Part 24

The chapter opens with a picture of primeval chaos, out of which God commands the universe of beauty, life, and order. Nothing is said of its origin. The story starts with it existent. It is painted as an abyss, dreary and boundless, wrapped in impenetrable darkness, an inextricable confusion of fluid matter, destitute of character, structure, or value, without form and void. It is the raw material of the universe, passive and powerless in itself, but holding in it the promise and potency of all existence. For over it nestles, like a brood fowl, the informing, warming, life-giving Spirit of God, sending through its coldness and emptiness the heat and parental yearnings of the Divine heart, that craves for creatures on which to pour out its love and goodness. This action of the Spirit is, however, no more than preparative, and waits its completion in the accession of a personal fiat of God's will, in which the Divine Word gives effect and reality to the Divine Wish. This is a feature of supreme importance, for in it consists the uniqueness of the Bible narrative. In the Pagan accounts of creation we find the same general imagery of dull, dead matter, stirred and warmed into life and development by the action of an immaterial effluence of "thought," "love," or "longing." But in them the operation is cosmic, impersonal, often hardly conscious; in the Bible it is ethical and intensely personal. In them the language is metaphysical, materialistic, or pantheistic; here it is moral, human, personal, to the point of anthropomorphism. They show us creative forces and processes; the Bible presents to us, in all His infinite, manifold, and glorious personality, the thinking, living, loving "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."

The result of the first day and the first Divine decree is the production of light. The old difficulty about the existence of light before the sun was made, as it was invented by science, has been by science dispelled. The theory of light as a mode of motion, which for the present holds the field, knows no obstacle to the presence of light in the absence of the sun. But this harmony is not due to any prescience of modern science in the writer of Genesis. His idea of light is not undulatory, and not scientific, but just the simple popular notion found everywhere in the Bible. Light is a fine substance, distinct from all others, and it appears first in the list of creation, as being the first and noblest of the elements that go to make up our habitable world. The emergence of the light is presented as instantaneously following the Divine decree. That is manifestly the literary effect designed in the curtness of the sequence, "Let there be light, and there was light." The light is pronounced good, is permanently established in possession of its special properties and powers, and is set in its service of the world and man by having assigned to it its place in the "alternate mercy of day and night." There is a very fine touch in the position of the declaration of goodness. It stands here earlier than in the succeeding sections. Darkness is in the Bible the standing emblem of evil. It would have been discordant with that imagery to make God pronounce it good, though as the foil of light it serves beneficent ends. The jarring note is tacitly and simply avoided by introducing the assertion of the goodness of light before the mention of its background and negation, darkness. The picture of the first day of creation is subscribed with the formula of completeness—"There was evening, and there was morning, one day," or "day first"—and has for its net result the production of the element or sphere of light.

The second day and the second Divine decree are devoted to the formation of the firmament. All through the Old Testament the sky is pictured as a solid dome or vaulted roof, above which roll the primeval waters of chaos. The notion is of course popular, a figment of the primitive imagination, and quite at variance with the modern conception of space filled by an interastral ether; though it is well to remember that this same ether is no more ascertained fact than was the old-world firmament, and is in its turn simply an invention of the scientific imagination. It is of more moment to note that the real motive and outcome of the day's work is not the firmament. That is not an end, but a means, precisely as a sea-wall is not an object in itself, but merely the instrument of the reclamation of valuable land. What the erection of the firmament does towards the making of our world is the production of the intervening aërial space and the lower expanse of terrestrial waters. Since this last portion of the work is not complete prior to the separation of the dry land, the declaration of goodness or perfection is, with exquisite fineness of suggestion, tacitly omitted. The net result of the day is, therefore, the formation of the realms of air and water as elements or spheres of existence.

The third day includes two works—the production of the solid ground, and of vegetation. The dead, inert soil, and its manifold outgrowth of plant life, are strikingly distinct, and yet most intimately related. Together they make up the habitable earth. They are therefore presented as separate works, but conjoined in the framework of one day. Two sections of the vegetable kingdom are singled out for special mention—the cereals and the fruit-trees. It is not a complete or a botanical classification, and manifestly science is not contemplated. Those divisions of the plant-world that sustain animal and human life, and minister to its enjoyment, are drawn out into pictorial relief and prominence. The intention is practical, popular, and religious. The net result of the day is the production of the habitable dry land.

The fourth day and the fifth decree call into being the celestial bodies—the sun, moon, and stars. They are called luminaries; that is to say, not masses or accumulations of light, but managers and distributers of light, and the value of this function of theirs, for the religious and secular calendar, for agriculture, navigation, and the daily life of men, is formally and elaborately detailed. Were this account of the heavenly bodies intended as a scientific or exhaustive statement of their Divine destination and place in the universe, it would be miserably inadequate and erroneous. But if the whole aim of the narrative be not science, but religion, then it is absolutely appropriate, exact, and powerful. In the teeth of an all but universal worship of sun, moon, and stars, it declares them the manufacture of God, and the ministers and servants of man. For this practical religious purpose the geocentric description of them is not an accident, but essential. It is not a blunder, but a merit. It is true piety, not cosmical astronomy, that is being established. In the words of Calvin, "Moses, speaking to us by the Holy Spirit, did not treat of the heavenly luminaries as an astronomer, but as it became a theologian, having regard to us rather than to the stars." The net result of the fourth day is the production of the heavenly orbs of light.

The fifth day and the sixth work issue in the production of birds and fishes, or, more accurately, all creatures that fly or swim. It is evidently a classification by the eye—the ordinary popular division—and it makes no attempt at scientific pretension or profundity. As having conscious life, these new creatures of God's love are blessed by Him, and have their place and purpose in the order of being defined and established. The net result of the day is the formation of fowls and fishes.

The sixth day, like the third, includes two works—the land animals and man. The representation admirably expresses their intimate relationship, and yet essential distinction. The animals are graphically divided into the domestic quadrupeds, the small creatures that creep and crawl, and the wild beasts of the field. The classification is as little scientific in intention or substance as is the general arrangement into birds, fishes, and beasts, which of course traverses radically alike the historical order of palæontology and the physiological grouping of zoology. The narrative simply adopts the natural grouping of observation and popular speech, because that suffices, and best suits its purpose. With a wonderful simplicity, yet with consummate effect, man is portrayed as the climax and crown of creation. Made in the image and likeness of God, he is clothed with sovereign might and dominion over all the elements and contents of Nature. The personal, conscious counterpart and child of God, he stands at the other end of the chain of creation, and with answering intelligence and love looks back adoringly to his great Father in the heavens. Mention is made of lesser matters, such as sex and food; but manifestly the supreme interest of the delineation is ethical and religious. Science is no more contemplated as an ingredient in the conception than prose is in poetry. With the making of man the circle of creation is complete, and the finished perfection of the whole, as well as the parts, is expressed in the superlative declaration that "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." The net result of the sixth day is the formation of the land animals and man.

The six days of creative activity are followed by a seventh of Divine repose. On the seventh day God rested; or, as it is more fully worded in Exodus (xxxi. 17), God "rested and was refreshed." It is a daring anthropomorphism, and at the same time a master-stroke of inspired genius. What a philosophical dissertation hardly could accomplish it achieves by one simple image. For our thought of God the idea performs the same service as the institution of the Sabbath does for our souls and bodies. The weekly day of rest is the salvation of our personality from enslavement in material toil. During six days the toiler is tied, bent and bowed, to his post in the vast machinery of the world's work. On the seventh all is stopped, and he is free to lift himself erect to the full stature of his manhood, to expand the loftier elements of his being, to reassert his freedom, and realise his superiority over what is mechanical, secular, and earthly. What in the progressive portraiture of creation is the effect of this sudden declaration that the Creator rested? Why, an intensely powerful reminder of the free, conscious, and personal nature of His action. And this impression of such unique value is secured precisely by the anthropomorphism, as no philosophical disquisition could have done it. The blot and blemish of all metaphysical delineation is that personalities get obliterated and swallowed up in general principles and impersonal abstractions. In all other cosmogonies of any intellectual pretension the process of creation is presented as passive, or Necessitarian, or Pantheistic, and invariably the free personality of the Creator becomes entangled in His work, or entirely vanishes. By this stroke of inspired imagination the Bible story rescues from all such risks and degradations our thought of the Creator, and at its close leaves us face to face with our Divine Maker as free, personal, living, loving, and conscious as we are ourselves.

We have now got what is, I trust, a fairly accurate and complete summary of the contents of the narrative. It is not necessary for our purpose to discuss its relations to the Pagan cosmogonies. From the sameness everywhere of the human eye, mind, and fancy, certain conceptions are common property. There is probably a special kinship between the Biblical and the Babylonian and Phœnician accounts. But with all respect for enthusiastic decipherers, we make bold to believe, with more sober-minded critics, that the 1st chapter of Genesis owes very little to Babylonian mythology, and very much indeed to Hebrew thought and the revealing Spirit of God. The chapter strikingly lacks the characteristic marks of myth, and is on the face of it a masterpiece of exquisite artistic workmanship and profound religious inspiration. Proof of this has appeared in plenty during our brief study of its structure and contents. Let us proceed to use the results of our analysis to determine some more general characteristics of its structure and design.

The process of creation is portrayed in six great steps or stages. Is this order put forward as corresponding with the physical course of events? and, further, does it tally with the order stamped in the record of the rocks? Replying to the second question first, it must be admitted that, _primâ facie_, the Bible sequence does not appear to be in unison with the geological. Of attempted reconciliations there is an almost endless variety, but, unfortunately, among the harmonies themselves there is no harmony. At the present moment there is none that has gained general acceptance: a few possess each the allegiance of a handful of partisans; the greater number command the confidence only of their respective authors, and some not even that. It is needless to discuss these reconciliations, because if geology is trustworthy in its main results, and if our interpretation of the meaning of Genesis is at all correct, correspondence in order and detail is impossible. If the order of Genesis was meant as science, then geology and Genesis are at issue; but, on the other hand, if the sequence in Genesis was never meant to be physical the wrong lies with ourselves, who have searched for geology where we should have looked for religion, and have, with the best intentions, persisted in trying to turn the Bible bread of life into the arid stone of science. Now, we venture to suggest that in drafting this chapter the ruling formative thought was not chronology. It must be remembered that the narrative was under no obligation to follow the order of actual occurrence, unless that best suited its purpose. Zoology does not group the animals in the order of their emergence into existence, but classifies and discusses them in a very different sequence, adopted to exhibit their structural and functional affinities. If the design of Genesis was not to inform us about historical geology, but to reveal and enforce religious truth, it might well be that a literary or a logical, and not a chronological, arrangement might best serve its end. As a matter of fact, the order chosen is not primarily historical. Another quite different and very beautiful idea has fashioned, and is enshrined in, the arrangement. Looking at our analysis of their contents, we perceive that the six days fall into two parallel sets of three, whose members finely correspond. The first set presents us with three vast empty tenements or habitations, and the second set furnishes these with occupants. The first day gives us the sphere of light; the fourth day tenants it with sun, moon, and stars. The second day presents the realm of air and water; the fifth day supplies the inhabitants—birds and fishes. The third day produces the habitable dry land; and the sixth day stocks it with the animals and man. The idea of this arrangement is, on the face of it, literary and logical. It is chosen for its comprehensive, all-inclusive completeness. To declare of every part and atom of Nature that it is the making of God, the author passes in procession the great elements or spheres which the human mind everywhere conceives as making up our world, and pronounces them one by one God's creation. Then he makes an inventory of their entire furniture and contents, and asserts that all these likewise are the work of God. For his purpose—which is to declare the universal Creatorship of God and the uniform creaturehood of all Nature—the order and classification are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. With a masterly survey, that marks everything and omits nothing, he sweeps the whole category of created existence, collects the scattered leaves into six congruous groups, encloses each in a compact and uniform binding, and then on the back of the numbered and ordered volumes stamps the great title and declaration that they are one and all, in every jot, and tittle, and shred, and fragment, the works of their Almighty Author, and of none beside.

With the figment of a supposed physical order vanishes also the difficulty of the days. Their use is not literal, but ideal and pictorial. That the author was not thinking of actual days of twenty-four hours, with a matter-of-fact dawning of morning and darkening of evening, is evident from the fact that he does not bring the sun (the lord of the day) into action till three have already elapsed, and later on he exhibits the sun as itself the product of one of them. Neither is it possible that the days stand for geological epochs, for by no wrenching and racking can they be made to correspond. Moreover, it is quite certain that the author would have revolted against the expansion of his timeless acts of creative omnipotence into long ages of slow evolution, since the key-note of the literary significance and sublimity of his delineation is its exhibition of the created result following in instantaneous sequence on the creative fiat. The actual meaning underlying the use of the days is suggested in the rubrical character of the refrain, as it appears rounding off and ending each fresh stage of the narration—"And there was evening, and there was morning—day one, day two, day three," and so on. The great sections of Nature are to be made pass in a panorama of pictures, and to be presented, each for itself, as the distinct act of God. It is desirable to enclose each of these pictures in a frame, clear-cut and complete. The natural unit and division of human toil is a day. In the words of the poet—

"Each morning sees some task begin; Each evening sees it close."

In Old Testament parlance, any great achievement or outstanding event is spoken of as "a day." A decisive battle is known as "the day of Midian." God's intervention in human history is "the day of the Lord." When the author of Genesis i. would present the several elements of Nature as one and all the outcome of God's creative energy, the successive links of the chain are depicted as days. Where we should say "End of Part I.," he says, "And there was evening, and there was morning—day one." Moreover, it is needless to point out how finely, from this presentation of the timeless fiats of creation in a framework of days, emerges the majestic truth that not in the dead order of nature, nor in the mere movement of the stars, but in the nature and will of God, Who made man in His image, must be sought the ultimate origin, sanction, and archetype of that salutary law which divides man's life on earth into fixed periods of toil, rounded and crowned by a Sabbath of repose.

If this understanding of the structural arrangement of the chapter be correct, we have reached an important and significant conclusion regarding the author's method and design. He does not suppose himself to be giving the matter-of-fact sequence of creation's stages. His interest does not lie in that direction. His sole concern is to declare that Nature, in bulk and in detail, is the manufacture of God. His plan does not include, but _ipso facto_ excludes, conformity with the material order and process. He writes as a theologian, and not as a scientist or historian. Starting from this fixed point, let us note the outstanding features and engrossing interests of his delineation. We shall find them in the phrases that, like a refrain, run through the narrative and form its key-notes, and finally in the resultant impression left by its general tenour and purport.

The recurrent key-notes of the narrative are three—God's naming His works, His declaration of their goodness, and the swift formula of achievement—"and it was so." The naming is not a childish triviality, nor a mere graphic touch or poetical ornament. It does not mean that God attached to His works the vocables by which in Hebrew they are known. Its significance appears in the definition of function into which in the later episodes it is expanded. Name in Hebrew speech is equivalent to Nature. When the story pictures God as naming His works, it vividly brings into relief the fixed law and order that pervade the universe. And by the picturesque—if you will, anthropomorphic—fashion of the statement, it attains an effect beyond science or metaphysics, inasmuch as it irresistibly portrays this order of Nature as originating in the personal act of God, and directly inspired by and informed with His own effluent love of what is good, and true, and orderly. Thus the great truth of the fixity of Nature is presented, not as a fact of science or a quality of matter, but as rooted in and reflecting a majestic attribute of the character of God. The interest is not scientific, but religious. In like fashion, the unfailing declaration of goodness, though it might seem a small detail, is replete with practical and religious significance. The Pagan doctrines of creation are all more or less contaminated by dualistic or Manichean conceptions. The good Creator is baffled, thwarted, and impeded by a brutish or malignant tendency in matter, which on the one hand mars the perfection of creation, and on the other hand inserts in the physical order of things elements of hostility and malevolence to man. It is a thought that at once degrades the Creator, and denudes Nature, as man's abode, of its beauty, comfort, and kindliness. How different is it in the Bible picture of creation! This God has outside Himself no rival, experiences no resistance nor contradiction, knows no failure nor imperfection in His handiwork; but what He wishes He wills, and what He commands is done, and the result answers absolutely to the intention of His wisdom, love, and power. In its relation to its Maker the work is free from any flaw. In its relation to man it contains nothing malevolent or maleficent. It is good. And once again, mark with what skill in the delineation the light is thrown, not on the work, but on the Worker, and the goodness of creation becomes but a mirror to drink in and flash forth the infinite wisdom, might, and goodness of its Divine Maker. Here also the interest is not metaphysical, but practical and religious. A third commanding aim of the narrative appears in the significant and striking use of the formula "and it was so." With absolute uniformity the Divine fiat is immediately followed by the physical fulfilment. There is no painting of the process, no delineation of slow and gradual operations of material forces. Not once is there any mention of secondary causes, nor the faintest suggestion of intermediate agencies. The Creator wills; the thing is. In this exclusion from the scene of all subordinate studies there is artistic design—profound design. The picture becomes one, not of scenery, but of action. It is not a landscape, but a portrait. The canvas contains but two solitary objects, the Creator and His work. The effect is to throw out of sight methods, materials, processes, and to throw into intense relief the act and the Actor. And the supreme and ultimate result on the beholder's mind is to produce a quite overpowering and majestic impression of the glorious personality of the Creator.