The removal of colour from the myths is the same thing as the process of Hebraising them.  The Priestly Code appears to Hebraise less than the Jehovist; it refrains on principle from confounding different times and customs.  But in fact it Hebraises much more:  it cuts and shapes the whole of the materials so that they may serve as an introduction to the Mosaic legislation.  It is true that the Jehovist also placed these ethnic legends at the entrance to his sacred legend, and perhaps selected them with a view to their forming an introduction to it; for they are all ethical and historical in their nature, and bear on the problems of the world of man, and not the world of nature. 1

************************************* 1 Yet it is possible the selection presented him with no difficulty, since cosmological myths were not popular tales, but priestly speculations, with which he was quite unacquainted. ***************************************

But with the Jehovist justice was yet done to some extent to the individuality of the different narratives:  in the Priestly Code their individuality is not only modified to suit the purpose of the whole, but completely destroyed.  The connection leading up to the Torah of Moses is everything, the individual pieces have no significance but this.  It follows of course from this mode of treatment that the connection itself loses all living reality; it consists, apart from the successive covenants, in mere genealogy and chronology.  De Wette thinks all this beautiful because it is symmetrical and intelligible, and leads well up to a conclusion.  But this will not be every one’s taste; there is such a thing as poetical material without manufacture.

How loosely the narratives of the primitive history are connected with each other in the Jehovist we see very clearly in the section dealing with the flood.  It disagrees both with what goes before and with what follows it.  The genealogy Genesis iv. 16-24 issues not in Noah but in Lamech; instead of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the sons of Noah, we have Jabal, Jubal, Tubal, the sons of Lamech, as the inaugurators of the second period.  We have also the characteristic difference, that Shem, Ham, and Japhet give us a division of mankind according to nations, while Jabal, Jubal, Tubal give a division according to guilds, which are necessarily those of the same people, as no people consists entirely of musicians or entirely of smiths.  And it is undoubtedly the aim of chapter iv. 16 seq. to describe the origin of the present civilisation, not of that which is extinct, having been destroyed by the flood.  Tubal-Cain is the father of the smiths of the present, not of those before the flood; Jubal the father of the musicians, Jabal of the shepherds of the narrator’s own period; hence they stand at the end of the genealogy and open the second period.  But as Genesis iv. 16-24 does not look forward to the flood, so neither does Genesis xi. 1-9 (the building