chapter iii

, verse 21:

"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make _coats of skins and clothed them_."

This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly, the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis,[2] only "thorns and thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just as in Job we are told:

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]

The theory of this book makes the whole story tangible, consistent, and probable.

We have seen that, prior to the coming of the comet, the human race, according to the legends, had abandoned itself to all wickedness. In the Norse Sagas we read:

Brothers will fight together, And become each other's bane; Sisters' children Their sib shall spoil; Hard, is the world, Sensual sins grow huge."

[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 388.]

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In the legends of the British Druids we are told that it was "the profligacy of mankind" that caused God to send the great disaster. So, in the Bible narrative, we read that, in Lot's time, God resolved on the destruction of "the cities of the plain," Sodom, (Od, Ad,) and Gomorrah, (Go-Meru,) because of the wickedness of mankind:

Chap. xviii, verse 20. "And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous"--

therefore he determined to destroy them. When the angels came to Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites. The angels warned Lot to flee. Blindness (darkness?) came upon the people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the houses. The angels took Lot and his wife and two daughters by the hands, and led or dragged them away, and told them to fly "to the mountain, lest they be consumed."

There is an interlude here, an inconsistent interpolation probably, where Lot stays at Zoar, and persuades the Lord to spare Zoar; but soon after we find all the cities of the plain destroyed, and Lot and his family hiding in a cave in the mountain; so that Lot's intercession seems to have been of no avail:

Verse 24. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah _brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven_."

Verse 25. "And he overthrew those cities, and _all the cities of the plain_, and all the _inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground_."

It was a complete destruction of all living things in that locality; and Lot "_dwell in a cave_, he and his two daughters."

And the daughters were convinced that they were the

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last of the human race left alive on the face of the earth, notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse 21), "I will not overthrow this city," Zoar; but Zoar evidently _was_ overthrown. And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish, committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two great and extensive tribes or races of men, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

This, also, looks very much as if they were indeed repeopling an empty and desolated world..

To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order:

1. The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them.

2. The creation of the plants, animals, and man.

3. The fair and lovely age of the Pliocene, the summer-land, when the people went naked, or clothed themselves in the leaves of trees; it was the fertile land where Nature provided abundantly everything for her children.

4. The serpent appears and overthrows this Eden.

5. Fire falls from heaven and destroys a large part of the human race.

6. A remnant take refuge in a cave.

7. Man is driven out of the Edenic land, and a blazing sword, a conflagration, waves between him and Paradise, between Niflheim and Muspelheim.

What next?

We return now to the first chapter of this dislocated text:

Verse 2. "And the earth _was without form, and void_."

That is to say, chaos had come in the train of the comet. Otherwise, how can we understand how God, as stated in the preceding verse, has just made the heavens

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and the earth? How could his work have been so imperfect?

"_And darkness was upon the face of the deep_."

This is the primeval night referred to in all the legends; the long age of darkness upon the earth.

"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

The word for _spirit_, in Hebrew, as in Latin, originally meant _wind_; and this passage might be rendered, "a mighty wind swept the face of the waters." This wind represents, I take it, the great cyclones of the Drift Age.

Verse 3. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

The sun and moon had not yet appeared, but the dense mass of clouds, pouring their waters upon the earth, had gradually, as Job expresses it, "wearied" themselves,--they had grown thin; and the light began to appear, at least sufficiently to mark the distinction between day and night.

Verse 4. "And God saw the light: that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness."

Verse 5. "And God called the light day, and the darkness be called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

That is to say, in subdividing the phenomena of this dark period, when there was neither moon nor sun to mark the time, mankind drew the first line of subdivision, very naturally, at that point of time, (it may have been weeks, or months, or years,) when first the distinction between night and day became faintly discernible, and men could again begin to count time.

But this gain of light had been at the expense of the

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clouds; they had given down their moisture in immense and perpetual rains; the low-lying lands of the earth were overflowed; the very mountains, while not under water, were covered by the continual floods of rain. There was water everywhere. To appreciate this condition of things, one has but to look at the geological maps of the amount of land known to have been overflowed by water during the so-called Glacial Age in Europe.

And so the narrative proceeds:

Verse 6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

This has been incomprehensible to the critics. It has been supposed that by this "firmament" was meant the heavens; and that the waters "above the firmament" were the clouds; and it has been said that this was a barbarian's conception, to wit, that the unbounded and illimitable space, into which the human eye, aided by the telescope, can penetrate for thousands of billions of miles, was a blue arch a few hundred feet high, on top of which were the clouds; and that the rain was simply the leaking of the water through this roof of the earth. And men have said: "Call ye this real history, or inspired narrative? Did God know no more about the nature of the heavens than this?"

And Religion has been puzzled to reply.

But read Genesis in this new light: There was water everywhere; floods from the clouds, floods from the melting ice; floods on the land, where the return of the evaporated moisture was not able, by the channel-ways of the earth, to yet find its way back to the oceans.

"And God said, Let there be a firmament _in the midst of the waters_, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

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That is to say, first a great island appeared dividing the waters from the waters. This was "the island of the innocent," referred to by Job, where the human race did not utterly perish. We shall see more about it hereafter.

"7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

"8. _And God called the firmament Heaven_. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

The Hebrew _Rokiâ_ is translated _stereoma_, or _solidity_, in the Septuagint version. It meant solid land--not empty space.

And if man was not or had not yet been on earth, whence could the name Heaven have been derived? For whom should God have named it, if there were no human ears to catch the sound? God needs no lingual apparatus--he speaks no human speech.

The true meaning probably is, that this was the region that had been for ages, before the Drift and the Darkness, regarded as the home of the godlike, civilized race; situated high above the ocean, "_in the midst of the waters_," in mid-sea; precipitous and mountainous, it was the first region to clear itself of the descending torrents.

What next?

"9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

"10. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

This may be either a recapitulation of the facts already stated, or it may refer to the gradual draining off of the continents, by the passing away of the waters; the continents

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being distinguished in order of time from the island "in the midst of the waters."

"11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself _upon the earth_: and it was so."

It has been objected, as I have shown, that this narrative was false, because science has proved that the fruit-trees did not really precede in order of creation the creeping things and the fish, which, we are told, were not made until the fifth day, two days afterward. But if we will suppose that, as the water disappeared from the land, the air grew warmer by the light breaking through the diminishing clouds, the grass began to spring up again, as told in the Norse, Chinese, and other legends, and the fruit-trees, of different kinds, began to grow again, for we are told they produced each "after his kind."

And we learn "that its seed is in itself upon the earth." Does this mean that the seeds of these trees were buried in the earth, and their vitality not destroyed by the great visitation of fire, water, and ice?

And on the fourth day "God made two great lights," the sun and moon. If this were a narration of the original creation of these great orbs, we should be told that they were made exclusively to give light. But this is not the case. The light was there already; it had appeared on the evening of the first day; they were made, we are told, to "divide the day from the night." Day and night already existed, but in a confused and imperfect way; even the day was dark and cloudy; but, with the return of the sun, the distinction of day and night became once more clear.

"14. And God said . . . Let them be for signs and for _seasons_, and for days and years."

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That is to say, let them be studied, as they were of old, as astronomical and astrological _signs_, whose influences control affairs on earth. We have seen that in many legends a good deal is said about the constellations, and the division of time in accordance with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which was made soon after the catastrophe:

"90. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowls that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven."

That is to say, the moving creatures, the fishes which still live, which have escaped destruction in the deep waters of the oceans or lakes, and the fowls which were flying wildly in the open firmament, are commanded to bring forth abundantly, to "replenish" the desolated seas and earth.

"23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

"24. And God said, Let the earth _bring forth_ the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so."

God does not, in this, _create_ them; he calls them forth from the earth, from the caves and dens where they had been hiding, each _after his kind_; they were already divided into species and genera.

"28. And God blessed them," (the human family,) "and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply and REPLENISH the _earth_."

Surely the poor, desolated world needed replenishing, restocking. But how could the word "replenish" be applied to a new world, never before inhabited?

We have seen that in