Now, even if there is a second account of Creation, it would surely be a circumstance somewhat difficult to explain. Contrary in any possible sense, the narrative (from chapter ii. 4, onward) certainly is not.  But why should there be a second narrative at all?  On the hitherto received supposition that chapter i. intends to tells us the process of creation—­what God caused to be done on earth, not merely what He did in heaven—­there is apparently no room for a second narrative.  Nor have I seen any completely satisfactory explanation.  But if we accept the view that the first chapter explains the Divine Design, and its being published (so to speak) and commanded in heaven, then it would be very natural that that narrative should be followed by a second, which should detail not the whole process of all life existence on earth, but (as the Bible is to be henceforth concerned with Man, his fall and his redemption) with an account of just so much of the process as relates to the actual birth on the earth’s surface of the particular man Adam, the most important (and possibly not the only) outcome of the fiat recorded in chapter i. vers. 27, 28.

In this view, not only a second narrative, but just the particular kind of narrative we actually have, is not only natural, but even necessary. Before, we had a general account of how God ordained the scheme of material-form and life-form on the earth; now we have a detailed account of how He actually carried out one portion of it—­that one portion we are most concerned to hear about, namely the man Adam, the progenitor of our own race, of whom came JESUS CHRIST, “the son of Adam.[1]”

The account is designed to introduce to us the scene of Adam’s birthplace—­the Garden of Eden.[2] The mention of a garden, and the subsequent important connection of the trees of that garden with the conduct of the man, naturally turn the writer’s attention to the general subject of the vegetation on the earth’s surface.  He prefaces his new account accordingly with a brief summary—­which I may paraphrase thus without, I trust, departing from the sense of the original:  “Such was the origin of the earth (and all in it) and of the heavenly host, at the time when God made them.  He had made every plant before it was in the earth—­every herb of the field before it grew” (mark the language as confirming what I have said—­God “created” everything before it actually developed and grew into being on the earth).  “Rain did not then fall (in the same way as now) on the earth, but the mist that exhaled from the soil re-condensed, and fell and moistened the ground; but there was as yet no MAN to till and cultivate the soil.”

[Footnote 1:  St. Luke iii. 38.]

[Footnote 2:  Which had a real historic existence. Vide Appendix A.]