344 PROF. H. EDODAED NAVILLE, D.C.L., LL.D., ON 



time when man had been formed and had been put in the 

 Garden of Eden. There vegetation was luxuriant, there was 

 every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food, for two 

 obvious reasons : a river went out of Eden to water the garden 

 and man was there to dress it and keep it. At the beginning, 

 no rain and utter barrenness ; on the contrary, in the Garden 

 of Eden, where man had been established, abundance of plants 

 and fruits due, not to rain, but to a river which divided itself 

 into four branches. I do not believe the critics have ever paid 

 any attention to this fact, since they suppose that all which is 

 said of the river is an interpolation due to a redactor. This, I 

 do not hesitate to say, shows a strange lack of insight into the 

 composition of the narrative. Why should the author have 

 mentioned that special point — absence of rain, and the empti- 

 ness which resulted from it, if it was not to put it in contrast 

 to the river in the garden and to the plenty derived from it ? 



This again reveals an author who had Egypt before his eyes. 

 To him, fertility is not due to rain, but to a river, and curiously 

 this river divides itself into various branches, like the Nile. 

 There are other instances in which Moses quotes Egypt as the 

 type of a fertile and rich country. 



The critics consider that what has been called the first tablet 

 belongs to the Priestly Code, it is therefore post-exilian, end of 

 the fifth century. Chapters ii and hi, which are the 

 beginning of the second tablet, are Jahvist. They belonged to 

 the author who lived in the Southern kingdom in the ninth 

 century. The second chapter is, therefore, four hundred years 

 older than the first. The Jahvist or Jehovist is distinguished 

 chiefly because he uses for the name of God Jahveh, which the 

 Hebrew scholars since Ewald say is the right reading for the 

 word which used to be read Jehovah, and which is translated 

 M The Lord." The word for God is Elohim, the name used by 

 the other writer a hundred years later in the Northern 

 kingdom. But since throughout these chapters and the 

 following both names are joined together, Jahveh Elohim, the 

 Lord God, the word Elohim is supposed to have been added 

 everywhere by the redactor. 



The description of the river of Eden is said to have been 

 inserted by the redactor. The third chapter, except the word 

 " God," is entirely Jahvist. In the fourth, after the sixteenth 

 verse, the descendants of Cain are part of what is called an 

 older Jahvist, another unknown document, perhaps the oldest 

 which is in Genesis. 



In my opinion, the tablet ends with the first verse of 



