the flood is advanced from forty days (JE) to a whole year, its area also is immeasurably increased.  The Priestly Code states with particular emphasis that it was quite universal, and went over the tops of the highest mountains; indeed it is compelled to take this view by its assumption that the human race was diffused from the first over the whole earth.  Such traits as the missions of the birds and the broken-off olive-leaf are passed over:  poetic legend is smoothed down into historic prose.  But the value and the charm of the story depend on such little traits as these; they are not mere incidents, to poetry they are the most important thing of all.  These are the features which are found just in the same way in the Babylonian story of the flood; and if the Jehovist has a much greater affinity with the Babylonian story than the Priestly Code, that shows it to have preserved more faithfully the international character of those early legends.  This appears most plainly in his accounting for the flood by the confounding of the boundaries between spirit and flesh, and the intercourse of the sons of God and the daughters of men:  the Jehovist here gives us a piece, but little adulterated, of mythical heathenism—­a thing quite inconceivable in Q.

The Priestly Code has the rainbow, which the Jehovist, as we now have him, wants.  But we have to remember that in Genesis vi.-ix. the Jehovist account is mutilated, but the priestly one preserved entire.  If the rainbow occurred both in JE and in Q, one of the accounts of it had to be omitted, and according to the editor’s usual procedure the omission had to be from JE.  It is accordingly very possible that it was not at first wanting in JE; it agrees better, indeed, with the simple rain, which here brings about the flood, than with the opening of the sluices of heaven and the fountains of the deep, which produce it in Q, and it would stand much better after viii. 21, 22 than after ix. 1-7.  In the Priestly Code, moreover, the meaning of the rainbow is half obliterated.  On the one hand, the story is clumsily turned into history, and we receive the impression either that the rainbow only appeared in the heavens at this one time after the flood, or that it had been there ever since; on the other hand, it is made the token of the covenant between Elohim and Noah, and the use of language in other passages, with the analogy of Genesis xvii., would point to the covenant described in ix. 1-7:  the rainbow would then be the counterpart of circumcision. 1 The covenant,

************************************* 1.  The celestial bow is originally the instrument of the arrow-darting God, and therefore a symbol of His hostility; but He lays it out of His hand to signify that He has laid aside His wrath, and it is a token of His reconciliation and favour.  When there has been such a storm that one might dread a repetition of the flood, the rainbow appears in heaven, the sun, and grace, breaking forth again.  In the 0.