them and appear as an area of blackness against a background of bright stars on all sides. If one were in the middle of such a cloud, there would be no light in the sky, only darkness.

Finally, if we imagine the Universe continuing to ex- pand forever, there will come a time when all the stars will have ended their lives as glowing objects, when all will be dark in a final victory of Chaos.

But all these arguments in favor of the special cases in which darkness might exist depend on our narrow defini- tion of light. In actuality, light is a wave phenomenon, the product of a rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field. The oscillation can take place with any period, and waves can be produced with any wavelength.

Our eye happens to be sensitive to certain wavelengths that our brain interprets as light. Those wavelengths make up only a small fraction of the whole, and there are wavelengths both longer and shorter that cannot be de- tected by our eyes and that do not appear as light.

All matter radiates these wavelengths in a wide range, the peak level being at some particular wavelength deter- mined by its temperature. Matter not hot enough to pro- duce wavelengths short enough to appear as light will produce longer wavelengths of infrared light or still longer wavelengths of microwaves or yet longer wave- lengths of radio waves. To all of these we are not natu-

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The Biblical writers lived in a time when there were many languages, and they knew that fact. As most people do, they naturally assumed their own language, Hebrew, was a special one, the original one. Certainly, if we ac- cept the Bible as literally true, then God speaks in the language in which the Bible was originally written. Hebrew becomes God’s language.

It would seem from this verse that God created indi- vidual words and therefore the Hebrew language just as he created light. And he created language even before he created light, for the command to create light is put into Hebrew words.

It followed from this, and was assumed by Biblical writers (and by many later people who accepted the Bi- ble literally), that Hebrew was the exclusive language of human beings well into historical times.

In actual fact, of course, languages have evolved in very complex fashion, and if there was any such thing as an original language, it is lost in the mists of time. Phi- lologists can judge the past only from the relationships of present-day languages, and these can be carried back in time only as far as the writing of deciphered scripts exist. That takes us back only five thousand years at most, by which time languages were already numerous, complex, and vastly differentiated.

Nor is there anything unique, in the linguistic view, either in age or quality, about the Hebrew language or any of its words.

19. The twenty-four-hour period known as “day” offers us the possibility of confusion, since the lighted portion of that period is also known as “day” in contradistinc- tion to “night,” and is referred to as such in this very verse.

It is because of this possibility of confusion that the verse does not merely describe the creation of light and the separation of light and darkness as having occurred on the first day, but carefully refers to “the evening and the morning” to indicate that the full twenty-four-hour period is meant.

We moderns have the day (the twenty-four-hour pe-

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riod) begin and end at midnight, a convenient scheme, if a somewhat artificial one, which is made practical only because of the existence of clocks that are cheap enough to be in every household and accurate enough to give the time to the minute.

Before the days of cheap and accurate timepieces, it was much more natural (and, indeed, inevitable) to start the day either at sunrise or sunset, times that could be marked independently of clocks.

It might seem to us that of the two, sunrise and sunset, it is sunrise that marks the natural beginning of the day. It is certainly the beginning of the workday. It seems that in those portions of the Bible that reached their present form before the Babylonian captivity there are occa- sional indications that sunrise starts a new day.

-Thus: “And the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offer- ings for thanksgiving shall be eaten the same day that it is offered; he shall not leave any of it until the morning” (Leviticus 7:15). The “morning” is not the same day, ap- parently; it starts a new day.

It was the Babylonian system, however, to start the day at sunset, which meant the day began with evening and morning was the latter part of that same day. The writers of the P-document were influenced by this Baby- lonian custom and adopted it, so that they described the full twenty-four-hour day by saying, “the evening and the morning” rather than the reverse. This custom of beginning the day at sunset continued into New Testament times and thus into some traditional holidays. “Christmas Eve” and “New Year’s Eve” are by no means the evening before Christmas and New Year’s. They are the beginning of Christmas and New Year's by Biblical tradition if not by the calendar or present-day recognition. In the same way Halloween (“All-Hallows Day eve’) on October 31 is the first part of All-Hallows Day celebrated on November 1.

And of course the Jews still celebrate their holidays beginning at sunset of the “day before.”

20. The acts of creation listed in the first chapter of Genesis are divided into separate “days.”

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mament. It would take-a metaphorical mind, indeed, to see the equivalence.

The Biblical firmament was not viewed by the early Jews as very far above Earth’s surface. It had to clear Earth’s mountains, of course, but it might very well not be much higher than that.

In the Greek myths, the giant Atlas had to support the sky as a kind of living pillar, and at one time, Hercules, by standing on a mountaintop, was able to take over the load temporarily—that seems to have been a typical an- cient view of the sky, its distance and its solidity.

In the old legend of Jacob’s dream, the sky could be reached by a ladder: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of.God ascending and de- scending on it” (Genesis 28:12).

22. Rain is essential to agriculture, as much to early man as to ourselves, and yet direct experience with rain was not always common. The early farmers who first made agriculture into a large-scale enterprise lived in the lowland valleys of great rivers in the Middle East—the Nile River in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, and the Indus River in Pakistan.

Generally, these were not areas where it rained fre- quently (along the lower Nile it almost never rained). The rivers themselves supplied the water necessary for man, animals, and crops, and great effort had to be put into irrigation procedures to make sure that a good harvest could be achieved.

The river was fed by rains, yes, but those rains were likely to occur in the mountainous regions where the rivers originated, and the farmers near the mouth of the river had no direct experience with that.

When people from these dry farming civilizations did encounter rain, they were likely to be amazed at water falling from the sky—a kind of gift from the homes of the gods, since such falling water would water plants with- out the hard work of irrigation.

In those early days, then, it was natural for people to assume that there were two sources of water, the rivers

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About 4.6 billion years ago, Earth was forming through the coming together of larger and larger objects con- glomerating out of the original cloud of dust and gas that formed the solar system. Just as the sun grew hotter and hotter as it absorbed the incoming energy of the parts that formed it, so did Earth.

Gathering far less matter than the sun did, Earth never grew as hot as the sun. It was hot enough, however, to possess neither atmosphere nor ocean to begin with. The light molecules that would have made up the atmosphere or ocean moved too quickly at Earth’s high temperature to be held by its comparatively small gravitational field.

Yet some of the light molecules were held in more or less loose combination with other molecules that made up the solid substances of the forming Earth.

After Earth formed, the chaotic mixture of substances that composed it to begin with gradually settled out over some millions of years. The densest portions sank to Earth’s center, where there is now a metal core, chiefly iron and nickel in a 10-to-1 ratio, that is mostly liquid because of the high temperatures.

The lighter rock rose to form Earth’s mantle and crust. Little by little, natural geological processes forced the lightest molecules out of their loose combination with rock. Water collected and, being less dense than the rock, gradually rose and began to fill the lower basins of Earth’s uneven surface. The still lighter molecules of gas- eous substances bubbled up through rock and water to form an atmosphere.

Scientists are far from agreeing on the precise details of ocean formation, but it would seem the process resem- bles the Biblical account in reverse.

The Bible makes it seem that solid land appeared out of an initial liquid mass, but from the scientific view, it would seem that an ocean appeared out of an initial dry mass.

1Q And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

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packing it into various containers, and by placing almost all of it into the sun, he brought about a more efficient separation of light and darkness, of day and night than would have been possible when that separation was de- creed on the first day.

31. The “lights in the firmament” have several uses; the first one commented on is that they be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”

Even in early prehistoric times, the movements of the heavenly bodies served to indicate time. The movements of the sun marked off the alternations of day and night. The movements of the moon marked off the months and years. The particular constellations in the sky at a par- ticular time of night marked off the seasons of the year.

All this is very important to farmers, herdsmen, and hunters, since the burgeoning and dying of plants, the mating and bearing of domestic animals, and the migra- tions of wild animals are all seasonal phenomena. But if we accept the importance of seasons, days, and years, what is meant by “signs’’?

The word “signs” may not be on a par with the other three terms, and the placing of it on a par may be a fault in the King James translation. In The New English Bible, the verse is made to read “and let them serve as signs both for festivals and for seasons and for years,” thus giving “signs” the significance of “a calendar.”

And yet...

The word “sign” is most often used in the Bible to sig- nify a miraculous deed of God designed to warn human beings of the path they must take. When Moses is sent to Pharaoh to direct him to free the Israelite slaves, God gives Moses the power to produce two different miracles designed to impress the Israelites and to persuade them to follow his leadership. God says, “And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign” (Exodus 4:8).

Later, when God promises Moses the ability to perform additional miracles, he says, “And thou shalt take this rod in thine hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs” (Ex- odus 4:17).

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With reference to the plagues that will visit Egypt as an indication of the displeasure of God and a warning to Pharaoh to obey the dictates of Moses, “. . . I will . multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Bigget” (Exodus 7:3).

It is clear that a “sign,” then, is some deed of God in- tended to give notice to human beings, to direct them, to punish them. The heavenly bodies would then be de- scribed as existing not only for the purpose of establish- ing a calendar, but as offering a method for determining the will of God.

As it happens, the various peoples who inhabited the Tigris-Euphrates valley (whom we may lump together as the Babylonians) were the first to work out in some detail the motion of the planets against the background of the stars, and remained the most advanced in this respect right down to the period of the Jewish captivity in the sixth century B.c. The shiftings of position on the part of the sun, the moon, and the five known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) were complex, and the Baby- lonians assumed the complexity was there for a purpose. Since they further assumed that everything about the Universe was made for the use of humanity (something the Bible assumes as well), then this complexity must have some meaning for man. The Babylonians deified the planets (something picked up by other people and retained even by us to the extent that we still give the planets the names of Roman and Greek gods), and so it was easy for them to suppose that the complex movements of the planets represented hid- den messages from the gods, designed to guide humanity. The movements were a cryptogram revealing the plans of the gods and therefore serving as a searchlight into the future. The Universe could be made less willful and hu- manity more secure if human beings could somehow learn to interpret the cosmic code.

The Babylonians labored to interpret the code from the shapes they imagined the constellations to represent, from the symbolism they saw fit to apply to each planet, and from other deductions it seemed to them to be sensi- ble to make.

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In short, the Babylonians were the first to invent a complicated system of what we now call astrology, something that was passed on to the Greeks and Romans and through them to medieval and modern Europe.

The Jewish exiles in Babylonia scorned the Babylonian religion, and even when they adopted the general brush- strokes of the Babylonian Creation-myth, they modified it to remove what was found most offensive. Thus, the plurality of Babylonian gods were removed in favor of one transcendent God; any hint of a rival of God or of danger from the forces of Chaos is removed; and so on.

The Jews disapproved of the deification of the heav- enly bodies, and in their Creation account, they stated specifically that the heavenly bodies were created by God and were therefore helplessly subject to his will.

Since Babylonian astrology rested strongly on Babylo- nian polytheism, the Jews scorned that, too. They were sure that God guided mankind, but they preferred to be- lieve he did so by dreams or by direct communication, rather than through some mysterious code in the sky for anyone to read—or fail to read.

Nevertheless, the one word “signs” enters into this verse, and it is tempting to suppose that it may be a refer- ence to astrology that was somehow included and, once it was, became too sacred to remove.

The scientific view of the Universe holds astrology to be a useless superstition. Whether a planet is here or there in the sky cannot possibly affect the character and personality of individuals born at this particular time or that, nor can it guide them in their daily activities.

15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: 32 and it was so.

32. The use of the “lights” to give light is mentioned only after their use for calendar-forming purposes. To us, it would seem that the light-giving purpose is primary, but that would not fit in with the internal logic of the P- document.

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yields 465,000 times as much light as does the moon at its brightest. The reason is not hard to find. The sun is an extremely hot body that shines of its own light. The moon shines only by what small fraction of that light it can catch and reflect.

35. The sun is described as ruling over the day. Day and night had been created and named, in the Biblical account, on the first day of Creation. Presumably, the diffuse primordial light brightened the heaven for part of the time and did not do so the rest of the time, so that there was day and night without the sun.

Once the diffuse light was collected into the sun, how- ever, the light waxed and waned with the sun’s height in the sky and quickly faded to extinction after the sun had left the sky. In that sense the sun ruled the day.

In the scientific view, however, there is nothing that is analogous to a diffuse light in the sky that shines only part of the time. What’s more, the sun does not merely rule the day (as though day had some existence indepen- dently of the sun); it is the day. What we call day is the result of our being near a source of light as bright as the sun is. If the sun did not exist, neither would day. 36. The lesser light, or the moon, rules the night in that it is the most prominent feat of the night sky—when it is there at all. The moon, however, follows an apparent path across the sky that is independent of the sun’s ap- parent path. This means that at any given moment it is as likely to be in the sky when the sun is in the sky as when the sun is not in the sky. Nevertheless, the sun’s brilliance pales the moon when it is present, so that the moon is not noticeable in the day sky. And except for a night or two every twenty-nine or thirty days, when the moon is shining very close to the sun indeed (on rare occasions, so close as to move in front of it), the moon is visible in the night sky at some time, even if only for a short period just after sunset or just before dawn. And whenever it is in the night sky, it is the most noticeable object in it.

An added factor to the moon’s noticeability is that un-

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like the sun it is not always and invariably a circle of light, but goes through a series of “phases” instead. From night to night it changes, beginning as a thin crescent just after sunset, gradually waxing as it moves farther from the sun in the sky, until it is a full moon, a perfect circle of light high in the sky at midnight, then waning again until it is a thin crescent just before the dawn. It then moves past the sun from west to east and begins the cy- cle over again. (In general, the more the moon waxes and the brighter it gets, the greater the fraction of the night it can be seen shining in the sky, till at full moon it is in the sky all night long.)

For all these reasons, it is fair to associate the moon with the night rather than with the day, even if it does spend as much time in the day sky as in the night sky.

The phases of the moon were fundamental to early calendars, which began a new month at each new moon (the first appearance of the crescent just after sunset). The Babylonians did this, and the Jews and Greeks cop- ied them.

37. The stars are dismissed quickly, almost as an after- thought. It was necessary to mention them, to make them clearly a creation of God and not divine in their own right, but since they played no direct part in either giving light or in setting up a calendar, they required no more than a few words. The starlike planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—are not given any special mention.

The P-document makes it clear that Earth is older than any of the heavenly bodies. Earth was rescued from Chaos, and the dry land (with its plant cover) was cre- ated on the third day. The heavenly bodies were then created, at a stroke, on the fourth day.

The scientific view is quite different. The formation of the solar system out of the original cloud was of such a nature that all its bodies were formed at essentially the same time. The sun, the moon, Earth, and all the planets, satellites, asteroids, and comets are essentially the same age; each one is about 4.6 billion years old. Earth is not older than the sun or the moon.

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It was not till about 425 million years ago that plants evolved structures and functions that made it possible to live on dry land, with animals following soon after.

40. The word “fowl” can be used for the common rooster and hen, specifically; for any large edible bird, more generally; and for any bird at all, still more gener- ally. “Fowl” is related to the German Vogel, which means “bird.” The Hebrew word oph translated in the King James Version as “fowl” is more accurately trans- lated (in modern terms) as “bird” in the Revised Stan- dard Version. In fact, oph has a more general meaning still, for birds are by no means the only animals capable of flight. There are the bats, which are mammals but which have the full power of flight. On the basis of their flying, the Biblical writers include them with the birds. Thus, when the Bi- ble lists those birds that may not be eaten, one verse reads, “And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat” (Leviticus 11:19).

It amuses some moderns that the Biblical writers clas- sify bats with birds or, for that matter, whales with fish. To us, bats and whales are mammals, even though the former can fly and the latter never leave the sea.

All classifications, however, are man-made. We group certain animals as mammals for various physiological reasons—such as bearing live young, possessing milk glands and a diaphragm, having hair, and so on. This makes particular sense in the light of the evolutionary development of life.

It may, however, be convenient to make other classifi- cations. Whales may be more like rabbits, physiolo- gically, than they are like fish. Still, if you want to catch whales, you have to go where the fish are and not where the rabbits are. In a practical sense, then, it could be useful to classify on the basis of habitat, placing whales with fish and bats with birds.

You might even classify insects with birds, as the Bible actually does, since insects also fly. In listing the living creatures that might not be eaten, the Bible says, “All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abom-

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Elsewhere in the Bible, tannin is used for living things that are clearly not whales. Thus, God tells Moses, “ .. Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent” (Exodus 7:9). It is also used when God is addressed thus: “. . . thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters” (Psalm 74:13).

The tannin referred to in this portion of the Creation- myth may hark back to the sea monster of Chaos in the Babylonian Creation-myth. The specific mention of “sreat whales” may, then, really be a way of indicating that the sea monsters spoken of by the Babylonians are by no means anti-gods that can fight with God even on the off-chance of winning. Even the largest monstrous example of life is, like everything else, but a creation of God and is utterly subject to him.

Of course, a sea monster is exactly what whales are. The blue whale of Antarctic waters can be as much as one hundred feet long and weigh as much as one hun- dred fifty tons. It is not only the largest living animal, but is probably the largest animal that has ever lived on Earth.

Not quite as large is the sperm whale, which can attain lengths of seventy feet. It is the most formidable of the whales, however, and is ferocious and carnivorous, whereas the blue whale feeds only on tiny creatures. Other examples of large and monstrous sea creatures are various giant sharks, giant squids, giant jellyfish, giant crocodiles, giant clams, and so on. As examples of ex- tinct giants of the past, there were the plesiosaurs, huge sea reptiles with lengths (mostly neck) of nearly fifty feet.

The Bible also contains reference to “leviathan,” which in various places may refer to real animals such as crocodiles and serpents, but can also refer to the sea monster of Chaos as “Thou brakest the heads of levi- athan in pieces...” (Psalm 74:14).

In later legends invented by rabbinical romancers, leviathan became an impossibly huge monster, based on the rather poetic description in the forty-first chapter of the Book of Job, where, in prosaic fact, the reference is probably to the crocodile.

In this verse, it would seem that all creatures of the sea were created simultaneously. According to the scientific

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are certainly felicity, as anyone who has gone without one or the other would testify.

According to the P-document, however, the blessing is given at the very beginning of life, and it is possible that God created only limited numbers of each species or even that he created only one pair of each species. To be sure, the preceding verse says that ‘‘the waters brought forth abundantly,” but that may mean that many differ- ent species of sea life were created and not necessarily that many individuals of each species were created. We might argue, then, that there was a largely empty world into which to expand and that the command to be fruit- ful and multiply made much sense.

What is a blessing under one condition, however, may not be a blessing under others. After a dry spell, there can be no blessing like a steady, soaking rain. But when the rivers are flooding, a day of steady, soaking rain is not a blessing but a curse.

In the same way, it has been frequently found among animals that overmultiplication during brief periods of unusually favorable conditions can lead to an overcon- sumption of food, which will in turn lead, when condi- tions become less favorable, to famine, to disease, and to a plunge in numbers well below the level that had been supported before the brief period of unusually favorable conditions. This is an example of the command “Be fruit- ful and multiply” turning into a curse.

Demographers—those who study population dynam- ics—have long known that the command “Be fruitful and multiply” has become an increasingly dubious blessing as far as human beings are concerned.

In 1798, the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus first pointed out the dire consequences of overpopula- tion. He held that the capacity for human multiplication was such that human numbers were bound to outstrip the human food supply and that war, famine, and disease were all nature’s ways of canceling out the overgreat ten- dency for humanity to multiply. The only way out of a dreary and never-ending round of catastrophe, then, he said, was to produce fewer children by sexual absti- nence. (A forlorn hope, if that is the only way out.)

Malthus’s gloom seemed to be misplaced, for even as

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he wrote, the world was beginning the Industrial Revolu- tion, which enabled humanity to make use of inanimate sources of energy (coal, oil, natural gas, moving water and wind, and so on) to increase greatly the food-yield of the world. In addition, science greatly increased the se- curity of life against such things as disease, improper diet, and other threats.

This was merely a postponement, however, and not at all an abolition of the danger. The population of Earth is now more than four times what it was in Malthus’s time, and on the average, people live better. The expenditure of energy that has made all this possible, it should be remembered, is at a rate hundreds of times as great as in Malthus’s time. We are beginning to have trouble main- taining the supply of energy required to keep the world moving smoothly, and the total population is now put- ting an unbearable strain on the world’s ecological balance.

Under these circumstances, every further increase in population is an enormous danger, and the primal com- mand, “Be fruitful and multiply,” has become, under changed circumstances, not a blessing but a deadly curse.

45. The command to multiply is given only to animals. There had been no such blessing given to the world of plants when it was created on the third day. That would appear to be because each plant seems to produce seed of itself.

Animals, on the other hand, clearly had to pair off and engage in sexual activity to produce young. The blessing was needed in the case of animals, therefore, to give them the necessary inspiration and vigor for coupling.

Yet plants, too, have both male and female sex cells. If the plants themselves cannot move, the grains of pollen, which carry the male sex cells, can be carried to the pistil at the center of a flower by the wind or by the unwitting action of insects or birds. (The pistil contains the female sex cells.)

Many plants have both pistils and pollen-producing anthers in each blossom. Pollen from the anthers can fer- tilize the pistil in the same blossom (self-fertilization) in

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50. God is now ready for the final, climactic act of the Creation. It is still the sixth day, the one on which the land animals are created, but there is still a land-living creature remaining to be formed who is not, in the eyes of the Biblical writers, an animal but is something infi- nitely more.

The magnitude of this final act is such that God, who, till now, has been pictured as issuing his commands with instant decision, is pictured (however briefly) taking counsel, as though, for this one thing, he can use advice.

The phrase “Let us” certainly sounds as though God is addressing someone, as though more than one entity is involved. In the Babylonian Creation-myth, which the P- document adapts, there was indeed more than one entity involved; there were numerous gods, and as a matter of fact, the word “God” in the P-document is the translation of the Hebrew Elohim, which is the plural form for the Hebrew word for God and should, properly, be trans- lated as “gods.” Since a polytheistic interpretation of the Creation-tale of the P-document is unthinkable to those who accept the Bible as a holy book, alternate explanations have been offered. The phrase “let us,” instead of “let me” (and, later in the verse, the use of ‘‘our” instead of “my’’) has been explained as the use of the royal “we” or the editorial “we,” a term that indicates majesty or that de- liberately seeks to suppress individuality. However, such uses of the first-person plural are comparatively recent inventions and weren't known in Biblical times.

It might be argued that the plural is used in reference to the vast multiplicity of power and attributes of an infinite deity, so that the use of the singular is inappro- priate. This, however, verges too close to an admission of polytheism.

Another possibility is that God is here addressing the angels. It might be that in the ages before the first verse of the Bible, God had created a heavenly state with an angelic court, and that the Creation as described in the P- document was carried through with the cooperation of angels or, at the very least, for the delectation of the an- gels, who form an admiring audience. In that case, this

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ment, in composing this phrase, meant it literally. They viewed God as possessing a human appearance, though, of course, one that is supernaturally brilliant and hand- some. Human beings, shaped after God’s form, are in this way distinct from all other forms of life.

In the scientific view, of course, there is no distinction of any importance between human beings and other forms of life. The human being is made up of cells just as all other forms of life are, right down to the bacteria. The key molecules making up the human being are the nu- cleic acids and proteins, which make up all other forms of life without exception, even down to the subcellular viruses. Physiologically, the human being resembles other mammals just as much as other mammals resemble each other, and our species clearly belongs to the order of pri- mates. Furthermore, the resemblances between the hu- man being, on the one hand, and the chimpanzee and the gorilla, on the other, are so detailed, right down to the minutest point of physiology and biochemistry, that the real puzzle is that the small differences that do exist are sufficient to produce three different species.

The course of evolution, insofar as it explains the for- mation of all the species of life, also explains the forma- tion of Homo sapiens. There are no added features to the evolutionary account, not one, that must be added to ac- count for the human being.

The only difference between ourselves and the other animals worth mentioning is that we have an extraor- dinarily large brain for our size and an extraordinary supple pair of hands. The amount by which we exceed the chimpanzee and gorilla in this respect is sufficient to account for our science, art, philosophy, and philan- thropy—to say nothing of our crimes and follies.

53. Human beings at the present time clearly dominate the earth and most of its life forms. In the Biblical ac- count this is so from the start, and by divine fiat. Human beings were created in order to be master, and the other living things, and even Earth itself, were created only to serve us.

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cannot be right, for the entire story of the Bible is that of the interplay between God and humanity. Human his- tory, in the Biblical sense, involves the intervention of God at every stage, and details his rewards and punish- ments. Furthermore, God finds it in the highest degree difficult (it would seem from the Biblical account) to per- suade a few human beings to maintain even a minimally acceptable code of behavior.

Suppose we suppose that human history is not in- cluded among the work that had been “ended” and con- fine that verb to the nonhuman background against which the human drama is played out.

Even in this narrower sense, “ended” cannot be taken literally. On Earth, we can see that the environmental background is not pristine, perfect, and unchangeable. There are alterations in the body of Earth itself. Rivers change their course, coastlines are eaten away, land- slides change the configuration of mountains, and so on.

The Greek philosophers admitted that all things earthly were changeable and corrupt, but it was common for them to maintain that outside Earth’s sphere, up in the skies, the heavenly machinery and the heavenly bodies themselves were unchangeable, incorruptible, and perfect. This fits in with the Judeo-Christian view that the heavenly bodies, being made for humanity, would retain all their properties unchanged until the drama of human history was done, at which time the Universe would be discarded and a new one begun on different principles. This view is given in fullest detail in Revelation, the final book of the New Testament.

In the scientific view, however, all is inevitable change, and the work of creation has never ended and may never end.

Since the Earth was created, biological evolution has brought into being and has ended very many species. Perhaps twenty million species (nine-tenths of all those that ever existed) have become extinct.

Nor has biological evolution stopped now. Given enough time, life forms will change markedly in appear- ance, structure, and function. That includes the human species. What’s more, many species have become extinct

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live on in shrunken form; some are no larger than a few miles across.

Yet, ever since the big bang, there have also always remained in the Universe vast clouds of dust and gas out of which new stars might form. To these clouds was added the material of the exploded stars. Whereas the clouds as they formed after the big bang were made up only of hydrogen and helium, the two simplest atoms, the material added by the exploded remnants of dying stars added more complicated atoms (carbon, nitrogen, oxy- gen, sulfur, silicon, iron, and many others), which had been formed in the glowing core of the stars before they had exploded. Stars that form out of dust clouds that have been con- taminated with these complicated atoms are “second- generation stars.” Our sun, formed nearly five billion years ago and ten billion years after the big bang, is such a second-generation star. The complicated atoms that are essential portions of our bodies and of all living tissues were formed out of the exploded bodies of stars dead and gone before our sun or Earth saw existence. Nor has the creation of stars ceased after the formation of our sun. There must be stars that are younger than the sun. All the stars that are considerably brighter and larger than the sun are certainly younger than the sun, for if they and the sun were formed at the same time (such is the short lifetime of a large star), they would be exploded and dead by now. Indeed, we can observe un- mistakable indications of stars being formed in clouds of dust and gas, such as the Orion Nebula, right now. Whole galaxies evolve and change, and the entire Uni- verse is evolving and changing. What the end will be, or whether there will be a true end, we cannot say, but clearly the work of creation, even allowing that it began at the big bang, has never ended but has progressed con- tinually and is progressing right now, by all the scientific evidence we have.

61. To say that God “rested” is curiously anthropomor- phic; that is, it interprets God’s deeds or motives by

human standards. It might seem reasonable to maintain

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that God does not require rest as a human being does. Since he is perfect and omnipotent, nothing can weary him. Why, then, does the P-document describe him as resting?

For one thing, the writers of the P-document here, as elsewhere, labor to etherealize the much more anthropo- morphic account of the Babylonian Creation-myth. In this myth, the numerous gods, having created the Uni- verse, celebrate by throwing a party and having a grand time. The writers of the P-document have the one and only God do no more than gravely “rest,” which can mean merely “to desist from further acts of creation.”

But then, why not say “desist from creating” rather than “rest,” with the latter’s inevitable connotation of recovering from weariness?

One explanation is that it is impossible to describe the actions and motivation of an infinite God except by using human terms. Even though these terms fall infi- nitely short of a true explanation, they remain the only way of getting across any understanding at all to human minds.

Or it may be that the writers of the P-document, while improving on the Babylonian Creation-myth, had not yet reached a full understanding of the transcendence of God and labored under the sneaking suspicion that even for his superhuman nature, the work of creating the en- tire Universe in only six days would have induced some- thing akin to weariness.

Indeed, through much of history, it was rather taken for granted that all motion—and all action generally—was wearisome and that even inanimate objects would stop whatever they were doing and “rest” if given a chance to do so.

This thought is natural enough since on Earth we see that moving things generally stop moving after a time; that things that rise in the air fall back; that all living things fail to maintain action indefinitely.

What causes life forms (including the human being) to grow weary is the fact that living tissue is maintained at a relatively low entropy, that living tissue is constantly changing in the direction of higher entropy, and that this

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62. The sanctified seventh day is the “Sabbath,” the day that on our calendars today is known (in English) as Saturday.

In other words, on the first Sunday, God created light; on Monday, he created the sky; on Tuesday, he created the dry land and its cover of vegetation; on Wednesday, he created the heavenly bodies; on Thursday, he created the animal life of the sea and air; on Friday, he created .the animal life of the land and then created human beings; and finally, on Saturday, he rested.

Although the P-document would make it appear that the Sabbath was divinely instituted at the time of crea- tion and before human history began, it would seem that in the period before the Babylonian exile—in the time of the Judges and Kings of Israel—the Sabbath was little regarded.

It was only during and after the Babylonian activity that the Sabbath became all-important and was written into not only the Creation-tale but into the Ten Com- mandments as well. What was the connection between the Sabbath and the Babylonians?

The word ‘“‘sabbath” is from a Hebrew word meaning “to break off” or ‘‘to stop,” and it seems to be connected with a period when one ceases from one’s daily labors.

It is necessary to interrupt work by rest and sleep, and more is accomplished in the long run by an individual who takes time off to rest and sleep than by someone who tries to work continuously. In the same way, it may be argued that occasionally there should be a longer rest and sleep—a whole day off, in other words—and that this, too, would lead to. more being accomplished in the long run.

But when does the day off come? At regular intervals or at irregular ones? If regular, then after how many workdays does the rest day come?

In those primitive times in history, when human beings lived in family groups and no more, days off undoubt- edly came whenever the state of things permitted or the family leader felt like permitting them. As society grew more complex, such days off had to be regulated if the work of the community was not to lose in efficiency. The best way of doing that was to tie it to religion.

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The people of the Tigris-Euphrates had developed a lunar calendar probably before 2000 B.c. The appearance of each new moon, signifying the start of a new month, was the occasion of a religious festival, and eventually other phases of the moon were celebrated.

It was the full moon that was first called “sabbath” (sabbatu to the Akkadians, who dominated the Tigris- Euphrates valley in the third millennium B.c.). This no- tion spread out to neighboring lands, and in Israel, before the Babylonian captivity, the full moon (sabbath) and new moon may have been treated as equally important.

Thus, when a woman plans to go to the wonder-work- ing prophet Elisha to persuade him to revive her dead son, her husband says, “. .. Wherefore wilt thou go to him today? It is neither new moon, nor sabbath .. .” (2 Kings 4:23).

By the time of the Babylonian captivity, however, the Babylonians were also celebrating the intermediate phases of the moon; the first-quarter, when the moon is a semicircle on its way from new to full, and the third- quarter, when the moon is a semicircle on its way back from full to new. -

These four phases come at intervals of about a week, and the very word “week” (Woche in German) is derived from an old Teutonic word meaning “change” (Wechsel in German)—that is, the change of the moon’s phase.

Each phase comes at an interval of not quite 7.4 days, so that in order to keep the week in time with the lunar months, the week should be sometimes seven days long and sometimes eight in some set pattern. This was not done. The Babylonians chose to make the week an un- varying seven days long, even though this meant that the week lost all connection with the lunar month.

The probable reason for this was that there happened to be seven “planets” in the sky that changed position regularly against the background of the fixed stars: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

To the Babylonians, it seemed to make astrological sense to suppose that each planet was in charge of a particular day (since each planet was in turn the prov-

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ince of a particular god). An eighth day in a week would be a day without a planet-god in charge, and this was unthinkable. The seven-day week it was, therefore, and one day in the week was given over to a religious cele- bration, and work was suspended either to allow time for the celebration or because the day was considered unlucky.

The Jews in Babylonian exile naturally observed the . weekly day of rest, but could not accept the polytheistic religious justification and had to evolve one of their own.

The writers of the P-document therefore grounded it in the week of creation—six days of divine labor and one day of divine rest. It was a case of the labors of God himself being made to fit the Babylonian week. That is why Creation took six days rather than any other num- ber of days, and it is an explanation that does not involve the Greek concept of perfect numbers. Coming back from Babylonian exile, the Jews insti- tuted an all-important Sabbath festival, and this was car- ried over into Christian ways of thought. Christians, however, abandoned the seventh day, little by little, and placed increasing emphasis on “the Lord’s Day” (Sun- day), which was the day of the week on which Jesus had been reported to have undergone the Resurrection. The Moslems celebrate Friday.

The week is now part of the general calendar used the world over.

From the scientific standpoint, the week is a purely artificial division that unnecessarily complicates the cal- endar. There are fifty-two weeks and one day in ordinary years and fifty-two weeks and two days in leap years. These additional days mean that every year starts on a different day of the week from the year before in a com- plex twenty-eight-year cycle.

If those extra days were celebrated as additional days of rest without any weekday assigned to them, the calen- dar could be made to repeat itself exactly, year after year. Indeed, it could easily be arranged to have every three-month interval repeat itself exactly over and over.

To set up so convenient and sensible a calendar seems, however, to be completely impossible because of the un-

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whereas earlier it was not used, is an indication that we are now dealing with a second writer or a second source. (Reasons have been advanced for the change in an at- tempt to avoid assuming a second document—such as saying that “God” represents the deity in his aspect of stern justice, and “Lord God” in his aspect of loving mercy—but such reasons sound artificial and unconvinc- ing. It is much easier to accept the fact that the early chapters of Genesis are derived from two different sources.) The difference in name is itself an indication that the second Creation-tale is more primitive than that de- scribed by the P-document. The assumption that the transcendent deity has a name after the fashion of hu- man beings is very much like the assumption that he has a body shaped like ours or emotions like ours, and the P- document avoids it. “Lord” is not the name of God, by the way, and it is not a translation of YHVH. Actually, we don’t know what the translation of YHVH is exactly; that is, what it means in English.,Apparently, it gets across the idea of TO BE in all its tenses. YHVH is “that which is, was, and shall be,” and if that is indeed what it means or implies then one can hardly think of a better name for an eternal God. As the Jews’ concept of God grew ever more exalted and abstract, they did not wish to profane the holy name by even pronouncing it, so the custom grew of substitut- ing a title for the name. Whenever YHVH appeared in the Biblical text or in a liturgy, the Jews would say Adonai (meaning “the Lord’) instead. Therefore, YHVH Elohim became Adonai Elohim, which is translated ‘‘the Lord God.”

The Hebrew language in its written form consists of consonants only. The vowels are not included, but to people who know the language, that does not matter.

As Hebrew became less familiar to the Jews, however, and as the common language of everyday use became Aramaic in Persian times, it became customary to make the vowel sounds in Hebrew by diacritical marks under the letters so that those unfamiliar with Hebrew could

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as an integral part and that to the name is associated all the characteristics of the thing itself.

If two words are similar, it would then bespeak some sort of connection between the things. It is as though one were to wonder why a large rope is called a “hawser”’ and then decide it is because one would have to be as strong as a horse to break it. This sort of thing is called word-play when it is meant in fun, folk etymology if it is meant seriously. The early books of the Bible are full of folk etymology.

If the words adam and adamah had just happened to be similar, it would have been taken as good evidence that man was originally made of dust. It might also be that adam arose from adamabh after the legend was es- tablished, replacing an older word for man—or the other way around to replace an older word for dust.

Notice that in the P-document Creation-tale, man is formed last of all living things and by the word of God alone, as nearly as we can tell. This creation is the cli- mactic act, and man is brought into a Universe that has been prepared for, him to the last detail.

In the J-document, on the other hand, man is formed first of all living things. God physically shapes him as a potter would, bringing him forth into a barren world and then arranging a suitable environment for him. This is a much more primitive concept.

69. Even with God himself as potter, the clay figure that results, however marvelous in appearance, is quite as dead as the original lump. To make it more than clay requires the divine magic of life. This constitutes the breath that, as I explained earlier, represents the Spirit of God. In other words, a nonliving shaped object of matter was infused with a bit of the Spirit of God and became alive.

From the modern scientific view, however, we know that the breath is as material as the rest of the body and will not suffice to represent the immaterial essence of either life or God. In fact, there is no material thing that is the essence of life, but rather the complexity of organi-

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areas where it was hard to find food, while in the plain along the lower Tigris and Euphrates, there was mar- velous farmland. With the proper irrigation from the wa- ters of the rivers, the harvests were plentiful, the land bountiful, the living good. To the Sumerians it was like coming to a garden in the plain—a “garden in Eden.”

Things may not have stayed wonderful for long. As population increased, food became harder to get. War- fare came as the Sumerian city-states squabbled with each other. There may well have grown a longing for the earliest days in Sumeria, when the land was really a “garden of Eden,” until the phrase came to symbolize a golden age of the past, which may have only been vaguely identified with the actual region in which the Sumerians continued to live and which was no longer in a golden age. In Hebrew, eden means “delight” or “enjoyment,” but this is merely an accidental similarity of sound with the Sumerian eden, for the two languages are not related. (In fact, Sumerian is not related to any known language.) Nevertheless, the accidental Hebrew meaning helped crystallize the feeling that Eden might be a mystical term without actual geographic meaning and that the place originally inhabited by mankind was merely “the garden of delight,” with no place name at all.

It seems pretty reasonable, however, to suppose that what the verse is really saying is that “the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Sumeria.”

73. It would seem, then, by this verse, that the first man lived in Sumeria.

From the scientific view this is not so. The first crea- tures that can be considered hominids, it seems fairly certain, evolved in eastern Africa, in what is now the region of Kenya and Tanzania. It may have been only after hundreds of thousands of years that hominids reached the Tigris-Euphrates valley. (On the other hand, we don’t know yet where the first creatures that might be considered Homo sapiens originated.)

Suppose, though, we consider “civilized man.” The earliest civilization sufficiently advanced to include writ-

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ing was the Sumerian. There, writing came into use as early, perhaps, as 3500 B.c. All other early civilizations developed writing after the Sumerians did, and that in- cludes the Egyptians and the Chinese. The Sumerians were first in the field with mathematics and astronomy, too.

Therefore, if we think of the man God created not as the first man, but as the first civilized man, putting him in Sumeria rather matches the historical facts.

Q And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; ™ the tree of life > also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.76

74. Apparently the Garden was intended to contain everything that man could want and need, and in later times, it was looked upon as an idyllic place of perfec- tion, a “paradise” (which is a Greek word, of Persian origin, meaning “park” or “garden’).

It is very common in legends to speak of an early “golden age,” when care was absent and food was so plentiful it could be picked off the trees without labor. Why not? Each human being in reasonable circum- stances can recall a golden age of his own—when he was young. Even if it was not really a golden age, it is recalled as one in older years, when the good is remembered with advantage and the bad diminishes into quaintness. Societies usually think back upon a golden age, too. I have talked earlier of Sumerian society growing less sat- isfactory as population increased and internecine war- fare arose. Then, too, the land was invaded about 2500 B.C. by the Akkadians, who founded an empire within which the Sumerians were a subject people. Would not the Sumerians then look back with nostalgia and wish- fulness at a time when they were free, a golden age of great days “in Eden” (“on the plain’’)?

For many centuries, there would be legends of a Gar-

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of bdellium” (Numbers 11:7). Since we don’t know the color of manna, that doesn’t help us identify bdellium.

13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: ®* the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.®®

84. Gihon, like Pison, is completely unknown, and is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible.

85. Ethiopia is what the King James Bible calls the na- tion whose name in this verse is, in Hebrew, Kush. In the Revised Standard Version, the word is not translated and is given as Cush.

There are indeed places in the Bible where Kush seems to stand for a region called Ethiopia by the Greeks. The Greek Ethiopia is not the modern nation of Abyssinia in east-central Africa, which is the familiar Ethiopia of to- day. Instead, the Greek Ethiopia is the region along the Nile directly south of Egypt. This was called Nubia in ancient times and now makes up the northern portion of the nation of Sudan.

If Kush really represented Nubia, then the Gihon would have to be the Nile River, which certainly ‘“‘com- passeth,” or winds through (an alternate translation of the Hebrew word), that land.

The Nile River can’t be what is meant, however, be- cause that never approaches closer than 900 miles to the Tigris-Euphrates. The Jews of Biblical times knew that, because they knew the Nile very well.

One might argue that in ancient times, the source of the Tigris and Euphrates might not have been known very well to people acquainted only with the lower courses of the river and that the sources of the Indus and the Nile were not known at all. The Jews of Babylonian times might have imagined that all four rivers had their source from the same spring somewhere in Armenia and that, about that common spring, there was located the Garden of Eden.

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17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: 9° for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.9!

90. This setting up of a forbidden action is common in folklore and is an easy way of explaining the presence of evil. If people are reluctant to suppose that evil can be visited upon them by an all-powerful divine being who is viewed as ultimately good, one can suppose that evil is a punishment brought by human beings upon themselves as a consequence of their own thoughtless, foolish, sin- ful, or vicious actions.

In the Greek myths, at the very start of human history, Pandora is given a box by the gods and is warned not to open it. She does, and all the ills of humanity escape at once

The phrase “this is the one thing you mustn't do” in any legend or folktale is invariably followed by that being the one thing the person warned must and does do. A well-known example in modern children’s tales is that of Bluebeard, who warns his wife that although she may freely go into every room in his castle during his absence, she must not enter one room. He even shows her the key to the room and gives it to her, but tells her it is a key she must not use. It probably surprises not a single child when it turns out that Bluebeard’s wife can barely wait for him to get out of sight before she uses the key.

In the P-document, incidentally, God gives the entire vegetable world to the animal world as food. He makes no exceptions and sets up no warnings.

91. As it reads, the verse sounds as though the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a deadly poison and will kill the man if he eats it.

This does not turn out to be the case, but one can inter- pret the phrase in a less literal sense. Eating the fruit may kill the man spiritually, destroying his innocence and fill- ing him with sin. Or else eating the fruit may simply make him mortal. He may not be dead at the moment of

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eating, but he will know from that moment that it will be inevitable that someday he will die.

The implication is that if the man were to refrain from eating the fruit, he would never die but would be immor- tal. This, of course, has no basis in fact as far as the scientific study of the history of humanity is concerned. There was never a time when human beings were im- mortal or when any multicellular creature was.

Nevertheless, the dream of immortality has always been with human beings throughout history, and there are inevitable legends of having immortality in the palm of one’s hands briefly—and then losing it.

Thus, in the well-known epic, Gilgamesh searches for immortality and manages to gain a branch of a plant that grows at the bottom of the ocean, a branch with the power of restoring youth. (It is this that may have in- spired the “‘tree of life,’ which also grows in the Garden.)

But then Gilgamesh falls asleep, and while he is sleep- ing, the branch of immortality is stolen by a serpent.

Why by a serpent? In the first place, serpents creep through the underbrush and easily go unnoticed so that they make excellent and efficient sneak thieves. Sec- ondly, serpents shed their skins, the outermost dead layer of it, doing so all in a piece instead of (as we do) tiny flake by tiny flake in an unnoticeable dandruff. The new layer of serpent-skin underneath the cast-off layer is bright and shiny. Serpents live out normal lifetimes, never growing younger (any more than any other form of life does), and eventually die. To the casual observer, however, at a time when biology was but an infant study, it would seem that the snake, in shedding its skin and possessing a new gleam, had renewed its youth. It must then have some magic rejuvenating trick that human beings did not possess—because Gilgamesh had lost it to the serpent.

The test of obedience, with mortality as the threat to failure, might have been anything, by the way. Why was it the fruit of the tree of knowledge?

The feeling is all too common that knowledge is dan- gerous; that people are innocent and virtuous when they are unsophisticated, but that gaining knowledge intro-

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served for friends, relations, and powerful people who do control us in one way or another. The most demo- cratic of us would resent it, just a bit, if we were ad- dressed by first name by an employee, a child, or a casual stranger of no prepossessing appearance. In some cul- tures, special names are kept secret; only public names that are not “true” are used, so that no one can gain power over a person. High officials, in the role of their office, cannot be addressed by name, but only by some honorific: “Mr. President,” “Your Honor,” “Your Majesty,” and God in particular must never be named. Even in addressing him as Lord, you must use circumspection. Any reference to God casually, or under inappropriate conditions, or as an expletive, or, worst of all, to swear falsely in his name (“to take his name in vain”)—that is, for no suitable pur- pose—is itself a blasphemy. Therefore, when the animals are brought to the man for names, that is a way of placing them in the man’s power and in the power of mankind generally. That is a more primitive version of the passage in the P-document Creation-tale in which God specifically gives human beings power over all other forms of life by nothing more than the force of his word. 97. The passage reinforces the notion that there are “natural” names for objects and that there is some lan- guage (presumably Hebrew) that is the “natural” lan- guage. This reaches the point where some people have the superstitious feeling that a dead language that lives on in a religious liturgy (Hebrew in the Jewish liturgy; Latin in the Roman Catholic) should be reserved for that and should not be profaned by ordinary use.

20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.%8

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98. If we understand the last clause to mean that among all the animals of the land and air none was found to be a suitable partner for the man, that makes sense, since none are intelligent enough for the purpose.

Here, too, the J-document Creation-tale’ betrays its primitive nature. The Lord God is portrayed as experi- menting—only after trying out the animals does he come to the conclusion that for a being as intelligent as a human being only another human being will do. The God of the P-document Creation-tale is at no time forced to experiment. All-knowing, he is depicted as creating the Universe as it should be. If we insist on thinking of “help meet” as “wife,” then we have the ludicrous picture of the Lord God bringing all the animals to the man to see if any of them will serve as wife. One might think that this alone would make it impossible to distort “help meet” in such a way, but the habit of not questioning the words of the Bible is a strong one.

21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: % and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

99. This verse had an interesting connection with the history of science. When anesthesia was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, there were some who felt that its use to reduce pain was a blasphemous attempt to avoid one of the punishments visited upon human beings by God. This verse was cited by physicians as an in- stance where God himself had used anesthesia when it was appropriate.

(This was not a completely convincing argument, for God’s use of anesthesia took place before the man had been disobedient; the punishment of pain and of other unpleasantnesses came afterward. Still, the verse had its

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influence and made it a little easier for the use of anes- thesia to be accepted.)

22, And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.10

100. God forms the partner as not quite another man, but as a modified man; that is, a woman.

This amounts to the creation of sex in the J-document Creation-tale. Presumably, although the tale does not say so, all the animals are now provided with mates. After all, had God earlier provided mates for all animals when he formed them, he would not have been momentarily puzzled as to where to find a suitable partner for the man.

The P-document Creation-tale describes the creation of both sexes simultaneously. This is explicitly stated in the case of man and is implied in the case of the other animals, since God directed them all, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.”

The J-document tells the more colorful tale, however, and most Bible readers ignore the more sophisticated ac- count of the P-document and insist that woman was cre- ated after man and, what is more, out of a portion of man.

This is important because it encourages the belief that woman is a subsidiary being, created only as a partner for man in an afterthought, and that she is no more than an appendage of his (a rib) given human form.

If the woman were created after man in the P-docu- ment Creation-tale, that would indicate she was superior to man, for in the P-document creation moves up the scale, the best and most important coming last. In the J-document, however, the best and most important comes first, since plants and animals are created after man. Since woman is created last of all, that, too, seems to place a stamp of special inferiority upon her.

To be sure, ingenious interpretation can make it seem

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101. The formation of the woman out of the rib bears a distant resemblance to what we now think of as “cloning.”

Of course, what God is described as doing in the Bible has a miraculous quality that cannot be legitimately compared to a mere human operation. For one thing, if a human being were cloned, the genetic character of the cells involved would make it certain that there would be no change in sex. The clone of a man would develop into a man, not into a woman. Similarly, the clone of a woman would develop into a woman, not into a man.

102. Here “Man” is a translation of the Hebrew word ish, which refers to the male of the species specifically, whereas adam is a more general-term, closer to what we would think of as “human being.” “Woman” is a transla- tion of ishshah, which is a feminine form of ish. To calla woman ishshah is something like calling her a ““Maness.”’

The word “woman,” by the way, is not in itself a femi- nine form of “man,” but is a corruption of the compound word “wife-man.”

The fact that the man here gives a name to the woman is a further indication of his dominion over her.

24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: }°3 and they shall be one flesh.

103. This verse can be used to signify that monogamy is the natural and original state of mankind. After all, the reference is to “wife” and not to “wives.”

It is very likely, after all, that a monogamous relation- ship has always been common among human beings, since there are roughly equal numbers of each sex born. Therefore, if it is common for many men to be poly- gamous, it must mean that many other men must go without wives altogether, or that many women must be polyandrous.

Yet, whether monogamy is “natural” may be ques-

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tioned. Many primate species are polygamous, and even among human beings there have been many cultures throughout history in which those who were wealthy enough or powerful enough collected as many wives as they could afford or could hold on to. Even where mo- nogamy is enjoined by custom and by law, it seems al- most impossible to suppress adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution.

Despite all this, monogamy may be desirable, but that doesn’t mean it is natural.

25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.14

104. Human beings are the only animals that deliber- ately cover their bodies with extraneous material for rea- sons associated with what we call “modesty.” Other animals might cover themselves with mud in order to be cool or might make use of an unused shell for security, but as far as we know, only human beings are modest.

We can’t be sure at what stage in the evolution of hu- manity the use of clothing developed. It seems to make sense to suppose that clothing was first worn to protect sensitive regions, such as the genitalia, from too rough a contact with the environment. (When human beings stood upright, the genital regions were even more ex- posed than they had been.)

Clothing may have become heavier and more envelop- ing when human beings migrated into cooler climates, where warmth was needed.

Clothes for the sake of modesty (or sometimes immod- esty, as when articles of dress are used to accentuate the sexual regions) may have arisen as a by-product of these more utilitarian origins of the custom.

On the other hand, there are primitive cultures today in which nudity is not considered shameful, and even some advanced ones such as the Japanese or in nudist camps and beaches.

It seems reasonable to suppose that early in the history

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117. God doesn’t ask the serpent for an explanation, but condemns it unheard. Perhaps it is because this is the J-document’s version of the battle between God and Chaos.

In the P-document, the battle was an utter victory for God, complete and instantaneous, when light was cre- ated and darkness retreated at God’s word.

In the J-document, God wins again by a mere word in the form of the curse, but not till after Chaos had had its victory in upsetting the original plan of the man and his wife in the Garden. Later commentators had to avoid this appearance of God suffering even a partial defeat, how- ever small, by making it appear that the Temptation and the Fall were part of God’s original plan, but there is no clear sign of that anywhere in the Old Testament.

118. At no time does the Bible actually say the serpent walked on legs. The curse might well mean that the snake, which was created without legs, must now con- tinue forever to lack them and to forfeit all chance what- ever of someday gaining them as a reward for good behavior. :

That, however, is not the way the passage is usually interpreted by readers of the Bible. It is almost univer- sally supposed that the serpent did walk on legs until the curse compelled it to crawl upon its abdomen.

In a way, there is validity to this. It seems clear from the scientific view that snakes evolved from reptilian an- cestors with the usual four legs and achieved their leg- lessness at least seventy-five million years ago. Nor was this a curse, though it may seem so to human beings. The long, thin bodies of snakes, their ability to hide in cran- nies and to creep along unseen, have made them by far the most successful group of present-day reptiles in the world.

One possible source for the tale of the curse rests again with the Babylonian dragon of Chaos. Babylon, at the time the Jews were exiled there, was at its peak of glory, the largest city in the world. Its walls were enormous and mighty, and the Ishtar gate, the chief entrance into the city, was decorated with large numbers of lions, bulls,

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Those one-celled forms of life that produce by simple division are, at least potentially, immortal. A virus can form replicas of itself endlessly. A bacterium, an alga, a protozoon can divide and redivide without cessation, and each cell formed in the divisions is as “young” as the original cell.

To be sure, one-celled organisms don’t fill the Earth— as they assuredly would in a very short time, if they were all literally immortal—because vast numbers are con- stantly dying of starvation, of desiccation, of chemical pollution, and (mostly) of being eaten by somewhat larger organisms.

Multicellular organisms, on the other hand, are formed of anywhere from dozens to tens of trillions of various groups of specialized cells, and among them are the sex cells (eggs and sperm), which are entrusted with the task of reproducing new individuals.

Once there are sex cells for the job, the remainder of the organism tends to wear out in time even if the en- vironment remains entirely favorable to life. We might say that the development of sex and of natural death came about simultaneously.

This is oddly akin to some allegorical interpretations of the tale of the serpent and the Temptation. Those who see the serpent as a symbol of the male genital organ would make it appear that the “forbidden fruit” was sex- ual experience. In that case, God was only pointing out the inevitable in saying that sex would mean death.

As for women bringing forth children “in sorrow,” it would appear that women do have a difficult time of it in childbirth, more so than most animals do. This may be related to the rapid evolution of the human brain and to its tripling in size in the last half million years. The pel- vic opening of the female has barely kept pace with this growth, and the head of the newborn infant, which is the largest part of the body and the first to emerge, does not slip through the pelvic opening easily. It is a tight fit.

Again, there is a rather interesting interpretation of the chapter that we can make. If the “forbidden fruit” of the “tree of knowledge” does represent knowledge, and since it is the growing brain that makes human knowledge pos-

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sible, it makes a kind of sense to suppose that the pain of childbirth is the consequence of eating the fruit.

123. Presumably, despite the pains of childbirth, the sexual urge will force women to undergo the process.

The domination of women by men is a historical fact in most cultures, helped along by the fact that men are, on the average, larger and stronger than women are, and the further fact that women are periodically hampered by menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, and the need to take care of the young. Male domination is here justified as a punishment for the woman having been the first to yield to temptation.

This apparent Biblical sanction of male chauvinism, and this apparent Biblical condemnation of woman for her special and greater guilt, has, of course, been a source of much misery and unhappiness for women in those societies that accept the Bible as the inspired word of God.

17 And unto’ Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I com- manded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sor- row shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; 124

124. This sounds very much like the sigh of a farmer. Humanity lived for many thousands of years by gather- ing food and by hunting. That came with labor enough, to be sure, for finding food was not easy, and in times of drought or of killing frosts, finding enough to feed all the mouths might well have been impossible.

When farming was developed, proper cultivation en- sured a much larger food supply and it became possible to feed many more people on a given area of land. How- ever, the labor of sowing, of weeding, of hoeing, of reap- ing, of guarding against predators meant backbreaking

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tissues of other animals that may devour our bodies, or of lesser forms, worms, maggots, molds, bacteria that will live on the dead tissues. All those various life forms will in turn decay or be eaten, and the atoms and mole- cules of a once-living human body may well eventually form the tissues of another human body and be part of a living organism once more.

The Biblical writers knew nothing ae microscopic life, but dust is not a bad way of describing it, in the absence of knowledge. Microorganisms are as small as dust grains, after all.

20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; 127 because she was the. mother of all living:228

127. It might be argued that now that human beings would die and be replaced by potentially endless num- bers of other human beings, “man” and “woman” are insufficient as a‘ means of identification. Each would need a proper name. The Revised Standard Version be- gins to use “Adam” instead of “the man” only in verse 3:17, when God pronounces Adam’s doom.

And now Adam gives his wife a name. By doing so, he reinforces his control over her, which was granted him by God’s dictum, four verses back.

128. “Eve” is the English form of the Hebrew Chavah. The actual meaning of the name is unknown (one sugges- tion is that it means “serpent”’!), and it is probably not of Hebrew origin.

The ancient Israelites used names that meant some- thing, however, and when they came across a name that was important to them and that didn’t have an obvious meaning, they would use folk-etymological devices and find a meaning in a similar sound.

Thus, Chavah has a sound similar to Chayah which means “life” in Hebrew. The Biblical writers therefore suggest that she was called Eve because she was the human source of all subsequent human life.

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lacked wisdom. Even after they gained wisdom and be- came “as one of us,” they were still no threat to God for they were now mortal.

If, however, having gained wisdom, they also ate of the fruit of the tree of life and regained their immortality, they would, perhaps, become a threat. Wisdom and im- mortality together would be too much, and we have an odd picture of a timorous God.

It might be argued that God was not afraid of even a wise and immortal human being but merely did not want Adam to become immortal and override God’s edict of mortality for him. In that case, we have the equally odd picture of a God who can be overridden.

However interpreted, this part of the story must date back to an earlier time when gods were much more human and possessed human failings (like the gods in Homer’s epics) and before the priestly writers of the Babylonian period had drawn the picture of a transcen- dent and omnipotent God.

23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cher- ubims,}33, and a flaming sword which turned every way 154 to keep the way of the tree of life.135

133. The entities serving as guardians are, in the singu- lar, “cherub.” The Hebrew method of forming a plural is to add the suffix -im, so that more than one cherub are cherubim. The King James Version adds the English plu- ral “-s” suffix, making a double plural out of it. The Re- vised Standard Version has it simply “cherubim.”

The Biblical writers do not define cherubim nor do they describe them. They are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, and about all we can obtain clearly is that they are winged and probably fearsome creatures.

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Originally, the motivation that led to the sacrifice may well have been analogous to that which leads to the bringing of a gift to a king. It is a sign of devotion and loyalty—and also a way of putting him into a good mood or even inspiring him with a feeling of friendship and gratitude. It’s the apple-for-the-teacher gambit.

Quite likely, the original notion was that gods ate, too. If food is burned, the rising smoke would carry the essence of the food upward to where the gods were thought to live, and in grateful exchange the gods would grant a good harvest or victory over one’s enemies.

In later times, of course, the reasons for sacrifice were made more lofty, but the practice was eventually aban- doned just the same.

4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.143 And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering.

143. Presumably Abel killed the firstborn lambs (‘‘first- lings’) for the sacrifice, which would seem to indicate that though human beings had been directed to be vege- tarians, God himself remained carnivorous.

5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.'44 And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

144. The Bible does not say at this point in what way God showed respect or why he favored Abel over Cain. Later commentators maintained that Cain was wicked, that he offered his sacrifices reluctantly, that he chose undesirable portions of the harvest—while Abel was good, chose the best lambs, and offered them gladly. Or, as is stated in the New Testament (see Hebrews 11:4), Abel had faith and Cain did not, and therefore Abel’s sacrifice was superior.

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ered as implying that he has already done something wrong in the past, and that was why God lacked respect for his sacrifice—but the Bible doesn’t say so.

This is the first verse in which the word “sin” is used. “Sin” is a translation of a Hebrew word that can mean “deviation from the terms of an agreement’ or “re- bellion.” If Cain puts himself into an ugly frame of mind, the temptation of rebelling against the dictates of God will arise, and he must master that temptation.

{§ And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.146

146. From the earliest days of farming, there was war between the settled agricultural communities and the nomad tribes on the fringes.

As time went on, agricultural communities gathered in surpluses of food, ornaments, tools, weapons; and herds- men, condemned “to travel constantly in search of fresh pasture for their animals, could not do so. The wealth of the settled communities was a standing temptation for the nomadic herdsmen.

As a consequence, settled communities were forever fighting off “barbarian raids.” The last and greatest of these, which founded the relatively short-lived Mongol Empire, devastated various parts of Asia from 1225 to 1265. Eastern Europe was overrun in 1240 and 1241.

Histories are usually written by the intellectuals of set- tled societies. It’s no surprise, then, that the nomads are pictured as cruel, destructive, and murderous. And yet it is usually the nomads who get the worst of it and suffer the more.

The settled agricultural communities have the more advanced weapons and can hide behind city walls. In general, the armies of civilization are more numerous and better armed, and when well led they can usually destroy the barbarians. (After the Mongol invasions, the coming of gunpowder put the weight of strength perma-

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at the time of the Garden of Eden, then the total popula- tion of Earth at the time of the murder of Abel was three: Adam, Eve, and Cain.

Could it be that Adam and Eve had many children, who have gone unnamed and unmentioned but now pop- ulate the world? Could it be a reference to the various animals, some powerful and predatory, that exist in the world?

Could it be that the Creation-myths of the P-document and the J-document refer to two different sets of the works of God? Perhaps God created human beings, male and female, many of them on the sixth day of Creation, and they filled the Earth. Afterward, it may be, he cre- ated Adam and Eve, alone in the Garden, as the progeni- tors of a particular family. Thus, Cain would now fear death at the hands of any of the numerous “pre-Adam- ites.” None of this is made plain by the Bible. It may be that the tale of Adam and Eve (“how death came into the world,” we might call it) ends with the expulsion from Eden. What follows next would be various legends deal- ing with primeval history and the birth of civilization, all of which are linked together, rather clumsily, by the Bib- lical writers.

There is one story of how crime came into being, and a second dealing with how the nomadic way of life came into being. Both presuppose a world full of people, and it is only the attachment to the Adam and Eve tale, by mak- ing Cain and Abel their sons, that creates confusion.

45 And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain,° Jest any finding him should kill him.

150. It doesn’t seem to make sense to protect Cain so zealously after the unprovoked murder he committed, unless we suppose that a life of exile and wandering is greater punishment than immediate death. On the other

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hand we are now into the primeval history tale, and this verse may be intended to account for the habit of some nomadic tribes of marking themselves with characteris- tic tattoos.

Agricultural societies eventually develop a more or less complex system of laws that are finally committed to writing and a complex judicial system to interpret and enforce those laws. The simpler society of the nomads, however, lacks such a written law and must do without.

Where laws are not carefully defined and their exact wording is not available, there is less security. Where there is not a set and proper machinery for dealing with lawbreakers, the law of the vigilante is put into motion. Summary justice at the hands of a mob becomes the rule.

Thus, if a member of a tribe is murdered by an out- sider, the rest of the tribe is duty-bound to hunt down the murderer and kill him. Presumably, the sure knowledge that murder will bring down retaliation upon the mur- derer is a powerful incentive against such crimes of violence.

Naturally, the member of a numerous and powerful tribe will want to be sure that everyone who casually encounters him knows that he is not someone who might be harmed with impunity. The tribesman therefore wears his tribal tattoo (as a modern traveler carries a passport) as identification.

In later times, there was the tribe of Kenites, who were not Israelites but who lived in close association with the tribe of Judah (see Judges 1:16). The Kenites were a nomadic tribe of whom Cain was the eponymous ances- tor (a real or mythical individual from whom a tribe or a people takes its name).

This portion of the Cain legend may be a fragment of a Kenite tale about how the tribal tattoo-mark came into being, although we may suppose that the Kenites did not portray their ancestor as a murderer.

G And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod,1>1 on the east of Eden.

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nailed to the spot by their farms and had to protect those farms and themselves.

To have Cain, the farmer, build a city, therefore, makes sense. Naturally, to build a city implies a population. Even a very small and very primitive city would have a couple of hundred people in it. Therefore, those who are puzzled by the identity of Cain’s wife would do better to puzzle over the identity of the people who populated Cain’s city.

154. There is no city we know of in very early times by the name of Enoch, or anything recognizably like it. Nor is the city referred to elsewhere in the Bible.

In actual history, one of the oldest cities to be founded (or even, perhaps, the very oldest) is a city well known to the Biblical writers. It was Jericho, located twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) northeast of Jerusalem and fre- quently mentioned in the Bible. It may have come into existence about 8000 B.c.

There is absolutely no reason to suppose, however, that Enoch represents Jericho.

18 And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat La- mech.155

155. The Biblical writers are interested in genealogies for three reasons.

First, family relationships of all degrees are important in tribal societies. Genealogies serve to fit various indi- viduals into appropriate slots.

Second, genealogies fill up gaps. Those portions of his- tory concerning which nothing of interest (or even noth- ing at all) can be related are quickly disposed of by simply listing a line of descent.

Third, genealogies are a way of quickly describing and being done with the history of a tribe or group of tribes that is not ancestral to the Israelites (with whom the Bib-

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177. Adam and his descendants, according to the P- document (at least those descendants who are given names in this chapter), had extended lifetimes, living far longer than what we now recognize to be the maximum life-span of the human being (about 115 years).

As one progresses through the Bible, the life-span of human beings is described as gradually decreasing until, by the end of the Book of Genesis, 150 is recognized as extreme old age, and by the time of King David seventy is.

Could it be that early man lived long and that modern man’s short life-span is an example of degeneracy?

From the scientific standpoint, this is probably the re- verse of the truth. Homo sapiens always had the capacity to live for a hundred years or a little more (a longer life- span than that of any other mammal), but in early time he almost never had the chance to do so. Life was brutal and chancy, and few people lived past forty. This was true right down to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Throughout historic times, there were cases of human beings living to be over ninety, according to reliable re- port—Sophocles in the fifth century B.c., Isocrates in the fourth century B.c., Cassiodorus in the sixth century, Ti- tian in the sixteenth century, and so on—but they were comparatively few in number.

It was only after modern medicine was developed and infectious disease could be controlled that the average life-span began to increase.

Once people reach the age of sixty, it is the degenera- tive diseases that take their toll (cancer, arthritis, heart attack, strokes, kidney failure, and so on). These have not yet yielded to the blandishments of medicine, so that a man of sixty today has little more in the way of life ex- pectancy than a man of sixty in the times of Sophocles, twenty-four hundred years ago. Of course, many more reach the age of sixty now than in those times.

If so, then how explain the extended life-spans of Adam and his immediate descendants?

Some have suggested that the “years” here given are really lunar months, since the calendar had not yet been extended to include the solar years. There are twelve and

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That's only a guess, of course. The Babylonian (and Israelite) year, based on the lunar calendar, was made up of either twelve or thirteen lunar months and might be either 354 or 383 days long (though, on the average, they were 365 days long). Thus, 365 might not have the easy significance to the Biblical writers that it has to us. The number may be a coincidence.

24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.185

185. Whereas of the other people mentioned in this chapter it is said, uniformly, “and he died,” for Enoch only is it said “he was not; for God took him.” This makes it seem as though the Biblical account would have it that Enoch did not die, but was taken alive to Heaven.

The Jews in later times believed so and assumed that in Heaven he learned the workings of the Universe and came to know the future.

In the second century B.c., and thereafter, various books of a mystical nature were written and were said to have been authored by Enoch. These books expanded on various Biblical legends and foretold the manner of the ending of the world.

At least one of those books was sufficiently well known to be mentioned in the New Testament. Thus, in the one-chapter book of Jude, the fourteenth verse reads: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these—” and then quotes from the book in the next two and a half verses.

This notion of having been taken to Heaven alive may be a remnant of sun-god myth or of someone being de- ified, taken to Heaven, and becoming a sun-god. Enoch, as Jude points out, is the seventh generation, starting with Adam (at least in the P-document). In the list of early Sumerian kings, the seventh is En-men-dur-Anna, who is also described as being the guardian of divine mysteries and as knowing what was to come. What’s more, he was king of Sippar, where Shamash, the Sume-

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Lamech in the J-document list talked of Cain having been avenged sevenfold while he himself would be avenged seventy-seven fold. It might be that that old song, which was too primitive to be included in the P-document, nevertheless supplied numbers for its numbers-con- scious writers.

Lamech died when Noah was 595 years old. Methuse- lah’s stretched-out lifetime meant that he outlived his son, Lamech, by five years and died when Noah was six hundred.

The people mentioned in the Book of Genesis are gen- erally termed “patriarchs” (from Greek words meaning “father-rulers”) because so many of them were the an- cestral heads of tribes or nations. Because of the ex- tended age of almost all the patriarchs, the word has come to mean any particularly old man. Those who have been mentioned in chapters 2 through 5 of Genesis, hav- ing lived before the Flood, are called “antediluvian” (“before the Flood”) patriarchs. Hence, the word “ante- diluvian” has come to mean “very ancient,” usually in an unfavorable sense.

‘\

32 And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Ja- pheth.191

191. Here the P-document is not as precise as it usually is. It is impossible to tell whether the three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, were triplets or whether all three had been born before Noah’s five hundredth birthday and were of indeterminate age—at least not from this verse.

It is usually supposed, however, that these three sons were born singly and probably in rapid succession, but at a time when Noah was about five hundred years old. The order in which they are named is taken to signify the order in which they were born, so that Shem is the oldest.

This is the first time in the P-document that a patriarch

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of men” were the females of the line of Cain (or women of the lower classes), but neither seems likely. In the Book of Job, we see, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord . . .” (Job 1:6), and there the phrase is clearly used to describe divine beings such as angels. There is no dispute about that. If the sons of God were divine and enforced their will on helpless human women, would Earth have to suffer for that? To avoid that, there are suggestions by some commentators that the “daughters of men,” by means of their lascivious wiles and in order to satisfy their wicked sexual cravings, deliberately seduced the virtuous sons of God. (The real trouble, probably, is that the Biblical editors used an inappropriate portion of the J-document in their effort to find something that would justify the Flood.)

% And the Lord said, My spirit shall not al- ways strive with man, for that he also is flesh: 193 yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.1%4

193. This is not clear in the King James. The Revised Standard Version has it read, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh.”

Perhaps God is reminding himself that man is mortal and that individual sinners have only a limited time in which to weary him with their corruption. Perhaps he is finding excuses for human beings. They are only flesh and therefore weak and bound to sin. The casing of flesh is an imperfect receptacle for the holy spirit.

194. If the interpretation of the first part of the verse is God’s self-reminder that man is mortal, then the re- mainder of the verse is a punishment for human corrup- tion. The mortality of man is emphasized.

Whereas hitherto, individual sinners might weary God with their corruption for nearly a thousand years, now

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weighed up to half a ton and that may not have died out till 1650.

Closer to the human family tree, there was Giganto- pithecus, the largest primate that ever lived. It resembled a giant gorilla, nine feet tall (if it were to stand upright) and weighing some six hundred pounds. It became ex- tinct about three million years ago.

All of these giants, however, are modern discoveries. It passes belief that this Biblical verse could be referring to them.

196. It is very common for legends to speak of great men of renown in the past and to view them as heroes of a greater mold than that to be seen among contempora- ries. The past always appears in glorious colors. Homer, writing about 800 B.c., keeps disparaging his contempora- ries and telling them how much stronger and more heroic their ancestors were.

In many sets of primitive legends, the great men of the past were viewed as the mixed offspring of the gods and human beings.

Achilles was the son of the sea nymph Thetis; Hercules was the son of Zeus; Aeneas was the son of Aphrodite; Romulus was the son of Mars; and so on. This type of belief is mirrored in this verse of the Bible. It is a bit of a familiar hero-tale of the polytheistic past used by the Biblical editors to emphasize the moral corruption of the times. That these men of renown of the past were viewed as of supernormal size is natural in view of the exaggerated tales of their deeds. Then, too, there was the natural wonder felt by barbarian invaders at the sight of the works of the civilizations they replaced. Thus, when the Dorian Greeks invaded the Peloponnesus, they were struck with astonishment at the thick walls of towns such as Mycenae and Tiryns, which had been strong- holds of the defeated Mycenaean civilization. Unable to grasp what cooperation and technology could accom- plish, the Dorians decided that the walls could only have been built by giants.

In the same way, the invading Israelites in 1200 B.c.

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Naturally, a particularly bad flood would destroy rec- ords, especially in a primitive situation where writing had, at best, barely come into use. For that reason, events “before the Flood” would quickly take on a legendary and, very likely, highly exaggerated nature. The Sumeri- ans listed kings who reigned for tens of thousands of years before the Flood; they made no such reports of kings who reigned after the Flood. And, of course, this reflected itself in the ages given of the antediluvian patri- archs in the Bible.

The dramatic tale of the Sumerian Flood was included in the epic of Gilgamesh, which must have been popular all over the ancient world and which couldn't help but influence the myths of other nations.

In the Gilgamesh legend, Gilgamesh, searching for im- mortality, is directed to seek out Ut-Napishtim, who at- tained immortality and who also survived the Flood. Gilgamesh finds Ut-Napishtim, and the latter tells a tale very much like the tale in the Bible. Thus, Ut-Napishtim is sometimes called the Sumerian Noah. It might be more accurate to call Noah the Biblical Ut-Napishtim. River floods, like any other natural disaster, do not usually come about through human agency, and in an- cient times, their causes were not understood. The Sume- rians assigned the event to the whim of the gods. The Biblical writers, adapting the Sumerian tale, could not allow such whimsicality to stand and searched (not en- tirely successfully) for a way of showing that humanity had brought the disaster on itself.

14 Make thee an ark 2° of gopher wood; 2% rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with. pitch.

204. The Hebrew word translated here as “ark” is tevah, and means a chest or box. The word “ark” is from a Latin term meaning “to enclose.”

We might well suppose that the earliest vessels de- signed to travel on water were rafts or open boats that

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twenty-two feet deep and that this was sufficient to cover the mountains. ;

A more correct interpretation, perhaps, given in the Revised Standard Version, reads, “the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.”

In other words, the total depth of the water was
twenty-two feet higher than Mt. Everest’s 29,028 feet, so that the sea level at the height of the Flood was 29,050 feet (5.5 miles) above the present sea level. _ From the scientific standpoint, this is clearly impossi- ble, since there is not enough water on Earth to accom- plish the task; what is more, there is no sign of such a universal deluge in the third millennium s.c. Egyptian history, for instance, carries right through the entire third millennium B.c. without any sign of a break or any men- tion of a flood.

On the other hand, if we consider the flatness of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and consider the Flood to have been a local phenomenon of the region, we might well imagine twenty-two feet to be a sober estimate of the depth to which the elevations of the region were covered.

21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land 2° died.

234. The implication is that sea life was not disturbed.

It is a horrible death by drowning that is thus unemo- tionally dismissed in the Bible. One can imagine drenched people trying to find high ground, trying to keep their heads above water. We can imagine animals fleeing uselessly. Whatever their sins, a more merciful deity, one might imagine, would have simply swept them painlessly out of existence with a word, and begun over again.

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240. This first part of the verse is from the J-document and presumably describes the waters draining away after the rain of forty days and forty nights.

241. This second part of the verse is from the P-docu- ment, and it states that the waters began to drain away after 150 days, mentioning the time specifically.

4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,?42 upon the mountains of Ararat.?43

242. The rains started on the seventeenth day of the second month, so that exactly five lunar months had passed at the time the ‘“‘ark rested.” That is just about 147.5 days—roughly, 150 days.

243. At the time the Flood reached its crest, then, by the reckoning of the P-document, the ark was in Ararat. This is a mountainous kingdom where the Tigris and Eu- phrates both have their sources in what is now eastern Turkey. It flourished in Assyrian times, and its name was Urartu—of which Ararat is clearly a version.

The tradition that the ark came to rest among the mountain ranges of Urartu is rather a point in favor of the tsunami theory of the Flood. Ordinary river flooding would sweep floating objects downstream—southeast- ward into the Persian Gulf. A huge tsunami would sweep it upstream—northwestward toward Urartu.

Despite the fact that a land is named, and a mountain range, there is a general feeling that Ararat is the name of a definite mountain peak. Indeed, the name was even- tually applied to one. Mount Ararat is found on modern maps in the easternmost region of Turkey, about seventy miles northeast of Lake Van. Its highest peak is 16,783 feet (3.2 miles) above sea level.

There are fanciful tales now and then of mysterious wooden objects located on its upper slopes, but none of these tales will withstand serious scrutiny.

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enmity for humanity, sent the Flood, is enraged that any life escaped. The other gods, however, led by Ea (god of fresh water, who, as a friend of human beings, warned Ut-Napishtim of the coming of the Flood), managed to assuage Enlil’s anger and appease him. They labored to do so, presumably, because they dreaded starvation, and even Enlil decided he would rather let human beings live than do without the smell of sacrifices.

The Bible tones this down a good deal, but the Lord “smelled a sweet savour” and at once decided to lift the curse on the ground, placed in Adam’s day, and to devas- tate Earth no more.

22 While the earth remaineth,257 seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and sum- mer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.?°8

257. The phrase “while the earth remaineth” might be taken to imply that the earth is not necessarily eternal. If it were, it would have been sufficient for the verse to read, “Seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

The Biblical view (taking the Bible as a whole) is that the Earth—in its present form, at least—will someday end. The Book of Revelation described the process in graphic detail.

From the scientific point of view, too, Earth is not nec- essarily eternal. There are a variety of catastrophes that could conceivably damage it badly enough to make human life upon it impossible, though most of these are very low-probability events. Even if Earth escapes such catastrophes, however, then by some seven billion years hence the sun will have consumed enough of its hydro- gen fuel to enter the next stage of its evolution.

It will be expanding, little by little, into a red giant. Its surface will then be considerably cooler than it is now, but the amount of surface will increase so enormously that it will deliver much more heat in total. Besides, as

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forbidden to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Mur- der is now forbidden. The rationale seems to be that blood (life) is the gift of God and therefore cannot be taken away but by God.

If a human being (or a beast, for that matter, as the preceding verse specifies) “sheddeth man’s blood,” blas- phemy has been committed, for a gift of God has been stolen. The murderer’s act has forfeited his own gift of life, and he can then be freely killed without the killer incurring the penalties of blasphemy.

This marks the situation in many societies that are pre- literate and that have no fixed written laws. When a per- son is killed, the members of the group to which that person belonged feel the right, and even duty, to even the score by killing the killer or some member of the killer's group. (This is the danger Cain feared in Genesis 4:14.) If the killer’s tribe feels the score has been more than evened, it seeks to redress the balance in turn, and the result is a “blood feud” that may end in dozens of killings. The unsatisfactory nature of this blood feud is such that even in preliterate societies attempts would be made to bring it under control, while in any literate society with a written code of laws, the crime of murder must be considered by a judge according to certain legal forms and a punishment must be established in accordance with the gravity of offense—and that punishment must end the matter.

Nor need the punishment always be death—since there can be such things as accidental homicide, homicide in a moment of passion, homicide in self-defense, and so on. There are no gradations recognized in this Biblical verse, and for this reason, too, it marks a very primitive stage in human development.

This verse has been used to justify capital punishment, and it also gives rise to the feeling that murder isn’t really so bad or as culpable if no blood is shed in the process. Thus Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, a half-brother of William the Conqueror, went into battle with a mace. Killing an enemy by brain concussion seemed more godly than to make use of swords, spears, and arrows, weapons designed to draw blood.

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reference to Canaan would seem, at this point, to be a non sequitur and unnecessary.

The Biblical writers, however, are chiefly interested in the history of the Israelites, and the Israelites lived in the land of Canaan by right of conquest.

Because the Bible uses a theological approach to his- tory, all events are interpreted as in accord with the will of God and as being based on justice. Good fortune is the result of obedience to divine law; bad fortune to disobe- dience. If the land of Canaan has been conquered, and if the people who had earlier dwelt there were enslaved by the Israelites, this had to be described as the just conse- quence of some evil done by the Canaanites or by some ancestor.

Canaan, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah, is the eponymous ancestor of the Canaanites, and since an event is about to be told that will serve as the explana- tion for the enslavement of the Canaanites, Canaan is brought into the tale.

19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.?72

272. It would be as naive to take the phrase ‘‘the whole earth” literally here as it would be in the story of the Flood.

The details that follow will make it clear that the Bibli- cal writers are discussing only parts of what we now call the Middle East—the regions they knew. There is no in- dication of any knowledge of the Americas or Australia or distant islands; not even any knowledge of the farther reaches of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Even in a more restricted sense, there is no indication of any possibility that the Sumerian Flood reduced even the Middle East to a single family. Areas such as Egypt, Asia Minor, Crete, and so on were well populated both before and after the traditional time of the Flood, with no detectable signs of any catastrophic break whatever.

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with Japheth, the youngest son of Noah, then moves on to Ham, and finally to Shem, who is the ancestor of the Israelites.

The names of the peoples and their locations would seem to represent the world as it existed in Assyrian times, in the seventh century B.c., or about a century be- fore the Babylonian captivity.

Japheth himself may be borrowed from the Greek tra- ditions, which reached the early Israelites by way of Crete and Cyprus and the Philistines. Japheth has been identified by some with Iapetus, one of the Titans in the Greek myths. The two names are almost identical, actu- ally. If we discount the conventional “-us’” ending in Greek names, both are pronounced “Yapet” in the orig- inal. According to the Greek myths, Iapetus was the father of Prometheus, who, in turn, fathered the human race by molding them out of clay, as Yahveh did in the J-docu- ment. For this reason, Iapetus could be considered by the Greeks to be the ancestor of mankind; and the Israelites may have accepted this to the extent of making him the ancestor of that portion of mankind to which the Greeks belonged. 286. Gomer probably refers to the people who, in As- syrian inscriptions, are Gimirrai, and these, in turn, were the people known in Latin spelling as the Cimmerians. In earlier times, they lived north of the Black Sea (Crimea, part of their early homeland, is a distorted spelling of Cimmeria), but in the seventh century B.c., pushed on by new bands of tribesmen in the rear, they invaded Asia Minor and met the Assyrians there in great battles. The Cimmerians were eventually defeated, to be sure, but As- syria was badly wounded in the process. The Cim- merians were in particularly prominent view at the time this “table of nations” reached its final written form, and their eponymous ancestor, Gomer, would be viewed, very reasonably, as the firstborn of Japheth.

287. Magog may represent “the land of Gog.” Gog (“Gyges” in the Greek form) was the king of the Lydians,

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321. Presumably these names are all associated with regions in or near Egypt (Mizraim), but what or who they are cannot be determined.

14 And Pathrusim, and Casluhim,%?? (out of whom came Philistim 323) and Caph- torim.324

322. Pathrusim and Casluhim, like the Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, and Naphtuhim of the previous verse, have the -im suffix of the Hebrew plural. They are not the names of people or of eponymous ancestors, but the names of tribes. All these tribes are Egyptian-related.

323. The Casluhim are here reported to be the ances- tors of the Philistim, a Hebrew word elsewhere trans- lated as “Philistines.”

The Philistines controlled the southern coast of Ca- naan in later times and were important enemies of Israel during the time of the Judges and of King Saul. They are here listed among the descendants of Ham and are par- ticularly related to Egypt.

Actually, in the thirteenth century B.c., toward the closing days of the decaying Egyptian Empire, there were barbarian invasions descending on the Egyptian coast- line. The Egyptians called them “the Peoples of the Sea” and beat them off, in the process just about consuming the last energies of the Empire. The Peoples of the Sea, ricocheting off Egypt, so to speak, settled on the Ca- naanite Coast (as the Philistines) just as the Israelites were entering Canaan from the east. The Israelites, not- ing that they came from Egypt, considered them de- scended from Mizraim.

It is generally felt that the Philistines were, at least in part, of Greek descent, so that it might have been more appropriate to make them descendants of Japheth rather than Ham. (Similarly, since Nimrod was related to the Middle Eastern Cush, at least geographically, rather than

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the Nubian Cush, he should have been made a descen- dant of Shem, rather than of Ham.)

324. Although this verse states the Philistines to have descended from Mizraim by way of the Casluhim, there are later references in the Bible that make’ it seem they descended by way of the Caphtorim. The Philistines are spoken of as “the remnant of the country of Caphtor” (Jeremiah 47:4), and there is also mention of “the Philis- _ tines from Caphtor” (Amos 9:7). The trouble is that we don’t know where Caphtor is. There have been suggestions that it was Cyprus, Crete, the southern coast of Asia Minor. Perhaps all these re- gions contributed contingents to the Peoples of the Sea, but which particular one the Biblical writers had in mind we cannot say. (Most of the confusion in this chapter arises from the J-document, more flamboyant and legen- dary, rather than from the sober P-document.)

15 And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn,325 and Heth,326

325. Canaan is pictured as the father of the various Canaanite tribes. Since these are known in detail to the Israelites, numerous descendants are listed.

Sidon is a city on the Mediterranean, about 130 miles north of Jerusalem. The area about it is now known as Lebanon and was known to the Greeks as Phoenicia.

Since the Phoenicians were never conquered by the Israelites, and since Sidon was the strongest of the Phoe- nician towns during the Israelite Monarchic period, Sidon is listed as the firstborn of Canaan.

326. Heth is the eponymous ancestor of the Hittites, who are sometimes referred to in the Bible as the “sons of Heth.” Because the Hittites are invariably mentioned in the Bible as among the tribes of Canaanite, one might feel they were a minor people.

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337. Gerar is in southern Canaan, about 150 miles south of Sidon and about eighteen miles inland from the coast.

338. Gaza is about as far south as Gerar but is located on the coast. In other words, Canaan is described here as having a north-south extension of 150 miles, not very much by modern standards, but quite ample in a day when people usually traveled by walking.

339. Having established the north-south extension, it is next necessary to establish the east-west extension.

Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim were in the southeast of Canaan. Their exact site is not known, for they were destroyed in some disaster at some early time (an event described in the nineteenth chapter of Gene- sis). These cities were supposed to have existed in the region of the Dead Sea, however, and some even specu- late that they might be covered by the southernmost ex- tension of the Dead Sea, that area having been flooded after an earthquake or volcanic eruption, which inspired the Biblical tale of the destruction.

If we assume Sodom to be somewhere in the south of the Dead Sea, then the east-west extension from Gaza to Sodom is about 65 miles.

340. Lasha is mentioned only here in the Bible, and its location is unknown. It is just possible, however, that the town that is meant is Laish, later called Dan, about twenty-seven miles southeast of Sidon.

If that is so, then Canaan is described as a roughly rectangular patch of ground on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean with an area of somewhat under ten thousand square miles. It would be something like the size and shape of an upside-down Vermont.

20) These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their coun- tries, and in their nations.

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woven baskets. Dried in the sun, the clay made it possi- ble for the baskets to carry liquids. Such daubed baskets, if left too close to a campfire, may have hardened fur- ther, and more or less accidentally, it was discovered that if clay was baked, it became a sort of artificial stone. In this way, bricks and pottery came into use.

The oldest such fire-baked clay has indeed been found in the region that eventually became Sumeria and dates back to about 6500 B.c., some four thousand years before the traditional date of the Flood.

359. The Hebrew word translated as “slime” here is more properly translated “bitumen” (as it is in the Re- vised Standard Version) or as “pitch.” Bitumen is a soft, sticky, waterproof black solid; hydrocarbon in nature. Chemically, it is related to petroleum; petroleum from which the more easily evaporated fractions are gone.

The Middle East, as we all know today, is rich in un- derground oil. Some of it seeps to the surface and par- tially evaporates, leaving the bitumen behind. Bitumen serves not only as a waterproofing agent, but as a mortar, too, making bricks stick together and forming a wall that is all one piece.

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower,?©° whose top may reach unto heaven; 361 and let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad 362 upon the face of the whole earth.

360. Agricultural peoples did tend to build cities for self-protection, and these would include towers. A tower could serve as a lookout point from which the approach of an enemy could be seen and an early warning be given. If strongly built, it could serve as a citadel, a ref- uge for noncombatants, the place for a last stand.

361. A tower could also be a place of worship. Since it was common to worship sun-gods, sky-gods, and storm- gods, one would try to get closer to the homes of these

oAn

Appendix

Primeval History According to the P-Document _

_ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God’said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 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. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made

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two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living crea- ture after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl] of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God

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Saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in _it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created.

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and be- gat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: And the days of Adam after he had begot- ten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: and all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos: and Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.

And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan: and Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fif- teen years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.

And Cainan lived seventy years, and begat Mahalaleel: and Cainan lived after he begat Mahalaleel eight hun- dred and forty years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years: and he died.

And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared: and Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight

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hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Mahalalee] were eight hundred ninety and five years: and he died.

And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch: and Jared lived after he begat Enoch eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died.

And Enoch lived sixty and five years and begat Meth- uselah: and Enoch walked with God after he begat Meth- uselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech: and Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son [Noah]: and Lamech lived after he begat Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years: and he died.

And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make

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it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my cove- nant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.

Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he. And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; they, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fow! after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him.

And the flood was upon the earth; and the waters pre- vailed and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high

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hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man.

And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters as- suaged; the fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated. And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen. _

And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth; and in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried.

And God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee. Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth. And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him: every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark. And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as

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the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he _ man. And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; and with every living crea- ture that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between men and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a cove- nant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my cove- nant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more be- come a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the cove- nant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.

And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog,

NOR

and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tar- shish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan. And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtecha: and the sons of Raamah; Sheba and Dedan. These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.

The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Ar- phaxad, and Lud, and Aram. And the children of Aram; Uz, and Hul, and Gether, and Mash. These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.

These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the na- tions divided in the earth after the flood.

These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hun- dred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: and Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hun- dred years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: and Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hun- dred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber: and Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg: and Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu: and Peleg lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Reu lived two and thirty years, and begat Serug: and Reu lived after he begat Serug two hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Serug lived thirty years, and begat Nahor: and

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