CHAPTER XIII

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GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET.

AND now, gathering into our hands all the light afforded by the foregoing facts and legends, let us address ourselves to this question: How far can the opening chapters of the book of Genesis be interpreted to conform to the theory of the contact of a comet with the earth in the Drift Age?

It may appear to some of my readers irreverent to place any new meaning on any part of the sacred volume, and especially to attempt to transpose the position of any of its parts. For this feeling I have the highest respect.

I do not think it is necessary, for the triumph of truth, that it should lacerate the feelings even of the humblest. It should come, like Quetzalcoatl, advancing with shining, smiling face, its hands full of fruits and flowers, bringing only blessings and kindliness to the multitude; and should that multitude, for a time, drive the prophet away, beyond the seas, with curses, be assured they will eventually return to set up his altars.

He who follows the gigantic Mississippi upward from the Gulf of Mexico to its head-waters on the high plateau of Minnesota, will not scorn even the tiniest rivulet among the grass which helps to create its first fountain. So he who considers the vastness for good of this great force, Christianity, which pervades the world down the long course of so many ages, aiding, relieving, encouraging, cheering, purifying, sanctifying humanity, can not afford

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to ridicule even these the petty fountains, the head-waters, the first springs from which it starts on its world-covering and age-traversing course.

If we will but remember the endless array of asylums, hospitals, and orphanages; the houses for the poor, the sick, the young, the old, the unfortunate, the helpless, and the sinful, with which Christianity has literally sprinkled the world; when we remember the uncountable millions whom its ministrations have restrained from bestiality, and have directed to purer lives and holier deaths, he indeed is not to be envied who can find it in his heart, with malice-aforethought, to mock or ridicule it.

At the same time, few, I think, even of the orthodox, while bating no jot of their respect for the sacred volume, or their faith in the great current of inspired purpose and meaning which streams through it, from cover to cover, hold to-day that every line and word is literally accurate beyond a shadow of question. The direct contradictions which occur in the text itself show that the errors of man have crept into the compilation or composition of the volume.

The assaults of the skeptical have been largely directed against the opening chapters of Genesis:

"What!" it has been said, "you pretend in the first chapter that the animated creation was made in six days; and then in the second chapter (verses 4 and 5) you say that the heavens and the earth and all the vegetation were made in one day. Again: you tell us that there was light shining on the earth on the first day; and that there was night too; for 'God divided the light from the darkness'; and there was morning and evening on the first, second, and third days, while the sun, moon, and stars, we are told, were not created until the fourth day; and grass and fruit-trees were made before the sun."

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"How," it is asked, "could there be night and day and vegetation without a sun?"

And to this assault religion has had no answer.

Now, I can not but regard these opening chapters as a Mosaic work of ancient legends, dovetailed together in such wise that the true chronological arrangement has been departed from and lost.

It is conceded that in some of the verses of these chapters God is spoken of as Elohim, while in the remaining verses he is called Jehovah Elohim. This is very much as if a book were discovered to-day in part of which God was referred to as Jove, and in the rest as Jehovah-Jove. The conclusion would be very strong that the first part was written by one who know the Deity only as Jove, while the other portion was written by one who had come under Hebraic influences. And this state of facts in Genesis indicates that it was not the work of one inspired mind, faultless and free from error; but the work of two minds, relating facts, it is true, but jumbling them together in an incongruous order.

I propose, therefore, with all reverence, to attempt a re-arrangement of the verses of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, which will, I hope, place it in such shape that it will be beyond future attack from the results of scientific research; by restoring the fragments to the position they really occupied before their last compilation. Whether or not I present a reasonably probable case, it is for the reader to judge.

If we were to find, under the _débris_ of Pompeii, a grand tessellated pavement, representing one of the scenes of the "Iliad," but shattered by an earthquake, its fragments dislocated and piled one upon the top of another, it would be our duty and our pleasure to seek, by following the clew of the picture, to re-arrange the fragments so as

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to do justice to the great design of its author; and to silence, at the same time, the cavils of those who could see in its shocked and broken form nothing but a subject for mirth and ridicule.

In the same way, following the clew afforded by the legends of mankind and the revelations of science, I shall suggest a reconstruction of this venerable and most ancient work. If the reader does not accept my conclusions, he will, at least, I trust, appreciate the motives with which I make the attempt.

I commence with that which is, and should be, the first verse of the first chapter, the sublime sentence:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Let us pause here: "God created the heavens and the earth _in the beginning_";--that is, before any other of the events narrated in the chapter. Why should we refuse to accept this statement? _In the beginning_, says the Bible, at the very first, God created the heavens and the earth. He did not make them in six days, he made them _in the beginning_; the words "six days" refer, as we shall see, to something that occurred long afterward. He did not attempt to create them, he created them; he did not partially create them, he created them altogether. The work was finished; the earth was made, the heavens were made, the clouds, the atmosphere, the rocks, the waters; and the sun, moon, and stars; all were completed.

What next? Is there anything else in this dislocated text that refers to this first creation? Yes; we go forward to the next chapter; here we have it:

Chap. ii, v. 1. "_Thus_ the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them."

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And then follows:

Chap. ii, v. 4. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, _when they were created_, IN THE DAY that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Chap. ii, v. 5. "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God _had not caused it to rain upon the earth_, and there was not a man to till the ground."

Here we have a consecutive statement--God made the heavens and the earth in the beginning, and thus they were _finished_, and all the host of them. They were not made in six days, but "_in the day_," to wit, in that period of remote time called "The Beginning." And God made also all the herbs of the field, all vegetation. And he made every plant of the field before it was cultivated in that particular part of the world called "The Earth," for, as we have seen, Ovid draws a distinction between "The Earth" and the rest of the globe; and Job draws one between "the island of the innocent" and the other countries of the world.

And here I would call the reader's attention particularly to this remarkable statement:

Chap. ii, verse 5. "For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Verse 6. "But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground."

This is extraordinary: _there was no rain_.

A mere inventor of legends certainly had never dared make a statement so utterly in conflict with the established order of things; there was no necessity for him to do so; he would fear that it would throw discredit on all the rest of his narrative; as if he should say, "at that time the grass was not green," or, "the sky was not blue."

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A world without rain! Could it be possible? 'Did the writer of Genesis invent an absurdity, or did he record an undoubted tradition? Let us see:

Rain is the product of two things--heat which evaporates the waters of the oceans, lakes, and rivers; and cold which condenses them again into rain or snow. Both heat and cold are necessary, In the tropics the water is sucked up by the heat of the sun; it rises to a cooler stratum, and forms clouds; these clouds encounter the colder air flowing in from the north and south, condensation follows, accompanied probably by some peculiar electrical action, and then the rain falls.

But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come from? The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate. There were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air, and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth, before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.

We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru, from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1] where no rain ever falls, in consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of condensation.

Or it would have to depend for its condensation on the difference of temperature between night and day, settling

[1. "American Cyclopædia," vol. xiii, p. 387.]

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like a dew at night upon the earth, and so maintaining vegetation.

What a striking testimony is all this to the fact that these traditions of Genesis reach back to the very infancy of human history--to the age before the Drift!

After the creation of the herbs and plants, what came next? We go back to the first chapter:

Verse 21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let the fowl multiply in the earth."

Verse 25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 7. "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

We return to the first chapter:

Verse 27. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 8. "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed."

Verse 9. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good

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for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil."

Verse 10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden," etc.

Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended to Spitzbergen.

Verse 15. "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."

Here follows the injunction that "the man whom God had formed," (for he is not yet called Adam--the Adami--the people of Ad,) should not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man, "male and _female_"; and here we have him making woman over again from man's rib.

Verse 25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the Drift.

Then follows the appearance of the serpent. Although represented in the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world--the dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil. And as such he is regarded by the theologians.

He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we

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have seen, in the Hindoo legends, the demon Ravana carrying off Sita, the representative of an agricultural civilization; just as we have seen Ataguju, the Peruvian god, seducing the sister of certain rayless ones, or Darklings. And the woman ate of the fruit of the tree.

This is the same legend which we see appearing in so many places and in so many forms. The apple of Paradise was one of the apples of the Greek legends, intrusted to the Hesperides, but which they could not resist the temptation to pluck and eat. The serpent Ladon watched the tree.

It was one of the apples of Idun, in the Norse legends, the wife of Brage, the god of poetry and eloquence. She keeps them in a box, and when the gods feel the approach of old age they have only to taste them and become young again. Loke, the evil-one, the Norse devil, tempted Idun to come into a forest with her apples, to compare them with some others, whereupon a giant called Thjasse, in the appearance of an enormous eagle, flew down, seized Idun and her apples, and carried them away, like Ravana, into the air. The gods compelled Loke to bring her back, for they were the apples of the tree of life to them; without them they were perishing. Loke stole Idun from Thjasse, changed her into a nut, and fled with her, pursued by Thjasse. The gods kindled _a great fire_, the eagle plumage of Thjasse caught the flames, he _fell to the earth, and was slain by the gods_.[1]

But the serpent in Genesis ruins Eden, just as he did in all the legends; just as the comet ruined the Tertiary Age. The fair world disappears; cold and ice and snow come.

Adam and Eve, we have seen, were at first naked, and subsequently clothe themselves, for modesty, with fig-leaves, (chap. iii, v. 7;) but there comes a time, as in the

[1. Norse Mythology," pp. 275, 276.]

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North American legends, when the great cold compels them to cover their shivering bodies with the skins of the wild beasts they have slain.

A recent writer, commenting on the Glacial Age, says:

"Colder and colder grew the winds. The body could not be kept warm. Clothing must be had, and this must be furnished by the wild beasts. Their hides must assist in protecting the life of men. . . . The skins were removed and transferred to the bodies of men."[1]

Hence we read in