IN THE CREATION STORY OF GENESIS. 



77 



James Moorhouse, late Bisliop of Manchester, remarked to me 

 in a letter : " I think you have a grand penetrating thought in 

 that remark. There are many scientihc verisimilitudes in the 

 Old Testament. Some people, seeing tliese, ordinarily assume 

 tlmt it was one purpose of Divine Inspiration to reveal physical 

 truth. I think tliis is more than doubtful ; but your admirable 

 sentence above gives, I think, tlie true account of it. The 

 organs of Old Testament revelation had a firm grasp of the 

 monotheistic idea. This connnands so wide a range of thought 

 that it enabled them instinctively to reject jnuch which was out 

 of harmony with the general order of , God's action in the 

 physical world, and also to instinctively express those general 

 aspects of physical truth which are in harmony with that 

 order." 



IV. Closer Consideration of Genesis i and ii (1-3).* 



In the " Creation Story " itself we find that the author had 

 in his mind two distinct conceptions of the yeveatf; of the 

 things which " God created and made " (ii, o). In the first 

 place we note that at three points, and three only, does he make 

 the statement " God created " ; and these occur where we can 

 recognise, in the light of the teaching of science, as even he 

 seemed to recognise, definite departures in the evolutionary 

 process, whereby the present order of things, culminating in 

 the " Man " of Scripture, has been brought about. To the 

 author the whole range of created things seems to fall into 

 three categories : — 



(i) Non-living matter, with its energy and properties ; 



(ii) Living being>\ with their power of motion, growth, and 



reproduction each after its " kind " or species ; 



(iii) The Spiritual Nature of Man. 

 For he tells us — 



God created the heaven and the earth. 



God created every living creature (and therefore life). 



God created man in His own image. 



* Space forbids any attempt to deal with the question of the Mosaic 

 authorship of Genesis, but one feels bound to suggest that, with the 

 evidence of the Tel-el- Amarna tablets (tirst described to this Institute by 

 M. Naville), and with the portrait of Amraphel and the translation of his 

 laws (which we owe to the ability and industry of Dr. Pinches) the 

 adverse criticism as to the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch must 

 be largely discounted 



