Here is the separate province of each, without fear of clashing, or room for controversy.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE DETAILS OF THE CREATION NARRATIVE.

Sec.1. The Explanation of the Verses.

It remains only now to go over the narrative, the general bearing of which I have thus endeavoured to vindicate, so that minor matters of detail, in which it is supposed (1) that some contradiction to known physical fact may still lurk, and (2) something that negatives the explanation suggested, may be cleared up.

Let us take it seriatim:—­

“In the beginning God created the heaven (plural in the original) and the earth.”

As I have before remarked, we have no real need to discuss whether “bara” means originated (created where nothing previously existed), or whether we should render it “fashioned,” i.e., moulded material (thus assumed in terms to be) already in existence.

Either will yield perfectly good and consistent sense; but, as a matter of fact, there is a virtual consensus of the best scholars that the word is here used to denote original production of the material.

It is also clear that the text is intended to embrace the whole system of planets, suns, stars, and whatever else is in space.  So the Psalmist understood it:  “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.[1]” Nor is there any reasonable doubt, exegetically, that the subsequent allusion to the sun, moon, and stars, refers (as the sense of the text itself obviously requires) to their appointment or adjustment to certain relations with the earth, and assumes their original material production in space, to have been already stated or understood.

“And the earth was (became) without form[2] and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

I have, in another connection, already remarked on this verse, and so shall not repeat those remarks.

[Footnote 1:  Psa. xxxiii. 6, and so Psa. cii. 25; cf. 2 Peter iii. 5.]

[Footnote 2:  Waste (R.V.).]

I will only say that the elemental strife and rushing together of chemical elements under the stress of various forces and the presence of enormous heat, would naturally envelop the globe in dense vapours, a large portion of which would be watery vapour, capable of condensation or of dispersion, under proper conditions, afterwards to be prescribed and realized.  As it is beautifully expressed in Job xxxviii., “When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it” (verse 8).

Then commences the serial order of Divine acts with reference to the Earth:—­

(1) “AND GOD SAID; LET THERE BE LIGHT:  AND THERE WAS LIGHT.”