The story of the creation in six days played, we know, a great part in the earlier stages of cosmological and geological science.  It is not by chance that natural science has kept off Genesis ii. iii.  There is scarcely any nature there.  But poetry has at all times inclined to the story of Paradise.  Now we do not require to ask at this time of day, nor to argue the question, whether mythic poetry or sober prose is the earlier stage in the contemplation of the world.

Intimately connected with the advanced views of nature, which we find in Genesis i., is the “purified” notion of God found there.  The most important point is that a special word is employed, which stands for nothing else than the creative agency of God, and so dissociates it from all analogy with human making and shaping—­ a word of such exclusive significance that it cannot be reproduced either in Latin, or in Greek, or in German.  In a youthful people such a theological abstraction is unheard of; and so with the Hebrews we find both the word and the notion only coming into use after the Babylonian exile; they appear along with the emphatic statement of the creative omnipotence of Jehovah with reference to nature, which makes its appearance, we may say suddenly, in the literature of the exile, plays a great part in the Book of Job, and frequently presents itself in Isaiah xl.-lxvi.  In Genesis ii. iii., not nature but man is the beginning of the world and of history; whether a creation out of nothing is assumed there at all, is a question which only the mutilation of the commencement (before ii. 4b) makes it not quite impossible to answer in the affirmative.  At any rate it is not the case here that the command of the Creator sets things in motion at the first so that they develop themselves to separate species out of the universal chaos; Jehovah Himself puts His hand to the work, and this supposes that the world in its main features was already in existence.  He plants and waters the garden, He forms man and breathes life into his nostrils, He builds the woman out of the man’s rib, having made a previous attempt, which was unsuccessful, to provide him with company; the beasts are living witnesses of the failure of His experiments.  In other respects, too, He proceeds like a man.  In the evening when it grows cool He goes to walk in the garden, and when there discovers by chance the transgression which has taken place, and holds an investigation in which He makes not the least use of His omniscience.  And when He says:  “Behold, the man is become like one of us to know good and evil:  and now lest he stretch forth his hand, and take of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever,” that is not said in irony, any more than when He expresses Himself on the occasion of the building of Babel; “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of their doings, and now nothing will be too difficult for them that they have imagined to do; go to, let us go down and confound their language.”  That at the same time the majesty of Jehovah is in no way compromised is the mystery of poetic genius.  How would the colourless God of abstraction fare in such a situation ?