Chap. xxx, verse 3.  “For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary.”

[1.  Maclean’s “Antiquity of Man,” p. 65.

2.  Chap. iii, verse 18.]

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Verse 4.  “Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for their food.”

Verse 7.  “Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they gathered together.”

And God “drove out the man” from the fair Edenic world into the post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and—­

“At the east of the garden of Eden he placed cherubims and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life.”

This is the sword of the comet.  The Norse legends say: 

“Yet, before all things, there existed what we call Muspelheim.  It is a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and situate at the end of the earth.  Surtur holds his empire there. In his hand there shines a flaming sword.”

There was a great conflagration between the by-gone Eden and the present land of stones and thistles.

Is there any other allusion besides this to the fire which accompanied the comet in Genesis?

Yes, but it is strangely out of place.  It is a distinct description of the pre-glacial wickedness of the world, the fire falling from heaven, the cave-life, and the wide-spread destruction of humanity; but the compiler of these antique legends has located it in a time long subsequent to the Deluge of Noah, and in the midst of a densely populated world.  It is as if one were to represent the Noachic Deluge as having occurred in the time of Nero, in a single province of the Roman Empire, while the great world went on its course unchanged by the catastrophe which must, if the statement were true, have completely overwhelmed it.  So we find the story of Lot and the destruction of the cities of the plain brought down to the time

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of Abraham, when Egypt and Babylon were in the height of their glory.  And Lot’s daughters believed that the whole human family, except themselves, had been exterminated; while Abraham was quietly feeding his flocks in an adjacent country.

For if Lot’s story is located in its proper era, what became of Abraham and the Jewish people, and all the then civilized nations, in this great catastrophe?  And if it occurred in that age, why do we hear nothing more about so extraordinary an event in the history of the Jews or of any other people?

Mr. Smith says: 

“The conduct of Lot in the mountain whither he had retired scarcely admits of explanation.  It has been generally supposed that his daughters believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed, except their father and themselves.  But how they could have thought so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of a deficiency of data on which to form any satisfactory conclusion."[1]