196 MR. GLADSTONE AND GENESIS v 



waters of the earth, of the air, and of the land. Leviticus 

 speaks of land reptiles, among other animals, as "sheh-retz" ; 

 Genesis speaks of all creeping land animals, among which land 

 reptiles are necessarily included, as "reh-mes." Our trans- 

 lators, therefore, have given the true sense when they render 

 both "sheh-retz" and "reh-mes" by "creeping things." 



Having taken a good dea] of trouble to show what Genesis 

 i.-ii. 4 does not mean, in the preceding pages, perhaps it may 

 be well that I should briefly give my opinion as to what it does 

 mean. I conceive that the unknown author of this part of the 

 Hexateuchal compilation believed, and meant hs readers to 

 believe, that his words, as they understood them that is to say, 

 in their ordinary natural sense conveyed the tl actual historical 

 truth." "When he says that such and such things happened, I 

 believe him to mean that they actually occurred and not that he 

 imagined or dreamed them ; when he says "day," I believe he 

 uses the word in the popular sense ; when he says " made" or 

 "created," I believe he means that they came into being by a 

 process analogous to that which the people whom he addressed 

 called "making" or " creating"; and I think that, unless we 

 forget our present knowledge of nature, and, putting ourselves 

 back into the position of a Phoenician or a Chaldaean philosopher, 

 start from his conception of the world, we shall fail to grasp the 

 meaning of the Hebrew writer. We must conceive the earth to 

 be an immovable, more or less flattened, body, with the vault 

 of heaven above, the watery abyss below and around. We 

 must imagine sun, moon, and stars to be "set" in a "firma- 

 ment" with, or in, which they move ; and above which is yet 

 another watery mass. We must consider "light" and "dark- 

 ness " to be things, the alternation of which constitutes day 

 and night, independently of the existence of sun, moon, and 

 stars. We must further suppose that, as in the case of the 

 story of the deluge, the Hebrew writer was acquainted with a 

 Gentile (probably Chaldsean or Accadian) account of the origin 

 of things, in which he substantially believed, but which he 

 stripped of all its idolatrous associations by substituting 

 "Elohim" for Ea, Ann, Bel, and the like. 



From this point of view the first verse strikes the keynote 



