Genesis 2:1-3

See Genesis 1:1 ff for the passage quote with footnotes for Genesis 2:1-3

12.Genesis 2:1. The Divine Sabbath. Genesis 2:1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished. A solemn retrospect introducing the sabbath of God. And all their host. A concrete denoting of the universe from the predominant terrestrial stand-point. The host has reference to the heaven, so far, at all events, as the stars are meant. As the host of the earth, however, denotes its inhabitants (Isaiah 34:2), so the thought, moreover, gives an intimation of the inhabitants of the heaven. “The passage in the book of Nehemiah (Genesis 9:6) that treats of the creation supposes correctly that in the host of heaven (צְבַא) the angels are included.” Delitzsch. When he says farther: “The stars, according to the more ancient representation (Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian) are set forth as a host for battle, or that together with the angels they are assigned a portion in the conflict of light with darkness whose theatre is the earth created within the surrounding sphere of the luminous heavenly bodies,”—all such remarks may be taken as Parsic rather than purely Biblical.

Genesis 2:2. And on the seventh day God ended His work.—The difficulty that arises from the mention here of a completion of God’s work on the seventh day, as before it seemed to have been on the sixth, has given occasion to the Septuagint, the Syriac, and many exegetes to put the sixth day in place of the seventh. Others (Calvin, Drusius, etc.) have read וַיְכַל as pluperfect (had finished) contrary to the grammar. Knobel explains the word with Tuch and others: God let it come to an end on that day. Delitzsch in a similar manner. Richers wrongly places a completion of the creation on the seventh day. Kurtz speaks of a heptæmeron. It seems to us, however, that the rest of God does not denote a remaining inactive merely, or a doing nothing. The perfecting of the work on the seventh is likewise something positive: namely, that God celebrated His work (kept a holy day of solemn triumph over it) and blessed the sabbath. To celebrate, to bless, to consecrate, is the finishing sabbath-work—a living, active, priestly doing, and not merely a laying aside of action. “The Father worketh hitherto,” says Christ in relation to His healings on the sabbath (John 5:17). The doing of God in respect to the completed creation is of a festive kind (solemn, stately, holy), a directing of motion and of an unfolding of things now governed by law, in contrast with that work of God which was reflected in the pressure of a stormy development, and in the great revolutions and epochs of the earth’s formation. “His מְלָאכָה (His work) was the completion of a task which He had proposed.” Delitzsch. God rests now and triumphs in that last finish of His work, the paradisaical man; God’s great festival is reflected in Adam’s holy-day. In accordance with his supposition that the creative days were not numbered from evening to morning, but in the contrary order (which is opposed to the text), Delitzsch holds that not the evening of the sixth day, but the morning of the seventh, was the real beginning of the sabbath (p. 127). But the evening of the sixth day lies back before the sixth day, whilst of an evening and a morning of the seventh day there is no mention at all. Had we taken the creative days as periods generally, or the evenings as merely remissions of the creative activity, the question about the evening and the morning of the seventh day would have had no right sense. If we truly take the evenings as denoting creative crises, then may it be asked: did not a crisis follow upon the creation of Adam? and this may we find intimated (Genesis 2:21) in the deep sleep of Adam. Still must we suppose that the completion of Adam’s creation took place towards the evening or decline of the sixth day.

Genesis 2:3. And God blessed the seventh day. The blessing of the seventh day may of itself denote primarily that it was appointed for rest and re-creation, “which is a blessing for the laboring man and beast (Exodus 20:10; Deuteronomy 5:14).” But the earlier blessings say: Be ye fruitful and multiply, and to bless means to wish for, and to promise one infinite multiplications in the course of life, as to curse means to wish for one an infinite multiplication of evil—that is, to imprecate, or pray against him. The blessing of the sabbath must consist in this, that it gives birth to all the festivals (or rests) of God, and all the festivals of men—that it endlessly propagates itself as a heavenly nature above the self-propagating earthly nature, until it has become an everlasting sabbath. Its most distinct birth is the New Testament Sunday. But this Sunday must mediate the heavenly Sunday. “It makes it to be an inexhaustible fountain of re-creation” (or new life). Delitzsch. And hallowed it. To hallow is to take an Object out of its worldly relation, and to devote it to God. There is, indeed, nothing before us here of a worldly relation in a profane sense, and so far can the negative force here have no place in the hallowing. Without doubt, however, the contrast is this: he withdraws it from labor for the sake of the world, and establishes it as the festival for God. In six days’ work had God condescended and given Himself up to live for the world; on the sabbath, He ordains that the world must live for God. He blessed and hallowed it, because He rested therein—that is, He appointed His own rest, as a ground and rule for the rest of man, and of the creatures, on the seventh day (see Exodus 20:11; Exodus 31:17). “According to the author God made this appointment at the creation, but He leaves its execution to a time after Moses, when, in the desert of Sin, He practically leads Israel to the festival of the seventh day, and thereupon makes publication of the law of the sabbath on Sinai (Exodus 31:12; Exodus 35:1). There is nothing known of any observation of the sabbath before the time of Moses.” Knobel. This holds good only of the legal establishment of the sabbath, for the custom of keeping a day of rest was not confined to the Jews only. Concerning the name שַׁבָּת, which the creative account does not contain, see Delitzsch, p. 130. Derivations: 1. From שַׁבְּתַי, an old name of Saturn; 2. from (שִׁבְעַת) שַׁבְעַת, the seventh day (Lactantius); 3. contracted from שַׁבֶּתֶת, the time of holy rest, which is the most likely. Which He had created and made (marginal reading in English Bible: created to make). Grammatically the infinitive construct לַעֲשׂוֹת is rendered by the Latin faciendo. Still the explanation: which God being active (that is, by doing, or by an effort) had created, would be quite idle, were it not that one would find in the language the recognition of an antithesis to the doctrines of emanation, or generally, to the supposed heathenish pathological and fatalistic modes of creation. Delitzsch thus modifies the faciendo (or לַעֲשׂוֹת): the creating is fundamental, whilst the making, or the forming, is consequential. Then there would be denoted thereby the continuing of the divine activity beyond the time of the creative work. In respect to the four verses that follow, which Delitzsch, too, as well as Ewald and others, would make the subscription of the previous section, not the superscription of the one that follows (as Tuch, De Wette, and others), compare Delitzsch, p. 133. Knobel says (p. 7): “The Elohist has a superscription before every principal section in Genesis, and so much the more must he have had such a superscription placed before his first narration.” Ilgen, Pott, and Schumann have rightly found the same (Genesis 2:4) in the words: “these are the origines of the heaven and the earth,” etc. The word tholedoth, then, must have suffered a misplacement. According to Delitzsch it is a closing formula. We hold it to be the superscription to what follows, because the word tholedoth must otherwise have regularly preceded, and because our text regards the tholedoth, or generations of the heavens and the earth, as conditioned in its principles through the creation of the earth and the heavens—that is, the earth, and especially Adam as the principal point of view for the whole.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. The contrast which is at once drawn between heaven and earth, and whose symbolical significance cannot be ignored, proves, in the first place, that the whole period before us, from Genesis 1-12, is to be considered under the point of view of the history of primeval religion. Secondly, the constitution of man in the image of God, the history of Adam, of Abel, of the Sethites, etc.; and, further, the contrast openly appearing at the close of this section between the uniting and separating of the peoples on the one hand, and the budding theocracy on the other. Thirdly, all periods lying in the middle between these two extreme points. Within this section, which presents the contrast between the primeval religion and the patriarchal religion of Abraham, now appear individual contrasts: 1. The contrast between the paradise-world and the sin-world; 2. the contrast between the anomism of the human race before the flood, and the heathenism of man after the flood. And to these add the more special contrasts which are to be brought out by the separate sections.

The primitive religion is to be distinguished from the religion of Abraham by the following points: 1. In the primitive religion, the symbolical sign is first, and the word second; in the patriarchal religion, the word of God is first, and the symbolical sign is second. (See Genesis 12:1; Genesis 12:7.) 2. In the primitive religion the continuance of the living faith in God is sporadic. This, it is true, is in connection with genealogical relations (Seth, Noah, Shem), as the appearance of Melchisedek especially proves (comp. Hebrews 7:3); and, as a gradually fading twilight, it goes on through the times until the days of Abraham, forming continually, as natural religion, the background of all the heathenism of humanity. The faith of Abraham, on the contrary, forms with the patriarchal religion a genealogical and historical sequence. The aurora of the morning in Abraham contrasts with the twilight of the evening in Melchisedek. Melchisedek looks, with the faithful of the heathen world, back to the lost Paradise; Abraham looks forward to the future city of God—his religion is the religion of the future. 3. The symbolical primitive religion is yet, in its exterior, overgrown with mythological heathendom. While it forms the bright side of the primal religious world, its dark side arises from the mythologizing of the symbols (Romans 1:19-23). With the patriarchal religion, however, the contrast between the theocratic faith and heathendom has become fixed. 4. With the historic form of this contrast, it is at the same time conclusive that heathendom maintains its relative light side in the history of humanism, and the theocratic popular history its relative dark side, which increases to the rejection of the Messiah and the death on the cross. The material development of salvation among the Jews, and the formal development of the human form of salvation among the heathen (Greeks and Romans), are for each other, just as the evil tendencies of heathendom and Judaism unite with each other in the crucifying of Christ.

2. Within our division appears the beautiful contrast that the creation of the world is once represented in the genetic order as an ascending development of life, so that man seems the aim (τέλος) of all things; then, from Genesis 1:2, onward, in principial order, according to which man, as a divine idea, is the principle with which, and for which, the world, and especially Paradise, was created. The first view is universalistic, and hence Elohistic; the latter is theocratic, and hence Jehovistic.

3. The form of the account of the creation: religious symbolical chronicle; its source: a revealed word or image effected by the vision of a prophecy looking backwards (see Introduction). The objections of Delitzsch against the mediation of the knowledge of creation to men through divine revelation in human vision (see 79 sqq.), rest on a want of appreciation of the scriptural idea of vision, as already indicated. Delitzsch, with the more ancient catholic supernaturalism, explains our account from a divine teaching, which is defined as the interposing voice of the Spirit of God, and the guidance, through it, of man’s own spirit. To this ultra-supernaturalistic view of Delitzsch and Keil is opposed the rationalistic one of Hofmann, namely, that the account of the creation is the transposed impression in history which the world made on the first-created man reflecting on its origin. To the purely historical conception of a wonderfully preserved or regenerated (Delitzsch) tradition of revelation or legend, is contrasted the mythical conception in various forms, effected through the allegorical interpretation of Philo; which is followed by many church Fathers, and by Herder in his adoption of a parabolic hieroglyphic. a. Moral myth as a ground for the commandment of the sabbath (Paulus). b. Philosophical myth, especially the natural philosophical (Eichhorn and others). We have already shown in the Introduction why we cannot join in either the purely historical or the mythical view, but must insist on the specific of a religious symbolical history. The vision might be designated as intuition, in so far as we carry back the respective knowledge to the unfallen man.

4. In our section the world is represented according to its four different relations: 1. As creation; 2. as nature; 3. as cosmos; 4. as æon (see Lange’s “Dogmatics,” p. 222 sqq.). The idea of creation is expressed by the word ברא, as well as by the going forth ten times of the Omnific Word of God. God said, “Let there be, and there was.” The account of nature, 1. through the great contrasts, separations, and combinations: heaven and earth, darkness and light, atmospheric waters and terrestrial waters, firmament and terra firma, land and water, sky and earth. 2. Through the designation of plants, that they should bear seed, each according to its kind. 3. Through the blessing on animals: be fruitful and multiply, and the distinction of various kinds of animals, as also finally the blessing on men. 4. Through the relation of the various creatures to the sphere of birth or life corresponding to them (especially water and earth), through their coming forth from these spheres at the creating word. Especially belong here the picturesque expressions: Thohu, Vabhohu. תַּדְשֶׁא הָאָרֶץ דֶשֶׁא שֶׁרֶץ—עֵץ פְרִי עֹשֶׂה פְרִי—עֵשֶׂב מַזְרִיעַ זֶרַע—הָרֹמֵשׂ—פְרֹוּ וּרְבוּ—וְעוֹף יְעוֹפֵף—יִשְׁרְצוּ הַפַּיִם הָרֶמֶשׁ 5. The six days’ work itself. The idea of the cosmos. It appears distinctly in all the solemn pauses of the creative work, as they are marked with the sevenfold repetition of the words: and God saw that it was good. The celebration of the sabbath also belongs here, as it points back to the beautiful completion of the universe. But the idea of the æon appears with the fact that man is made the end and aim of all days of creation, by which it is clearly pronounced that he is the real principle in which the world and its origin is comprehended. The history of the earth is thus made the lifetime of humanity. Its profoundest principle of development and measure of time is the support of man.

5. The Creation. On the dogmatic doctrine of the creation, see Hase, Hutter, Hahn: “Doctrine of Faith,” and Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics.” Here comes especially into consideration 1. the relation of the doctrine of the creation to the Logos, John 1:1-3. The first verse of Genesis clearly forms the ground presupposed in that passage, God spake; through His word He created the world, says Genesis; His word is a personal divine life, says John, and the New Testament in general, especially Colossians 1:15-19; Genesis 2:3-9. According to Genesis everything is created through the idea of man in the image of God with a view to this man; according to the New Testament it is through the idea of Christ, who is the principal of humanity, with a view to Christ. As Adam was the principle of the creation, so is Christ the principle of humanity. Therefore it reads: “God hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4; comp. John 17:5). The creation is, in its most essential point, the production of the eternal God-Man in the eternal to-day. In man nature has passed beyond itself, from the relative, symbolical independence, to the perfected and real, to freedom; it has in him the mediator of its redemption, of its glorification. The beautiful cosmos, this unity of all varieties, which combines in it an endless complex of unities, to the production of external harmony and beauty, has, in Christ, the most beautiful of the children of men, its middle point, the centre of its ideal beauty. Finally, the first æon, which is fixed by the life of Adam, has for its core, its root, and its aim, the second æon fixed by Christ. 2. The relation to the Holy Ghost. The spirit is the living, self-impelling unity of spiritual life, the breath of the soul, as the wind forms the spirit of the earth, the vital, ever-active unity of its varieties. The Spirit of God hovering over the waters, is the divine, creative, living unity, which rules over the fermenting process of the Thohu Vabhohu; hence, as the peripheral principle of formation (at one with the central principle of formation, the Logos), it effectuates the separations and the combinations by which the formation of the earth is determined. In the New Testament, however, it appears in its personal strength, as the unity of all works of revelation of the Father and the Son, and as the absolute, spiritual principle of formation which effects the glorification of the world through the separation of the ungodly and the godly, and through the combination of everything godly in the church and the kingdom of God. 3. The relation of the creation to the Divine Being. In the creation, God appears as the creator, who calls forth things as out of nothing. But from the genesis out of the pure nothing, are distinguished the creative things as proceeding from the life or breath of the creator’s word, with which they come forth into existence (Psalms 104:30); and finally man stands complete with the features of divine affinity, proceeding from the thought of His heart, from His counsel, as created in His image, and intended to be His visible administrator on earth. In the New Testament, however, the paternal feature of the Divine Being has unvailed itself as a paternity, from which all paternity in heaven and on earth proceeds, but which, in the most special sense, refers to Christ, the image of the Divine Being. By the relation of the work of creation to the coming Christ, the whole creation becomes an advance representation, a symbol of Christ in a series of symbolical degrees, of which each represents in advance the next following one. Through the relation of Christ to the Father, the whole creation receives the mark of the human, especially of revelation, or of the wonderful (as denoted by the lion), of resignation, or of sacrifice (as denoted by the ox), and of the reflection of light, that is, the idea (as denoted by the eagle). But the spirit, as the unitary life of the revelation of the Father and of the Son, is reflected as creative wisdom in all creative movements of the world, and, indeed, in the fundamental forms of separation and combination, of centrifugal and centripetal force, of repelling and attracting operations. The account of the creation, Gen. Genesis 1:1, is not a dogma of the trinity of God; the completed creation, however, as a work of God and revelation, is a mirror of the trinity, and a prophecy of the revelation of its future (see Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics,” p. 206 ff. 4. The relation of the creation to revelation. The most general sphere of the revelation of God, that which forms the basis of all future revelations, is the creation of heaven and earth as the objective revelation of God, which corresponds with the subjective revelation of God in his image, Man 1:5. The relation of the doctrine of the creation to the heathen and post-heathen view of the world. It denies polytheism, for the creator of all things appears as the only one, and if his name stands in the plural (Elohim), the element of truth in polytheism (in contrast to Judaism) is therewith recognized, namely, the variety of the revelation of the one God in the variety of his strength, works, and signs, and the variety of the impressions which he thereby produces.

It denies pantheism, for God distinguishes himself by his creation of the world; he creates the world through his conscious word, consequently freely, and stands in personal completion before his work and over it, so that the world is neither to be regarded as an emanation of his divine being, nor especially as a metamorphosis of the divine being, (the second form of it,) or, vice versa, God as the emanation of the world. But it emphasizes also the true in pantheism (in contrast to deism): the animating omnipresence and revelation of God in the world, with his creating word, with his spirit hovering over the formation of the world, with his image in the dispositions and destination of man. It denies dualism, for God appears as the creator of all things directly. He is also the originator of the Thohu Vabhohu of fermenting elements; he finds in the creation no blame, and, at the end of the sixth day, everything is very good. The true in dualism is, however, also retained (against fatalism), namely, the contrast between the materials and the formative power, between the natural degrees and the natural principles, between nature and spirit. But the doctrine of creation denies much more the antichristian polytheism, that is, atomism, even to its most modern form of materialism, as such materialism rejects not only the truth of the spirit, of personal life, of the Godhead, of the immortality of the soul, and of liberty, consequently all ethical principles, but also the physical principia of crystal formation, of the formation of plants and animals. It does this by making matter regarded as devoid of all visibility, and in so far thoroughly hypothetical and abstract, or rather the infinity of feigned abstract substances (with which the Thohu Vabhohu, as a living fermentation of appearing elements, is not to be confounded), the sole God-resembling factor of all phenomena of life, such phenomena consisting of two classes, of which the physical and abstract spiritual is to be in accordance with the play of matter, the ethical, on the contrary, a bare appearance, having no conceivable or comprehensible reality. The living God here stands in contrast with the multitude of these dark idols of a feigned deity, and he places opposite the subordinate elements of life the superordinate vital principles, which give the elements their cosmical form, whilst over all he places the ruler man, with his godlike, spiritual nature.

The only thing that endures as an element of truth in materialism is the infinite and subtle conformity to law that is found in material things, a fact which spiritualism nowadays far too much disregards. The doctrine of creation also denies with increased emphasis the intensified pantheism, i.e., the most modern pantheism as opposed to personality—the pantheism which makes everything proceed from an impersonal thought, in order to let everything again disappear through continual metamorphoses (morphologism) in impersonal thoughts; for the scriptural doctrine makes all thoughts of creation proceed from an unconditioned personality, pass through fixed forms, and culminate in a conditioned personality. The truth that lies in such self-deification is recognized in this, that all works of the absolute thinking are themselves thoughts. He has spoken thoughts which have become works of creation. Finally, it denies the dynamical dualism (or the dualism of power), i.e., that hierarchical absolutism which holds as evil not only the material world, but still more the entire realm of spirit and spiritual life regarded as something to be controlled with infinite care, and with the infinite art and power of an abstract authority; for it testifies for the word of God as immanent in the world, and thereby holds fast the element of truth in that hierarchism, according to which the spirit of God hovers over the waters, and man as the administrator of God is commanded, with reference to all animal life in the world: Rule over them, and make them subject to you.

At the very first verse and word of Genesis, it clearly steps over that impure sink of dualism beyond which the entire heathen and philosophical view of the world could never go. It does this, by contrasting God in his eternal self-perfection to the creation which arose with time. The doctrine of the creation is the first act of revelation and of faith in the history of the kingdom of God. It would lead too far, should we attempt to show how the three heathen errors of religion are ever present with each other, although at one time polytheism, at one time pantheism, and at another time dualism, prevails. We make this observation, however, to indicate thereby that we do not ignore the pantheistic basis of Gnosticism, even when it plays with polytheism, since we present it according to its prevailing characteristic as dualism. But not only are the coarse ground-forms of the ancient and modern darkening of the doctrine of the creation to be judged by the first chapter of Genesis, but also the more subtle, Christianly modified forms, as, on the one hand, they present themselves in Gnosticism, (with which we also reckon Manichæism and its later shoots, extending to our time: Priscillianism, Paulicianism, Bogomiles, Albigenses, dualistic theosophs of Jacob Böhm), and, on the other hand, in Ebionitism, as it has found its continuation in the later Monarchianism, and still more modern deism. The Gnostics ground their opposition to the Old Testament on a paganistic misinterpretation of the New, and thus they may be ranged according to their more or less hostile attitude to the Old Testament, and as representing various heathenish views of the world which, after the manner of old Palimpsests, placed one upon the other, appear through the overlying Christianity. Among such Palimpsests, on which a form of Christianity has been overwritten, may be reckoned the Samaritan (Simon Magus), Syrian (Saturninus, etc.), Alexandrian (Basilides), old-Egyptian (Ophiten), Hellenic (Karpocrates), Ponto-Asiatic (Marcion), and Persian Gnostics (Manes). Finally, in Mohammed, the Arabian Gnosticism and Ebionitism ran together, as the again broken forms of Subordinatianism and Monarchianism ran together in Arianism. Through the manifold modifications which Christian dualism experienced immediately, and especially in the course of time, one must not be led astray in respect to the Unity of the genus. Just so, pure Ebionitism, whose naked image is Jewish Talmudism (as it is to be recognized throughout by its oblique position to the New Testament and the New Testament elements in the Old), has passed through various mutations whose ground-thought remains the same: namely, a fatalistic, eternalized, ontological divorcement between God and the world, through the law of religion or nature, whether the form of the change be called deism, naturalism, or rationalism. And, finally, the mixed form of gnostic Ebionitism, which was prepared through the Alexandrian system of Philo, and whose naked image is the Jewish Kabbala, has remained unchanged, through all mutations, in its ground-thoughts, whether they appear as Montanism, Donatism, or pseudo-Dionysian, mediæval and modern ultra-supernaturalism, as inflexible baptismism, or yielding spiritualism. Together with the true difference between God and the world, the doctrine of creation expresses also the true combination between both, and finds the living mediation of this contrast in the man created in the image of God; whereas, dualism makes the difference a separation, while pantheism makes the combination a mixture, and the still observable, polytheistic reminiscence in Christendom vacillates, in its love of fables, between creature deification and creature demonizing.
6. The relation of the temporal creation to the eternity of God. It is quite as wrong to transfer gnostically the origin of the real world to the eternity of God, to fix the existence of God according to theogony by speaking of a becoming of God, or of an obscure basis in God (Böhm), or of an origin of the material contemporary with the self-affirmation of God (Rothe), as it is to declare, with scholastic super-naturalism, that God indeed might have left the world uncreated. Against the first view, there is the declaration that the world had a beginning, which, a little farther on, is fixed as the beginning of time. Against the latter, there is the declaration that God chose believing humanity from eternity in Christ, as it is also indicated in our text, by the decree of God at the creation of man, and by the image of God. The world rests therefore, as an actual and temporal world, on an eternal ideal ground. Its ideal preparation is eternal, but its genesis is temporal, for it is conditioned by the gradual growing, and the beautiful rhythm of growth is time.

7. In the significant number ten, the number of actual historical completion, the account is repeated: God said, Let there be, and there was. The speaking of God now certainly indicates the thinking of God, and it thence follows that all works of creation are thoughts of God (idealism). But it indicates also a will, making himself externally known, an active operation of God, and thence it follows that all the works of creation are deeds of God (realism). Both, however, thinking and operating, are one in the divine speaking, the primal source of all language, his personally making himself known, although we cannot bring up the thought of this speaking to the conception (personalism). Through creating, speaking, making, forming, the world is ever again and again denoted as the free deed of God.
8. Theological definitions of the creation. The creatio is distinguished as a single act and as a permanent fact. A third period is, however, at the same time pointed out, namely, the continuance of the doing in the deed, so that the world would not only fall to pieces, but would pass away, if God withdrew himself from it. The thought that he cannot withdraw from it in his love, should not be confounded with the untenable thought that he might not be able to withdraw from it in his omnipotence. The absolute dependence of the world on God is at all times the same (see Psalms 104:30; Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3). On the relation of the creation to the trinity, compare Hase, Hutter, p. 149, and Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics,” p. 206 ff. The expression, creation from nothing, is borrowed from the apocryphical word, 2Ma 7:28 : ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων; comp. Hebrews 11:3. It denies that an eternal material, or indeed that anything, was present as a (material) substratum of the creation. One can, however, misinterpret the expression by making the act of creation one of abstract will, absolved from any divine breath of life (Güntherianism). On determining the creatio ex nihilo we distinguish the nihil negativum, by denying the eternity of matter as substratum of the creation, and the nihil privativum, by assuming that God at first created matter as nihil privativum, then the forms in the hexaëmeron. This the modus creationis: first, matter; then, the form. This idea of a matter as something before form, does not correspond, however, to the idea of a quickening or life-giving activity in creation. With the beginning of creation there is immediately established the contrast of heaven and earth, i.e., different spheres, which as such are not mere matter; and with the Thohu Vabhohu of the first earth-form there is immediately established the constructive activity of the spirit of God. The demiurgic conception presupposes an eternal world-matter, whether regarded according to the Persian idea as evil, or according to the Greek as blind, heterogeneous, and antagonistic, or according to the Indian idea as magically mutable, which eternal world-matter must, in all cases, make the demiurgic formation a thing of mere arbitrary sport. The true idea of the work of creation lies between this and the theurgo-magical, according to which God had made the universe, in abstract positiveness, a pure material contrast of His divine being. This is a conception in which the creating word, the spirit of God hovering over the waters, the image of God, or even the omnipresence of God in the world, do not receive their just due. As the aim of the creation finally (finis creationis), there have been distinguished the highest or last aim, God’s glorification, and the intermediate aim, the welfare of his creatures and the happiness of man. But it must be observed that God glorifies himself in the happiness of men, and that the latter should find their happiness in contemplating the glory of God.

9. The Relation of the Mosaic Account of the Creation to the Mythological Legends of the Creation. The cosmogonies of the heathen are confounded with their theogonies, as their gods with primeval man. See Lücken: “The Traditions of the Human Race, or the Primitive Revelation of God among the Heathen,” Münster, 1856. “These cosmogonies are all very similar to each other. At first chaos is placed at the head as a disordered mass (chaos alone?). This chaos develops or forms itself into the world-egg. This egg, which plays a certain part in the cosmogonies, is only a conception called forth by the apparent form of the earth, so that the sky presents itself as the shell and the earth as the yolk of this great egg. With this shaping of chaos into a world-egg, or earth-sphere, arises then, according to the representation of these cosmogonies, the first being, the ‘first-born,’ or the first man. This first man originating with (out of) the world-egg, the father and founder of all life, is now, according to the popular conception, a giant-like being. As the present man, according to primitive conception, is a microcosm, so is that first being, in heathen conception, the macrocosm itself, originating all life in nature by developing from himself the various parts of the world-organism, heaven and earth, sun and moon, mountains and rivers. Now by dividing or killing this macrocosmic being, or by mingling its generating parts with earthly things (especially fertilizing water, as in the story of Chronos), the lower life of nature begins, and things can multiply in sexual division and separation. This is the whole nucleus of all cosmogonies. And we would here observe, how frequent it is in heathen conceptions that all primitive generating being is imagined under the form of a great world-animal (as an immense ox or goat, for example), and as such worshipped. Thus the first being of the Persians is the ox Abudad, and the Egyptians worshipped it as a goat under the name of Mendes.” Here, however, the following is to be observed: 1. Behind, beside, or over the chaos, or the disordered matter, usually stands a mysterious form of the highest divinity: Brahma among the Indians, Fimbultyr among the Teutons, Ormuzd among the Persians. 2. With the Hesiodic Gaia, which proceeds from chaos (i.e., from boundless empty space), there is also Eros; so in the Chinese legend the first macrocosmic man or giant (Panku) is formed with the earth. In like manner Brahma with the Indians, and Ymer with the Teutons, become, by the division of their limbs, the foundation of the world. 3. Matter is always fixed with the divinity, or the divinity with matter. But matter is coherent with God in the predominantly pantheistic systems of emanation. According to the Indo-Brahmic, Platonic, and Alexandrian system of emanation, matter emanates with the world from divinity; according to the Egyptian and mythologico-Grecian system, divinity emanates from the world, from chaos, or the ocean. According to the predominantly dualistic systems, the world arises from a mixture in the conflict between the emanations of the predominantly spiritual, light, good God, and the emanations of the predominantly material, dark, wicked God—sometimes in a decidedly hostile position of the two powers, as in the Persian mythology, sometimes in a more peaceful parallelism, as in the Slavonian. For the various cosmologies, compare the quoted work of Lücken, p. 33; Delitzsch, pp. 81, 83, and 609; Hahn: Compendium, p. 374, with reference to Wuttke: “The Cosmogonies of the Heathen Nations before the Time of Jesus and the Apostles,” Hague, 1850. The Chaldean myth of the creation, as given by Berosus, is found in Eusebius: “Chronicles,” i. p. 22; Syncellus, i. p. 25; the Phenician myth as given by Sanchoniaton in Eusebius: Præparatio Evangelica, i. p. 10; the Egyptian myth in Diodorus Siculus, i. 7 and 10; a Grecian myth in Hesiod’s Theogony, Genesis 2:1-16 sqq.; the Indian myths in P. von Bohlen: “Ancient India,” i. p. 158; Lassen: “Indian Antiquities,” iii. p. 387 (at the beginning of the code of Manu); the Zend myth in Avesta, the Etrurian myth in Suidas under Tyrrhenia (see the “Commentary” of Keil and Delitzsch, p. 8); the Scandinavian myth in the Edda, etc.

According to the older conceptions of the days of creation as combined with biblical chronology, one could speak of a date of the creation. Starke is satisfied with the correctness of the date: 23d of October, 4004 before Christ. Schröder makes the date the 1st or 17th of September, 4201, but adds; “The Son of Man knew not the day nor the hour when heaven and earth should pass away, but the child of man would know the year and the day when heaven and earth arose.” The autumn seems to have been chosen on account of the ripe fruits, without reflecting that on the entire earth it must ever be autumn somewhere.
10. The World as Nature. a. The Ancient View of the World, that of the Bible and of Modern Times.—The world-view of the ancients was based on appearance, according to which the earth formed a centre reposing under the moving, rolling starry world; this geocentric view received a scientific expression in the well-known Ptolemaic system. This system was abandoned in the time of the Reformation for the helio-centric system of Copernicus. But because the Bible, with respect to astronomical matters, speaks the language of common life, which is yet authorized in accordance with appearances (the sun rises, sets, etc.), it was supposed that the Copernican system contradicted the teaching of Holy Writ, and not only the papal council imagined that in its treatment of Galileo, but even Melancthon was of the same opinion, and to the present day such protests, even on the Protestant side, have not entirely died away (see the attacks on Dr. Franz in Sangerhausen in Diesterweg’s “Astronomy,” p. 104; also p. 20, especially p. 325). These prove how often a contracted Bible belief can injure more than profit the faith. The Copernican theory was especially supposed to be in contradiction with the passage in Joshua 10:12-13. While men were torturing themselves with this difficulty springing from a blind adherence to the literal rendering, a much greater one was gradually stepping forth out of the background. The consequences of the Copernican system were developed, according to the discoveries of Herschel, in this wise: the sun among its planets is only a single star of heaven, and the earth is one of its smallest planets. Since now the fixed stars of heaven are nothing but suns, and these suns are all, according to the analogy of ours, surrounded by planetary groups, there appear to be countless numbers of planets, of which very many are larger than our earth. How shall we now retain the thought, that the earth is the sole scene of the revelation of God, as Holy Writ declares: the scene of the incarnation of God, and the centre of a reconciliation, dissolution, and glorification of the world, embracing heaven and earth.

The Hegelian philosophy sought at first to meet this difficulty in its own interest. In order to make the earth the sole arena of the evolutions of mind, which was to reach the full glory of its self-consciousness in the Hegelian system, the whole starry world was declared to be destitute of spirits and in the main spiritless—mere films of light, etc. (see Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics,” p. 279). The effort was made to render this barren view agreeable to theology with the pretence that it was in accordance with the Bible, and favored the faith (“Land of Glory,” p. 12 ff.). Against this insinuation the author wrote the articles which are collected in the work: “The Land of Glory” (Meurs), Bielefeld, 1838, with reference to the work of Pfaff: “Man and the Stars.” The results of modern astronomy (according to Struve, Mädler, Schubert, etc.), viz., that the other planets of our solar system have not, in the first place, the same plastic consistency nor the same planetary relations as our earth, and secondly, that the stellar world is divided into a solar planetary region like our solar system, and a solar astral region (the world of double stars, of eternal sunshine), were applied to the biblical Christian view of the world as recognizing (in its conception of various places of discipline and punishment) a place beneath the world on the one hand, and a place above it on the other; consequently the contrast of a region of growing and a region of perfected life, of the church militant and the church triumphant, of the earthly and the heavenly, of the earthly-human and the angelic life. Above all, it was observed that with the doctrine of the ascension of Christ the existence of a land of glory, in contradistinction to the earthly sphere of day and night, birth and death, or the sphere of the creative, was settled. This work was followed by the work of Kurtz: “Bible and Astronomy,” 1st ed. 1842. In the meanwhile there sprung up a third representation of cosmology, which was again to fix the geocentric stand-point in a spiritual respect. This was mainly induced by A. von Schaden, but diligently prosecuted by Dr. Ebrard, recently in his work: “The Results of Natural Science,” Königsberg, 1861. With respect to our planetary system, the said work endeavors to prove that the earth is its teleological centre, and to that end, farther, that the other planets could be either not at all or only partly inhabitable; that they are only accretions to the planetary nature, having their places there simply on account of the earth; and that considered under any other point of view they could only appear as caricatures of the planetary nature.

Delitzsch (p. 614) is in general inclined to this view. He permits, however, a natural philosopher by profession (Prof. Franz Pfaff), to speak for him, who nevertheless acknowledges (after a severe criticism of the plant-family) that there may be imagined elsewhere such beings as are organized in correspondence to the prevailing relations on other heavenly bodies. But one cannot see how the conceptions in question can be called “ creatures of fantasy.”

We consider the view of the pure unreality of the extra-earthly planetary world as neither cosmologically grounded, nor of wholesome tendency in aid of a biblical view of the world. As respects the first point, one must clearly distinguish between an inhabitability of the planets of our solar system for beings of our earthly organization, and a similar inhabitability for spiritual beings in general. If the earthly organization of man is to fix the measure for the habitableness of supra-terrene bodies, then must we also apply the analogy to the most beautiful and brilliant stellar-world. And what must become of the departed human souls, separated from their bodies? How shall there be found a native region for angelic spirits? But it would redound little to the glorification of the living God of Holy Writ to consider the whole planetary group of our sun, the earth alone excepted, as spiritless wastes. Whatever in this respect is true of the Hegelian system in general, in its relation to the stellar-world, is true of the said view in special reference to our planetary system.
[Note on the Astronomical Objection to Revelation. The question of the planets’ inhabitability, especially in its religious and biblical bearings, has been very ably and scientifically discussed in a work entitled “The Plurality of Worlds” by Prof. Whewell of Oxford. The author maintains a view similar to that of Dr. Ebrard, that the earth is the advanced planet of the system, and that the most scientific evidence goes to show that the others (especially the largest, or those of least density) are in a rudimentary or inchoate state. The same may be true of all the visible bodies of the stellar spaces. The only reasoning against it is simply the question, why not, pourquoi non, as Montaigne employs it, without any inductive evidence. This author employs also the modern view in geology with great pertinence and force: Immense times without life or with only the lowest forms of life! If this is not inconsistent with the divine wisdom and goodness, then immense spaces without life, or with only the lowest forms of life, for a certain time, is no more inconsistent.

So far, however, as this presents a difficulty to revelation and Christianity, it is not due to modern science alone, or even mainly. The inhabitability of the planets, and the “plurality of worlds,” are as much a priori thoughts, that is, rising of themselves to the musing meditative mind, as they are the results of any scientific or inductive reasoning. In both cases, imagination is the chief power of the mind employed, though modern science has furnished it with its stronger stimulants. As such a priori or independent thought, the notion of a plurality, or even an infinity, of worlds, was very ancient. It was, however, larger than the modern notion, being rather a plurality of κοσμοὶ, or mundi (that is, total visible universes) than of worlds used, as the name is now used, of planetary or stellar bodies. It was the old question of the soul demanding a sufficient reason for the non-existence, the absence of which reason seemed to be itself a proof of the actual existence. Why not? If one world, why not two—three—more—numberless? See Plutarch: De Placitis Philosophorum, vol. v. p. 239, Leip. ed., where among other statements and arguments he quotes the saying of Metrodorus: ἄτοπον εἶναι ἐν μεγάλῳ πεδίῳ ἕνα στάχυν γενηθῆναι, καὶ ἑνα κόσμον ἐν τῷ�, “it is absurd (incredibly strange) that there should be but one head of wheat in a great plain, and no less so, that there should be but one cosmos in infinite space.” The other idea of the planets’ inhabitability appears also in the Greek poetry. See especially the fragment given by Proclus:

ἄλλην γαῖαν�, ἐπιχθόνιοι δέ τε μήνην ἡ πόλλ’ ρὔρε’ ἔχει, πόλλ’ ἄστεα πολλὰ μέλαθρα.

Another land of vast extent,
Immortals call Selene, men, the moon,
A land of mountains, cities, palaces.
The Bible is charged with narrowness in its space conceptions, but how narrow is that science, or that philosophy, which while vaunting itself, perhaps, on its superior range of view, has no idea of any higher being than man, and sometimes would seem to reject any other conception of deity than that of a developed humanity, slowly becoming a god, an être suprême, to the nature still below. How glorious the Scripture doctrine appears in the contrast, as starting with an all-perfect personal being: Jehovah Tzebaoth, Jehovah of Hosts, with cherubim and seraphim, ἀρχαί, κυριότητες, living principles, ruling energies, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers. If not in space conceptions, yet how sublimely in the higher idea of ascending ranks of being do the Scriptures surpass the low and narrow views of Herbert, Comte, and Darwin. After a past eternity of progress, nature and the cosmos have just struggled up to man! This is the highest limit yet reached after a movement so immeasurably long, yea, endless in one direction; and that, too, not man as the Scripture represents him, a primus homo, an exalted being, so constituted by the inspiration that gave him birth, and signed him with the image of the eternal God, but man just rising above the ape, just emerging from that last growth of nature that preceded him in this interminable series of chance selections at last falling into some seeming order, and of random developments that never came from any preceding idea. Man as he now appears on earth, and whom Scripture pronounces a fallen being, the highest product of an endless time! Such is “the positive philosophy,” so boastful of its discoveries in width and space, but so exceedingly low and narrow in respect to the other and grander dimension! It discards theology and metaphysics as belonging to a still lower stage of this late-born child of nature, but alas for man if all the glory of his being, all his higher thinking, has already thus passed away! We may thank the Living God for giving to us an ideal world, as in itself a proof of something above nature, and of a higher actual even now in nature than our sense and our science ever have drawn, or may ever expect to draw, from it.

The objection to revelation to which Lange here alludes as drawn from the modern astronomy is itself simply anthropopathic. They who make it imagine Deity to be just such a one as themselves. If He has two worlds to take care of, it is incredible that His providence should be as particular, and His interest as near, as though He had but one to govern. Such a mode of thinking makes worth, too, and rank, wholly quantitative and numerical, banishing, in fact, all intrinsic quality, and intrinsic value, from the world of things and ideas. The bigger the universe in space, the less the worth in each part, as a part, and this without any distinction between the purely physical or material to which such a quantitative rule of inverse proportion might apply, and the moral and spiritual, which can never be measured by it.

The force of this objection comes from the fact of the imagination overpowering the reason. The lower though more vivid faculty impedes or silences for a time the higher. Reason teaches intuitively, or as derived from the very idea of God, that His care and providence towards any one rational and moral agent cannot be diminished by the number of other rational and moral agents, or be any less than it would be if such agent had been alone with Deity in the universe. The light and heat of the sun are the same whether the recipients are few or many. The case, therefore, may be thus stated: If a certain manifestation of the divine care for, and interest in, our world and race (namely, such as is revealed in the Bible) would not be incredible on the supposition of their being but one such world or race, then such credibility is not at all diminished by the discovery that there are others, few or many, to any extent conceivable. We must hold firmly to this as a pure rational judgment against the swaying imagination invading the reason, and even assuming to take its place. If the interest revealed by Christianity could be pronounced credible before the discoveries of astronomy (and this is assumed as the ground of the argument), then such measure is equally credible now, or we are convicted of judging God anthropopathically, however we may dignify the feeling with the name of an enlarged and liberal philosophy.
Besides, there is no end to the argument until it banishes all providence, all government, all divine interest conceivable in the cosmos—everything, in short, which distinguishes the divine idea from that of a wholly impersonal nature. On a certain scale of the universe the Old Testament becomes incredible. On a wider sweep Christianity, the old Christianity of the Church, can no longer be believed. The incarnation and the atonement must be thrown out; God could not have cared to that extent for this petty world. Turn the telescope, so as to enlarge the field, or, through its inverted lenses, behold the objects still farther off, and “liberal Christianity” disappears. Even that has too much of divine interest for the new view. Draw out the slide still farther, and the very latest and faintest “phase of faith” departs. Everything resembling a providence or care of any kind for the individual becomes incredible in this time and space ratio. Prayer is gone, and hope, and all remains of any fear or love of God. Farther on, and races are thrown out of the scale as well as individuals; even a general providence of any kind becomes an obsolete idea. Not only the earth but solar and stellar systems become infinitesimals, or quantities that may be neglected in the calculus that sums the series. There is no end to this. We have no right to limit it by the present size or power of our telescopes. The present visible worlds of astronomy may be no more—they probably are no more—to the whole, than a single leaf to the forests of the Orinoco. The false idea must be carried on until every conception of every relation of a personal deity to finite beings, of any rank, utterly disappears, and a view no better than blank atheism—yea, worse than atheism, for that does not mock us with any pretense of theism—takes the place of all moral fear as well as of all religion.
And this raises the farther question: If such be the diminishing effect on the religion, what must it be on the science and the philosophy? If human sins and human salvation become such small things when seen through this inverted glass, what becomes of all human knowledge, human genius, and human boasting of it? We do not find that the men who make these objections, as drawn from the magnitude of the universe, are more humble than others; but surely they ought to be so, after having thus shown their own moral and physical nothingness, and, along with it, the utter insignificance of their science.
In one aspect, his mere physical aspect, man is indeed insignificant. The Scripture does not hesitate to call him a worm. It pronounces all nations “vanity”—“the small dust of the balance,” unappreciable physically in the great cosmical scales—“less than nothing and emptiness.” Such is its view of man in one direction, whilst in the other his value is to be estimated by the incarnation of Christ, and the very fact that the Infinite One condescends to make a revelation of Himself to such a being. T. L.]

The cosmology of the Bible is geocosmic in its practical point of view. After it has presented to us the creation of the heavens and the earth, it lets us conclude from the development of the earth the development of the heavens, namely in respect to the creation of light and of man. From the spirit-world of earth we are to conclude a spirit-world of heaven. But it superabundantly indicates a development of the earthly solar system parallel with the development of the earth (Genesis 1:14). That heaven is an inhabited region, appears from many passages, e.g., Genesis 28:12; and also that this region is divided into a rich multitude of various departments. And the question is not only of heaven, but also of the heaven of heavens (1 Kings 8:27). Christ teaches us too: In My father’s house are many mansions (John 14:2). But finally the Holy Writ informs us clearly, that notwithstanding the changeability, and necessity for rejuvenation, of the entire universe (Psalms 102:27; Isaiah 51:6), there is yet a contrast between the regions of growth on this side, and of perfection on the other (Eze 1:21; 1 Peter 1:4; 2 Peter 3:13, etc.). In this respect the newest and purest astronomical view of the world corresponds entirely to this biblical distinction between the regions of growth here, and of perfection beyond. But the Bible also promises for the form of the world, even on this side, a new structure and perfection. Once all was night; but in the present order of things day and night alternate; in the future the new world shall be raised beyond the contrast of day and night (Revelation 66:21). Formerly all was sea; the present order consists in the contrast of land and sea; in the new world the sea shall be no more.

b. The Idea of Nature in the Bible. The Bible and the Investigation of Nature. We have shown in passing that the Scriptures fully recognize the idea of nature, i.e., of the conditioned going forth of the fixed life of nature from a fundamental principle peculiarly belonging to it. Every creative word becomes the ideal dynamical basis of a real principle. At first appear the principles of the separation. The separation of heaven and earth has the more general signification of universe on the one side, and of a special world-sphere on the other as represented by the earth, of which we now speak. At the second separation (light and darkness) the co-operation of the spirit of God is brought out, i.e., of the creative formative activity of God; at the third separation (water and land) the co-operation of light is presupposed. The natural law set up by Harvey (see Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics,” p. 259): omne vivum ex ovo, has been again brilliantly restored in modern times by the exact investigation of nature in opposition to the theory of generatio œquivoca, which natural philosophy had taught (see Sobernheim: “Elements of General Physiology,” Berlin, 1844). In Delitzsch also the conception of the generatio œquivoca plays a part in the account of the creation (p. 111), because he has not sufficiently considered that the creative words, in the ideal they carry, form the foundation of the actual principles of nature.

From the last-quoted principle it appears as follows:
1. Every grade of nature is fixed by a corresponding principle of nature, the natural principle of the plant, etc.
2. By its unfolding, this principle brings to light the standard of its development as the natural law of its grade. The natural principle is the first, the natural law is the second.

3. By the new principle of the higher grade of nature, the natural law of the preceding grade is modified in accordance with the new and higher life. The plant modifies the natural law of gravity, the animal modifies the local attachment of the plant; in man the animal instinct is effaced.
4. With each new life-principle God creates a new thing. The creation of the new is however the most general idea of the miracle, as the announcement of what is new is the most general idea of prophecy. Consequently, each new natural principle is to the preceding surpassed grade of nature as a miracle. “The animal is a miracle for the vegetable world” (Hegel). From this relation of the new natural principles, as they form the new degrees of nature, it follows that all nature is a symbolical support and prophecy of the ethical miracle of the kingdom of God. For as the first man, Adam, miraculously changes the natural law of the animal world, that is, changes instinct into human freedom, thus does Christ, as the new man from heaven, as the completed life-principle and miracle, change the Adamic laws of life into fundamental laws of the kingdom of God. It is in accordance with his nature to perform miracles within the Adamic sphere (1 Corinthians 46:15).

5. But what is true of the laws of nature, is also true of the matter of nature. Principle is the first thing in nature, law is the second, matter, as we know it, is the third. For through the intervention of a new and higher natural principle in the world by means of the creative word supporting it, the life of the preceding grade is reduced to the grade of matter. Thus by the appearance of the vegetable principle, the elementary world becomes matter for new formations; so, too, the animal reduces the vegetable world to the grade of material, and in like manner does man change the grade of the animal world. But the man from heaven makes from the elements of the Adamic world the matter for a new world. The materialists of our day have ridiculed the idea of a life-power which should be different from the supposed fundamental matter of the world. Instead of the life-power, there should have been opposed to them something more real: the life-principle. The life-principle is fundamentally distinguished in the contrast of plastic formative power and material substratum. They are both mutually established each with the other, but above them stands the principle. The materialist, therefore, as he explains everything from a force of matter, which no man has ever yet seen (see Lange’s “Miscellaneous Writings,” 1st vol. p. 54), does not only deny the existence of the human soul and its ethical nature and highest causality, the Godhead, but he is also the antagonist of the genuine zoologist who believes in the reality of the animal principle, as he is of the genuine botanist who does not consider the vegetable formations a shadowy play of matter on the wall, and of the crystallographer who connects imponderable forces and polarity—yea, of the genuine chemist too, who has perceived that the relations of elective affinity in substances extend beyond the atomistic conceptions. May it not possibly be explained, that as the material side of the natural principle is formed by the creating word, so is the reference of the origin of matter to a pure thought of God something else than the reference to the difficult enigma of a creative matter; and experience proves that the coarser matter everywhere, as outside or precipitate, proceeds from finer formations. It is a radical contradiction that matter should generate spirit, and, nevertheless, be everywhere subjected to spirit, even to the disappearance of its original nature.

6. The ascending line of natural principles is an ascending line of acts of creation, with which the principles always the more strengthen, deepen, generalize, and individualize themselves, and with which, at the same time, new forms of the natural law and new combinations of substances appear.
7. The finished lower sphere of nature does not produce the newly appearing principle of the higher sphere, but it is, however, its maternal birth-place. And because the lower sphere prepares for the higher, in order to serve as its basis, it is full of indications of it, and becomes throughout a symbol which represents in advance the coming new world-form.
8. With respect to the development of the nature-principles into the realization of the conditioned self-generation of nature, we must distinguish the following kinds of development: a. The development of the world-creation in general; b. the development of our solar system; c. the spherical development of the earth; d. the gradual development of the individual life on earth; e. the natural development of the individuals themselves; f. the development of nature in the narrower and the broader sense, or 1. apart from human life, and 2. in connection with it.

a. The Development of the Creation of the World in general. Through the analogy of the development of the earth, the Scripture permits us to infer also a development of heaven. The heavens are created (Genesis 1:1; 1 Chronicles 17:26; Nehemiah 9:6; Psalms 33:6; Psalms 136:5; Proverbs 3:19); the heavens grow old and pass away (Psalms 102:27; Isaiah 51:6); the heavens are renewed (2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:5). Astronomy also teaches a continuous growth, and in the same way recognizes indications of passing away in the stellar world. But there is a difference between the various celestial regions. The old Jewish and Mahommedan tradition, and the Christian Apocryphas know seven heavens (the Koran, the Kabbala, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs). But the Hebrews admitted in general three heavens as in accordance with the Scripture (Paul also 2 Corinthians 12:2-4; the third heaven the paradise): 1. The heaven of the air (the clouds, birds, changes of the atmosphere); 2. the heaven of the stellar world, the firmament; 3. the heaven in which God dwells with His angels, paradise. Of the latter heaven it must be observed that it is a symbolico-religious idea, and by no means excludes the stellar world (see Lange’s work: “The Land of Glory”). The Scripture recognizes also the distinction between an earlier heavenly stellar world and the system to which this earth belongs, as we find it indicated in the fourth day’s work. When the earth was founded the morning-stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy (Job 38:7). Consequently before the foundations of the earth those morning-stars were there. Also the “Heaven of heavens,” as well as the ascension of Christ, point to a heavenly region which lies beyond the cosmical sphere of the world, to a region “of eternal sunshine.” See the above quotations.

b. The Development of our Solar System. Although on the fourth day of the creation the whole stellar world is introduced into the circle of vision of the earth, nevertheless the cosmical completion of the system belonging to the earth is especially indicated. Special allusion is made to this system when the New Testament biblical eschatology treats of the end of the heavens and the earth, and their renewal (Joel 3:4; Matthew 24:29; 2 Peter 3:10).

[Note on the Scriptural Heavens and Earth. We think Dr. Lange carries too far what may be called the cosmological view of the Mosaic account. It either gives the writer too much science, or, in order to get a ground of interpretation independent of his conceptions, makes him to be a mere automatic medium—thus taking away the human, or that subjective truthfulness which is so precious in any view we may take of this narrative. Hence the tendency to regard the Bible heavens as the astronomical heavens of modern science, instead of the heavens of the earth, nearly connected with the earth, and in which the sun, moon, and stars appear as lights, whatever may be the near or remote causes of those appearances. See remarks in note on the Hebrew plural שָׁמַיִם, pp. 162, 163. The symbolic contrast of the heavens and the earth, with which Dr. Lange starts in the interpretation, has all the value he attaches to it; but it is not at all lost in what he might regard as the narrower view. The optical heavens, with the appearances in it, was all the writer knew, or was inspired to know, or describe. It was to him the cosmos. As this enlarges, by science, or otherwise, the conception of the heavens enlarges with it, but only as a conception. The idea remains as in the beginning. In keeping up this contrast, however, we are not to regard the scientific bodies discovered in the remoter spaces, as the heavens in distinction from our own home, as though the heavens were simply all that is off, and away from, the earth. The planet Mars is no more a heaven, or heavens, to us than we are a heavens to it. As knowledge lifts up the everlasting gates, the conception of the mundus enlarges to take in other earth-like bodies in space; but the old idea travels forth unchanged. The great symbolic contrast yet remains. The heavens, too, enlarge their scale, and the peculiar divine residence, once thought to be in the near sky just above us, is carried farther off, beyond the sky of clouds, beyond the sphere of the moon, the sun, the planets, the solar system. Science adds the stellar bodies; the heavens, the great symbolic, or rather symbolized, heavens, are still beyond, high over all, embracing all. “Who hast set Thy glory above the heavens,” עַל הַשָׁמַיִם (compare עַל as used Genesis 1:20; Genesis 19:23, שֶּׁמֶשׁ עַל-הָאָרֶץ); “Who stoopeth down to behold the things that are in the heavens (the lower heavens) and the earth,” Psalms 113:6. Solomon’s language, “The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee,” may, or may not, be surpassed in its local conception, but no science, it may be repeated, will ever transcend it in idea. Whatever the number of spheres, real or imaginary, the שְׁמֵי שָׁמַיִם, the heaven of heavens, is still the great heaven above them all. T. L.]

c. The Spherical Development of the Earth, or the Six Days’ Work. As was above indicated, the six days’ work have been represented in the sequence of a twofold ternary, in which is mirrored the significance of the number three. We construct these ternaries in the following manner: 1. Light and the lights; 2. water and air, and the animals of water and air; 3. the solid land and over it the vegetable world; the land-animals and over them man. As to the strict consistency of these days’ works, the most celebrated naturalists, as Cuvier, have expressly acknowledged it. Now we find these days’ works construed in the most manifold way; in part purely according to the Scriptures, in part purely according to natural science, and partly in distinct comparison, whereby the harmony between the Bible and natural science is contested or maintained. Scriptural representations of the six days’ work. Here the 104th Psalm exceeds all. First day, Genesis 2:1-2; second day, Genesis 2:3-4; third day, Genesis 2:5-18; fourth day, Genesis 2:19-20. The fifth day and the first half of the sixth are freely inlaid into the picture from the fourteenth verse. The sixth day also from Genesis 2:14; but in Genesis 2:23 man appears more distinctly in his rule. Here follows an accurate picture of the whole creation from Genesis 2:24. The creation of the new world, which is the aim of the Apocalypse, passes also through a sevenfold stage. Here an accord in the order of the six days’ work is not to be misunderstood. 1. The seven congregations as the seven candlesticks of the earth, Christ in a figure of light in their midst, with seven stars in His hands—an allusion to the creation of light of the first day (Genesis 1-3). 2. The seven seals. The council in heaven and the seven seals or decrees of sorrow on earth—an allusion to the creation of the firmament between the waters above (Genesis 4:6, the “sea of glass”; comp. Genesis 7:17) and the waters beneath (the blood of the lamb, Genesis 7:14), Genesis 4-7. The seven trumpets. Decrees of judgment on the earth preaching repentance (Genesis 8:7) and on the sea (Genesis 2:8)—allusion to the separation of land and sea (see also Genesis 10:2), Genesis 8:1 to Genesis 10:2. The seven thunders (voices of awaking whose speech had been sealed). The angel who had awakened the seven thunders, raises his hand to heaven and swears that hereafter time shall be no more. Episodes from the stage of the seven thunders: the swallowed scroll, the measuring of the temple of God, the two olive trees, the woman in heaven clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head—an allusion to the lights created to mark the seasons (Genesis 10:3 to Genesis 12:2). 5. The seven heads of the dragon. The (flying) dragon in heaven, the woman with eagles’ wings, and the beast out of the sea with seven heads, the earthly anti-Christ representative of the seven heads of the dragon—allusion to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the sea (Genesis 12:3 to Genesis 13:10). 6. The seven last plagues or vials of wrath. Introduction: the animal out of the earth, the number 666 (with reference to the significance of the number 6; perhaps also the sixth day); the lamb on Mount Sion, the image of God with the 144,000 virgins who bear on their foreheads the name of the lamb and the name of the father, i.e., are images of God; the announcement of the judgment, of the seven last plagues; the judgment on the earth; the whore, her counterpart the bride and her bridegroom, heroes and deliverers, judges of spirits and associates in the apostasy—allusion to the animals of the earth and to man created in the image of God, with the command: Rule over them and make them subject to you, Genesis 13:11 to Genesis 19:21).

7. The great Sabbath of God (Genesis 20, 21). It is, of course, understood that so original a creation as the Apocalypse could not be an allegorical copy of the six days’ work. In the Epistle of Barnabas (among the writings of the Patres apostolici) we find Genesis 1:15 the incorrect literal interpretation of the passages Psalms 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 (according to which a thousand years of earth should make one day of God, consequently six thousand years of history the great spiritual week of God which is to precede the divine millennium sabbath). This became later a standing presumption of the chiliastic computations. One of the first patristic representations of the hexaëmeron with polemical references to the heathen view of the world, we find in the apology of Theophilus of Antioch: Ad Autolycum, lib. ii. cap. 12 sqq. Many others have followed these (see Introduction). Among the modern biblio-theological representations of the six days’ work, that of Herder (“Oldest Record of the Human Race”) occupies a prominent place. It rejects all combinations of the scriptural text with natural science. It traces back the account to the teaching of God; but it arose by means of human observation of the rising sun, as in this the picture of creation is ever unrolled to the eyes of the observer. The representation itself he calls a hieroglyphe for the instruction of man in the great pictures of creation, as presented to his contemplation in the order of life, first work, then rest (the sabbath-law), and in the numbering of days (with reference to the week) as given to him in language, etc. He finds in the account the symbols of the first religion, natural science, morality, politics, chronology, writing, and language. In his poetic diction there is much that is beautiful; but the picture he gives us of the terror of the Orientals in respect to darkness and labor is very partial and exaggerated. The same may be said of many other things in his book. The ignoring of the reality of the six days’ work is rationalistic. The construction is as follows:

I. Light.

II. Firmament.

III. Terra firma.

IV. Lights.

V.

Water
Air

}

of heaven.

VI. Creatures of earth.

VII. Sabbath.

In the spirit of Herder, but independent in its view, and determination of the individual parts, is the representation in F. A. Krummacher’s “Paragraphs on Sacred History” (p. 22 ff.). The six days, as such, and in themselves understood, are to him divine days. Zahn also falls back on Herder in animated representation (“History of the Kingdom of God,” p. 1 ff.). Grube’s delineation of the six days’ work is very comprehensive and full of meaning (“Features from Sacred History,” p. 11 ff. Scientific representation of the six days’ work. On the historical development of the doctrine of the cosmos, see Alex. von Humboldt, iii. p. 3 ff. Steffens: “Polemical Sheets for the Advancement of Speculative Physics.” Second number, on Geology, Berlin, 1835 (here are quoted, p. 6, the respective geological works of Cuvier, Boué, Brogniart, Elie de Beaumont, De la Beche, and Von Leonhard). Merleker: “Cosmography,” Leipzig, 1848, p. 3. There is also the historical part of Lyell’s “Principles of Geology,” and Vogt’s “Compendium of Geology” (Braunschweig, 1854, 2 vols.); Reusch: “Bible and Nature,” p. 71. Here belong Quenstedt: “Then and Now.” A popular treatise: Harting: “The Antemundane Creations compared with the Present.” From the Dutch, Leipzig, Engelmann, 1859. See, moreover, the preliminary literature. We must distinguish those treatises which regard the Hexaëmeron of Moses, and those which do not. And further, we must distinguish the systems which assume the formation of the earth by radical revolutions in a steady sequence of new creations (Cuvier), and those which assume a gradual transformation with partial revolutions. Harting belongs to the latter. We must, however, certainly maintain that a seed or germ of creation (for the transformation) must have passed through the catastrophes out of the earlier stage into the later, analogous to the process at the flood, but transformed in a creative way during the metamorphosis of the earth. But the doctrine of the great catastrophes is not therewith excluded. In respect to those who deny the existence of any harmony between the Bible and natural science, it may be said, that a few theologians in Germany, with shallow scientific acquirements, have undertaken the work; such as Ballenshedt (in the notorious book: “The Primitive World”), Bretschneider, and Strauss. In England recently Goodwin (in the Essays and Reviews). Schleiermacher has also in this respect expressed anxieties which prove that he was not well posted on the point (“Studies and Criticisms,” 1829, p. 489). Most recently has this assumed opposition become a special dogma of the Hegelian school of Tübingen, which has its main altar in Eastern Switzerland. On the side of natural science the harmony has been mainly contested by French authors; in Germany, by Vogt and Burmeister. On the side of the naturalists, who at the same time were scientifically learned and Bible-believing men, stand Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Haller, and Euler; at a later period the Frenchmen Cuvier, Brogniart, Deluc, Biot, Ampére; in Germany, Steffins, H. von Schubert, A. Wagner, and others. (See Reusch, p. 63 ff.) To these add also the Bible-believing cosmologists—the Frenchmen Marcel de Serres, de Blainville, the Belgian Waterkeyn, and especially many Englishmen and North Americans (Reusch, p. 67; see especially also Delitzsch, p. 609). A significant position is taken by the already quoted work of Buckland: “Geology and Mineralogy,” etc., as given by Werner, in the German edition of the well-known “Bridgewater Treatises,” vol. v., with which compare the valuable criticism of it by W. Hoffmann, in “Tholuck’s Literary Advertiser,” 1838, Number 44. “The conditions on which the great geologist treats with his timid brothers in the theological world are (according to W. Hoffmann) the following: 1. Geology has evidently proved that the surface of our planet has not been from eternity in its present condition, but has passed through a series of creative operations, which followed each other in long, fixed periods of time. 2. There is an exposition of natural phenomena which stands so little in contrast with the Mosaic history that it even throws light on dark parts of it, and thereby confirms it. 3. The authenticity of the Scriptural text must remain unscathed, but the exposition demands concessions from the literal expositor; the reader must make this, and indemnify himself therefor by the accession which geology supplies to natural theology. 4. The Bible does not aim to give solutions of geological and other questions of natural science. Else, God would have found it necessary to endow man with omniscience, because he was obliged, at the same time, to impart to him all degrees and kinds of human knowledge, if the revelation were not to remain an insufficient one.” In several points Hoffmann has corrected the author with a free and large survey, namely, in the endeavor of Buckland to transfer all the periods of the geologically determined earth-formation into the undefinable beginning before the first day of the creation, although to those geological periods the long biblical day-periods are still to be added. Hoffmann, on the contrary, alleges that then the eyes of the trilobites, for example, must have existed before the creation of light. The same is true of the first vegetable and animal world throughout. The same untenable view, however, that will transfer the geological periods, with their relation to each other, into the time of the Thohu Vabhohu, meets us also now in various forms. It is represented by Andreas Wagner and Kurtz (see, on the contrary, Delitzsch, p. 112). The more defined combination of geological results and the biblical account appears in a form sometimes mainly scientific, and again mainly theological; but the two series cannot be strictly separated from each other. Reusch places here Marcel de Serres, Waterkeyn, Andreas Wagner, Wiseman, Nicolas: “Philosophical Studies of Christendom,” Sorignet (La Cosmogonie de la Bible devant les sciences perfectionées, Paris, 1854), Pianciani, Kurtz: “Bible and Astronomy,” Keerl and Westermeyer, whose work, in his view, is without scientific value. So also Mutzl, Michelis, Ebrard, and a series of Essays in the Periodicals: “Nature and Revelation” (Münster, 1855 ff.), and “The Catholic” (Mentz, 1858 sqq.). We also enumerate here, La Cosmogonie de la Révélation, par Godefoy, Paris, 1841, the previously quoted works of O. Reinsch, Fr. von Rougement, and Böhner (with respect to the cosmogonal theory of Kant and La Place). The newest commentary on Genesis, by Keil, shows no progress. Keil insists on regarding the account of creation as an historical record in the strictest sense; he opposes the division of the six days’ work according to ternaries, he sets the act of creation in excluding contrast with the idea of the natural process, boldly questions the evidence of the various periods of the creation, and contends that the days of the creation are simple earth-days. With this continued darkening of the present view of the state of the case, it is a small merit that the theosophic view of the Thohu Vabhohu seems sets aside (p. 16).

The six days’ works are above all things to be comprehended as six consecutive acts of creation, in which, every time, a new creation is placed as a new appearance of the cosmos. For the world is to be regarded throughout as being, in respect to its foundation, the act of God, or creation (in the stricter sense); according to its development, nature, whilst, according to its appearance, cosmos, and, according to the plastic life-principle lying at its base (the future of man and the God-Man), it is œon. The creation is, in the first place, and in general, represented as creation of heaven and earth; then the history of the earth is specially brought out with reference to its relation to heaven, and also to give an idea of the cosmical creation beyond the earth in our planetary system. The characteristic traits are the following:

The First Day. The separation of darkness and light, i.e., of dark and light matter. We must here preserve the text from the terrifying pictures of darkness in Herder, and the conceptions of darkness, approaching dualism, of certain theologians of the present day. The Scripture speaks also of a “ smiting of the sun” (Psalms 121:6; Jonah 4:8), and of a sacred obscurity, also of a beneficent shade, as Christendom recognizes a holy night; it knows also a higher unity of day and night (Rev 20:21; see “The Land of Glory,” p. 150; Novalis: “Hymns to the Night”). Nothing is more dangerous to life than the commingling of physical and ethical darkness (see Isaiah 23:45). God did not make physical darkness in so far only as it is privative, mere absence of light, but he made it in so far as he made the earth, the darkness in general, and the order of life: day and night. With respect to light and its effects, comp. Schubert: “Mirror of Nature,” p. 457 ff.; also F. A. Krummacher’s poem: “The Light,” and Milton’s “Salutation to Light.” The light is in the Scripture as an image of the Godhead, or of its indwelling (1 Timothy 6:16). It is God’s garment (Psalms 104:2), an image of the being and life of Christ and of its efficacy. Not without reason have some designated light as the first creature of God, and distinguished between latent light = material darkness, and free light-matter. Comp. what Hoffmann has observed, in his quoted criticism, about the visible creation proceeding from the invisible sphere of the creative powers, the imponderable substances dynamically regarded. (Comp. Hebrews 11:3) The unity of the contrast of centripetal and centrifugal power (sympathy and antipathy), attraction (gravity) and repulsion (motion), warmth and light, appears to lie in something beyond the relative contrast of electricity, where warmth predominates, and that of magnetism, where light predominates (although in both one is set with the other); which remoter principle we may designate as a breath of life, whose material product is an inconceivably minute, fundamental form of the luminous world-body which is to spring from it, as the cell or the fundamental form of organic life, in an element of growing light, that is, which becomes light, or an ether, which as earth-matter has attractive power, and, as a medium of light, repulsive power. With respect to the evenings and the mornings, it is to be observed that Kurtz has also effaced their optical reality. By the evenings is meant the going out or departure of the separate visions. The permanent reproduction of the word, “Let there be light,” is not so much the rising of the sun, according to Herder, as rather the electric spark, the lightning proceeding from the dark thunder-cloud, the northern light of the long polar night, just as every meteoric revelation of the light-nature of the earth. For this is clearly intimated, that the earth, until its arrangement into cosmical dependence on the sun, found itself in a condition of self-illumination, like that towards which it ever strives to rise in the polar night. Physical darkness is undoubtedly made by the Scriptures an image of ethical darkness, for it is the comparatively imperfect. But we again distinguish the black night, which may be in measure illuminated by every spark; the gray night of mist, which is in positive opposition to the light, and the white night, or blinding light, by which the light is corrupted into the worst darkness, or the most evil night.

Second Day. About the upper waters, see the Exegesis. The allusion they contain to the matter of the distant world-space, the space of heaven, is found also in mythology (see Delitzsch, p. 614). But it is questionable whether, along with the upper waters, there is also presupposed here a world-matter out of which the lights are formed on the fourth day of creation (A. Guyot, with the addition of the mist theory of La Place; Fr. de Rougement, translated from Fabarius, p. 61, with distinct reference to our planetary system; Böhner, p. 158, a clear and instructive representation). But it is to be observed that the lights of the fourth day clearly refer to the light of the first day, consequently not to the upper waters of the second. The rakia, as firmament, indicates the boundary line behind which water, air, and æther, flow together. Consequently, this firmament indicates, at the same time, the boundary line between the centripetal and centrifugal force of matter, between its impulse to become earth, and its impulse to become light. But this is just what makes the rakia a symbol of the real heaven: it is the equator which spirits pass in their passage to the home in light. The second day is therefore the separation of the atmosphere and the element of liquid earth (dividing the substance of light and the substance of darkness), and probably still glowing hot. With the firmament, between the coldness of the æther and the warmth of the earth, as between light and gravity, are built the first formations of the earth as the vessel of its liquid nucleus; neither Plutonic nor Neptunian, because fire and water are not yet separated. For the contest between Plutonism and Neptunism, see Delitzsch, p. 609. The contrast of both systems does not begin till the third day of the creation, with the separation of water and land. The beginning of the third day of creation (the evening) probably marks the period of the actual water-formation from the precipitates of the recent atmosphere, with which the entire new surface of the earth is overflowed. In the transition from light days, and rain-storms, and hurricanes, is mirrored the creation of the second day. The crystals and precious stones children of night. “On the second day God made nothing,” says Rougemont, “he only caused a separation.” But such a separation was a creation.

Third Day. Separation between land and water. In accordance with this, the development of fire, which brings forth the earth, and combines with water, to continue the formation of the earth. The first appearance of plants on points of earth in insular dispersion. Remains of the general flood: deserts, sandbanks. (Question, whether the plants throughout were created before coal, or whether coal is not mainly to be considered as pre-existing as a formative substance of the plants.)

Fourth Day. The cosmical combination of the lights of heaven and the earth. Cosmico-atmospheric and chemical completion of the earth for the conditions of a higher life. Ecliptic. Beginning of the relations of the zones. Continued operation: the zones, the seasons, the periods. The metals children of light.

Fifth Day. Animals of the water—birds. The conclusion of this period and the first half of the following; the main period of the strata-formation and the petrifactions, although this period begins with the end of the third day.

Sixth Day. The catastrophe introducing this closes, with its completion not manifest before the appearance of man, or the cycle of the great general revolutions, and introduces the world which is intended to be Adam’s home. The natural law, in its central effect as a law of necessity, is abolished in the destination and freedom of man.

Seventh Day. God reposes and rests in man. Man reposes and rests in God. God’s sabbath is reflected in the sabbath of the world. Just as the geology of the first day represents the cosmogony through the universality of light, so the firmament of the second day represents the heaven above and the earth beneath. Then the fourth day, in contrast to the third, points up again to the cosmos. On the fifth day of creation the birds of heaven must at least indicate the cosmical relation; on the sixth day man, the special representative of the spirit-world.

d. The Gradual Development of the Individual Life on Earth. The idea of the natural life is the idea of a relative independence communicated by God to the world, which passes through the stages of symbolical independence to actual independence, or that freedom of man in which nature is abolished. We distinguish, accordingly, the following degrees of independence in an ascending line: 1. The element: or dependent self-existence to be annulled (through chemistry); 2. the chemical combination: or the mutual relation of the one element to the other, i.e., to its related opposite; 3. crystals: self-formation in forms and colors; 4. plants: self-production, reproduction; 5. animals: self-motion inwardly (self-perception), outwardly (motion in the narrower sense); 6. man: self-consciousness and power of self-control; 7. the power denoted points to the man from heaven, the God-man: or complete self-control in complete self-comprehension in the unity with God, nature, and humanity (see Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics,” p. 247).

In respect to the classification, we remark, 1. That every lower grade reappears in all higher grades in a continually modified form; 2. that it is the coming grade as a symbol and actual prophecy; and 3. that it takes the lower place of a serving and supporting substance for the higher grade. In man all grades are combined and subordinated to spirit. As he is an image of God, so also is he an image of the earth; so also of the universe. Microcosm. The idea of the lower grade is not so to be understood as if the stamp of divine authority were wanting to it. 5. Every grade comprises again lower and higher formations; with the lowest it reverts to the preceding grade, but with the highest it presents, in its solemn pauses of formation, a preliminary or provisional completion which becomes the symbol of the completion of life in general. Through those relapsing or bastard-like formations arise the poisons, according to H. von Schubert and K. Snell (see Lange’s “Dogmatics,” p. 266), which are an allegory of moral discord and relapse into sin. The completed types of a fixed grade of nature are, on the contrary, the precious stone, the palm, the rose, the eagle, the dove, the lamb, etc., becoming with their transient completion symbols of the highest life. The period which is peculiar to each grade, appears with it in full power; hence in the element, the obscure, enigmatical, apparently isolated existence; in chemistry, the whole irresistible power of physical elective affinities; in the crystal, the stately play of the sternest forms and the most beautiful colors; in the plant, the whole power of reproduction (through root, seed, and branch), and of growth high into space, and far into time; in the animal, the motion in all kinds and in all grades; in man, finally, the self-consciousness in that perfected intensity which makes it the most peculiar characteristic of his being. 7. The individual formation appears in every grade in greater power. Hence the elements have mostly lost themselves in chemical combinations, and these again submit to the most manifold separations. Hence crystals are mostly altered, arrested, or distorted through disturbing influences or checks, and seldom appear pure. Hence plants are capable of greater degeneracy in their kinds than animals, and the metamorphoses of the subordinate animals greater than those of the higher. This disposition to degeneracy and to variety has lately become an inducement to dispute the idea of fixed species, as we see it in the work of the English naturalist Darwin, on the origin of species in the animal and vegetable world by natural generation, translated into German by Bronn, Stuttgart, 1860. This work, doubtless, will only be able to induce more exact formulas as to the grade of the individuality of the species and the susceptibility of modification in their pure ground-types through antagonistic or favoring influences.

e. The Natural Development of the Individuals themselves. It passes through a regular series of stages or metamorphoses in which the metamorphoses of growth to maturity, of the transition from one ground-form into another (analogous in the insect-world to the passing through various natural grades) are to be distinguished from a higher state of perfection. It has indeed been doubted whether from the beginning our nobler grains have not been distinguished from the wild species, and also the tame domestic animals from the wild. The Scripture seems to speak in this tone in the distinction appearing in the very beginning between cattle and wild animals, and farther on in the distinction of certain plants of Paradise (see Delitzsch, p. 622 and Genesis 1:2).

f. The Development of Nature at large. 1. Apart from man. That nature waits patiently for man appears from the fact that left to itself it grows wild, and in boundless luxuriance threatens to overwhelm and smother itself, as is proved by the primitive forests, the marshes, and the miasmas. 2. In reference to man. Nature is intended to develop itself in accord with man. It therefore sympathizes in his fall (Genesis 3:17 ff; Genesis 19:28; Deuteronomy 28:15 ff; Isaiah 13:6 ff; Romans 8:19 ff), and in his resurrection (Deuteronomy 28:8; Job 19:77; Isaiah 23:35; Isa 65:66; Romans 8:21; 1 Corinthians 15:45 ff; 2 Peter 3:13; Rev 20:21). See De Rougemont, Philippians 50:2 and 3.

Therefore also has man in his individual form, and man in his totality, his natural side; and therefore it is that the most sublime idea of nature (for the idea of nature, see the quotation from Aristotle in Lange’s “Dogmatics,” p. 258), or the idea of an inceptive founding, of a gradual development, and a final completion of animal life, does, for that very reason, present itself to us in the history of the kingdom of God, as the miraculous tree, which continues to grow from the beginning to the end of the world, with its crown reaching into eternity. And especially in the history of the God-Man, does it thus appear as a tree whose roots go back into the foundation of creation, and whose boughs, branches, blossoms, and fruits spread throughout the new humanity. The natural sciences have not yet attained to the greatness of the scriptural idea of nature.

Of the Relation of the Account of the Creation and of the Holy Writ in general to the Natural Sciences. In this relation a fourfold collision may be conceived: 1. An incorrect exegesis of the Scripture may clash with an incorrect exegesis of nature (the investigation of nature is indeed only exegesis, and its teachings are to be distinguished from the objective facts themselves). 2. An incorrect scriptural exegesis can contradict the ground-text of the life of nature. 3. A false exegesis of nature can come in conflict with the text of the Scripture. The fourth case, that the sense of the Scripture itself, or the text of nature itself, might be in contradiction with each other, could only be imagined on the ground that Scripture and nature were not, both of them, books of revelation of the same God. The thorough, scientific, and theological investigation confirms more and more their harmony. Pretended incongruities in the account of creation itself are: 1. Light before the lights or illuminating bodies. This is thoroughly removed (see Exegesis). 2. The earth proceeding from the water in contrast to Plutonism. This objection reposes on the misunderstanding of the waters Genesis 2:2 and Genesis 2:6, and exaggeration of the demands of Plutonism. 3. The firmament on the fourth day. See the Exegesis and the fundamental thoughts. 4. The days of creation: Also removed by the correct exposition which makes them peculiar days of God. When, however, naturalists fill their mouths with millions of years as a necessity for the formation of the earth, they fall into contradiction with the spirit and the laws of nature itself. It is a law of nature that the subordinate formations arise more rapidly than the higher ones. And further, that life in the glowing, warm moments of its origin, moves more rapidly than in its development. If man continued to grow in the same proportion as in the maternal womb, he would increase beyond the highest trees. 5. The relation between the heliocentric and the geocentric view, see above. Pretended collisions between the scriptural miracles and nature. See “Bible-Work,” Matthew; “Life of Jesus,” ii. p. 258; “Philosophical Dogmatics,” p. 467. On the prophetic-symbolical parallel-miracles, see more particularly in the “Bible-Work,” Exodus.

11. The World as Cosmos. The idea of the cosmos, i.e., of the regulated, unitary, beautiful appearance of the world, makes itself known, at first, through the sevenfold verdict: “God saw that it was good.” In this we must bear in mind that, with the good, the adjective טוֹב means also the appropriate, the agreeable, the beautiful. But when it is said for the seventh time, after the creation of man, and with enhanced emphasis: Behold everything was very good, there lies therein a reference to the fact that the great world, the macrocosmos, has reached in man, as the microcosmos, its living point of unity. A variety, however, which with its appearance rises into an ideal unity, forms the very idea of the beautiful. But here this idea is, at the same time, in its completeness, the idea of the good; for in man the finite world has reached its unending eternal aim. And then there is what may be called the poetical account of man affirming his appearance in that parallelism of phrases, Gen 2:27, of which it has been observed, it is the first example of religious poetry, as the song of Lamech, Genesis 4:23, is the first example of secular. The solemnity of the cosmical appearance of the world is then again specially expressed in the delineation of the rest of God on the seventh day. The sabbath of God is the primitive picture of the human days of rest and festivity, in which the adorning of the world appears in the reflection of human adornment, and human worship endeavors to unite in itself all forms of the beautiful, of art, as it also unites with the most beautiful periods of the life of nature in the course of the year. The Holy Writ retains also this view of the world especially in the appreciation of the beautiful, even of female beauty, and in the reverence of the sublime and beautiful nature (Psa 8:19 and Job 19:104; Isaiah 23:40, etc.), in the glorifying of the beautiful service of Jehovah (who Himself is adorned with light, Job 19:104), and in its own festal robes of beauty. It may be observed, in passing, that the Jewish Rabbinism has discovered strange reasons why, in the account of the second day, there does not also stand the expression: “He saw that it was good;” it was because, say they, on that day the apostate angels fell, because on it God created hell, or because the waters brought the flood over the world. It is generally assumed that the sentence of approbation of the firmament on the second day is comprised with that pronounced on the formation of the land on the third day, and on the firmament on the fourth. This is pursued farther in the preceding exegetical illustration. It is known that the Grecian idea of beauty and of the cosmos is elevated far above that of the Chinese, satisfied as it is only with the delicately formed, the variegated, and the cheerful, and whilst it detests the shadows in the picture. Certain representations respecting the darkness and night in the treatment of the six days’ work remind us of the Chinese or Persian views; for instance, in Herder, Delitzsch, Rougemont (p. 11), and in Christianus (“Gospel of the Kingdom,” p. 5). In one respect, again, is there presented a similar difference between the Grecian and the scriptural idea of the cosmical. The former throws the obscure into the background, because it cannot resolve it into higher unities. For the Hebrew, that which is the ugly in a smaller unity is only the picturesque shadow in a general higher unity (see Psalms 104:20; Psalms 148:7-8). The obscurity of the cosmos, originating with sin, is quite as well to be regarded subjectively, according to which the world meets the sinner in an uneasy threatening form (Ecclesiastes 1:8), as objectively, according to which the creature, as suffering, must, in reality, with fallen man, sigh for redemption (Romans 8:19).

12. The World as Æon. That the world also in its truest and most inward principle of life and development is comprised in man, appears already from the strong emphasis with which man is introduced in the first chapter of Genesis as end or aim of the creation, but still more from his principial position at the head of things, which is given to him in the second chapter. The idea of the æon is a development and a developing period of life placed with the power of life in the principle of life. The world as æon has also the principle of its life-power, its duration, form, and development in man. And thus is it explained that with the distinction of universal history into the history of the first and second man, or Adam and the Messiah, there is also distinguished a twofold æon. But it is in accordance with the idea of the æon, that the new æon of Christ can have principially begun with His appearance and redemptory act, whilst the old æon still externally continues. The life-development of the æon starts from the beginning and appears, at first, gradually, but not perfectly, until the close. Just so it is explained that the world in the course of its development depends on the bearing of man, and that the history of man is the history of the earthly cosmos. The sinless man and Paradise, Adam and the field burdened with the curse, the rain of the first race and the flood, Noah’s generation and the rainbow, the people of promise and the promised land, the renewal of humanity, through Christ, and the renewal of the earth, the judgment, and the end of the world, these are only the principal epochs of a chain of events which are expressed in the most manifold separate pictures and traits (see Lange’s “Life of Jesus:” the Baptism of Jesus, the natural events at His death and ascension).

13. That the Scriptures neither know nor will know of pre-Adamites (see Hahn: “Compendium of Faith,” ii. p. 24), nor of various primitive aboriginal races, appears not only from Genesis 1:1, but also from the consistent presumption and assertion of the entire Holy Writ; for example, Matthew 19:4; Acts 17:26; 1 Corinthians 15:47. Here we can bring out only the following points: 1. The original unity of the human race coincides with the doctrine of the unity of the fall of man in Adam, and the unity of the redemption in Christ. It also accords with the biblical and Christian idea of the unitary destination of the earth. 2. The autochthonic doctrine of the ancients stands in intimate connection with their polytheism; the special race of any certain land corresponds with the special gods of said land, as the speech of Paul in Athens clearly shows (Acts 17:25-26). 3. The greatest naturalists have mostly declared themselves against the originality of different human races, see Lange’s “Dogmatics,” p. 330; the greater part of the earlier defenders of said view belonged to the department of natural philosophy. With the distinction of the various ground-types, which are formed from the one human species, the most serious difficulties are banished, though not solely by reference to climatic relations; and so in regard to the alleged fruitfulness of sexual combinations among the various races, the proof of such fruitfulness is justly pronounced one of the strongest proofs of unity. 5. The autochthonic theory has never been able to harmonize itself in relation to the ground-forms to be presented; and it can also, 6. not deny the fact that the origin of the various types of men points back to a common home in Asia.

14. As to the doctrine of the original image, compare the dogmatic works. The following distinctions need special attention: 1. צֶלֶם and דְּמוּת, image and likeness. The Greek expositors referred the first to the dispositions of man, and the latter to his normal development; thus also the scholastics referred the former to the sum-total of the natural powers of man (reason, liberty), and the latter to his pious and moral nature. This distinction appears again in another form in the older Protestant dogmatics, when it distinguishes between an image that man has not lost by sin (Genesis 9:6; James 3:9), and such a one as he, in fact, has lost, although this Protestant distinction does not refer itself back to those words image and likeness. Image has already been made to refer to the similitude to God in man (the so-called μικρόθεος), likeness to man as microcosm in so far as he unites the whole world in himself and presents it in a reduced scale, because the world is a likeness of God on a grand scale (A. Feldhoff: “Our Immortality,” Kempten, 1836). We maintain rather that the image designates the principle in accordance with, and with a view to which, man has been created—consequently, the dynamic-plastic idea of the God-Man (which view is supported by the fact that man, according to Genesis 1:3, wished arbitrarily to realize this idea). We maintain, therefore, that the image denotes the primitive image, as in Christ alone is it plainly so called, and comes in Him to its realized appearance. Therefore is it said in the image, that is, the determinable similitude of man in proportion to the image of Christ. The likeness, on the contrary, is the real appearance of the copied similitude, as it was peculiar to the first man in the condition of innocence from the beginning. The older Protestant dogmatics distinguished, as said (without reference to the words image and likeness), the substantial human affinity, to God, especially in spiritual powers, reason, etc., and the image in the narrower sense, the justitia originalis, the status integritatis with its separate attributes (especially impassibility, immortality). They laid the emphasis on the fact that the image in this stricter sense was lost. Thereby has this opinion, for its part, represented the glory of the first man in various ways as too much developed, whilst the Socinians, contrary to the nature of the spirit, would consider it as a mere abstract power (see Lange’s “Positive Dogmatics,” p. 304). 2. To say nothing now of the Encratites and Severians, who denied to the female sex a share in the similitude, there may be farther noted the strange contrast between such as would find the image merely in the bodily appearance of man (The Audians, and lately Hofmann), or merely in his spiritual nature (Alexandrians, Augustine, Zwingli), since here the simple observation suffices, that the body of man is above all an image of his peculiar spiritual nature. In accordance with this the similitude can naturally be understood only of man in his totality. Its root is the spiritual nature or the divine affinity, its appearance is the bodily form in which man effects his dominion over nature, and although this does not fulfil the idea of his similitude, it certainly appears as the first and most common realization of it. Man is the administrator of God on earth. The similitude, i. e., the disposition and designation of man to the image, has remained to him; the image in its integrity (δόξα) he has lost. Still, an obscure outline of it, especially of the likeness, has remained to him, as is proved by the remains of the manifoldly evil administration of men on earth. The distorted image of the divine assumes various forms in sinful man, even to the image of evil spirits. One must make the distinction between the primitive image, Christ, and the copy, human nature, but not so as if the primitive image were the exclusive Godhead, or the copy pure creature. See also the article “Image” in Herzog’s Real-Lexicon.

15. Man (אָדָם) indicates here collectively humanity according to its origin in the first human pair, or in the one man in general, who was certainly the universal primitive man and the individual Adam in one person. Adam, referring to Adamah; the red one, from the red earth taken. Or is it, in fact, as Starke maintains, the beautiful, the brilliant? It is true, אָדָם in Arabic may also mean to be beautiful, to shine, and Gesenius remarks: solent Arabes duplex genus hominum distinguere, alterum rubrum, quod nos album appellamus, alterum nigrum. If the earth had the name of Adam, Adamah, as might be inferred from the first appearance of the word in Genesis 2:7, the conception of Adam had a good sense, as brilliant, beautiful, analogous to the commendatory appellations of man in other nations. But it is clear that Adam is named according to Adamah, Genesis 2:7, and so Paul has comprehended him as the χοϊκός (1 Corinthians 15:47). On the word Adam, comp. Delitzsch, pp. 141 and 619. The Scripture indicates by this name that it is in unity with the wonderful fact, that man was created by God, though he went forth from the earth in the form of a natural growth under an “inspiration of the earth,” as Steffens expresses himself.

16. The Sabbath. The view set up by Schröder and Gerlach of the late origin of the sabbath in the giving of the law, finds a contrast in the exaggerated importance of the significance of the word sabbath in Delitzsch (p. 131 ff.), where he says, “Sunday has a churchly solemnization, but the sabbath remains the blessed and hallowed day of days,” etc. The sense of these and similar words is not entirely clear, especially when one considers that under the days of creation Delitzsch does not understand real days but periods. Also the beautifully expressed parallel, in Delitzsch, of the creative Friday when everything was finished, and the Friday of the redemption, when Christ died with the words: “ It is finished;” that is, the sabbath of creation and the day of rest of Christ in the grave, as bringing up with the resurrection of Christ the now prominent and deep significance of that first Sunday, when God said: “ Let there be light.” For historical particulars, see Winer, article “Sabbath;” Hengstenberg: “The Day of the Lord.” See especially the article “Sabbath” by Oehler in Herzog’s “Real-Encyclopædia,” where the existence of a clearly marked pre-Mosaic solemnization of the sabbath among the Jews, and the analogous existence of a heathen, that is, an Egyptian weekly festival, is decidedly questioned. That the heathen nevertheless, from time immemorial, have known certain festive periods, appears from their mythological systems.

17. As significant figures, as signs of a future sacred symbol of numbers already appearing in our section, are to be observed the number two, appearing in the various contrasts (heaven and earth, etc.) as the number of nature or of life; the number three in the contrast of the two ternaries; the number four as number of the world in so far, as on the fourth day the cosmos in the whole was completed; the number six as the number of labor, and seven as the sacred number of the divine labor concluded and perfected in the solemn rest of God. The number seven appears besides in the sevenfold, solemn expression: God saw that it was good. But the number ten also is seen in the tenfold introduction of the creative word: “God spake: Let there be.”
18. The so-called anthropomorphisms of the present chapter: God spake, God saw, God made, God rested, form the foundation of the whole anthropomorphic and anthropopathic style of delineation in Sacred Writ. We must here observe that the anthropopathic expression may not be understood as literal-dogmatic (anthropopathists) neither as mythical (spiritualists), but as religio-symbolical, representing the divine ideal-doing under the figure of human action, not, however, in the sense as if human life, action, and image were the original that shadows itself in the similarities of divine action, but in the sense that the divine speaking, working, and resting form the foundation for the analogous, comparative doings of man (see “Bible-Work,” John); just as God’s day is the original image for the day of man, but not vice-versa.

19. The first chapter of Genesis clearly contains the germs of all fundamental doctrines of theology in the stricter sense, as well as of anthropology; that is, it is the basis for the doctrine of God (the first article of the apostolic Confession of Faith), of His attributes and His personality, of the world, of the religious and earthly-real side of the world; finally of man, his nature, dignity, and destiny. With the image of God, in which man is created, is also expressed the future of Christ, as it lay in its ideal destination in the divine counsel from eternity (see Lange’s “Dogmatics,” p. 211). The possibility of sin is, moreover, alluded to in the words: Rule over them and make them subject to thee. It appears, however, more clearly in the second chapter.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

(Kleist: “Hymn to God;” Gellert: “God is my Song;” Klopstock’s “Odes to Creation;” Fr. Ad. Krummacher: “The Days of Creation”). Homily on the six days’ work from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3. Point of view: The creation as a revelation of God: 1. His omnipotence (Let there be!); 2. His wisdom (means and end, the grades of nature and the image of God); 3. His goodness (the living beings and their movement and nourishment); His love (man). The creation as a future of man (the preparation of the house of God for man and man for the house of God). The creation as the advent of the God-Man: 1. The days’ works of God a prophecy of Man 1:2. the perfected man on the sabbath of God a prophecy of the God-Man. The first creation a prefiguration of the second creation or the redemption. The week of God: 1. God’s work in nature; 2. God’s rest in man. The sabbath of God a prophecy of the divine Sunday. The week of God in the history of the world. The appointment of the whole course of the world as a work of God: 1. The Chiliastic error therein: the chronological computation, etc.; 2. the truth therein: the expectation of the divine period of rest (Revelation 66:20). The world according to its various forms: 1. As creation; 2. as nature; 3. as cosmos; 4. as æon. The work of God and the work of man. What is different, and what is common to both: a. The order; b. the constancy; c. the gradual progression; d. the aim. The account of the creation contrasted with ancient and modern errors (see Doctrinal and Ethical). The account of the creation in its truth and sublimity. The basis of all the days’ works: Heaven and earth. The contrast of heaven and earth running through the entire Holy Writ as a symbol of religion. Heaven as the home of man whilst on the earth: 1. The sign of his origin; 2. the direction of his prayer; 3. the goal of his hope. The first three days’ work as the preparation of the last three. The word of God as the word of power in the creation. The spirit of God as the formative strength of all God’s works. Creation as a mirror of the Trinity. The creation a revelation of life from God: 1. The foundations of life in the elementary world; 2. the symbolical phenomena of life in the animal world; 3. the reality and truth of fife in the human world. The glory of the Lord in the work of creation: 1. The co-operation of all His qualities (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, etc.); 2. the unity of all His attributes. Separate Sections and Verses. Genesis 2:1 : In the beginning. The birth of the world also the birth of time. 1. The fact that the world and, time are inseparable; 2. the application: a. the operations in the world are bound to the order of time, b. time is given for labor. To-day, to-day!—The relation of worldly time to the eternity of God (Psalms 90:1). The beginning of the Scriptures goes back to the beginning of the world, as the end of the Scriptures extends to the end of the world. The outline of creation: Heaven and earth: 1. Heaven and earth in union; 2. earth for heaven; 3. heaven for earth. The primary form of the earth and the creation of light a picture of the redemption: 1. The redemption of mankind in general, 2. of the individual man. Waste and void the first form of the world. Laying the foundations of the world (Ephesians 1:4, and other passages). The spirit of God the sculptor of all forms of life. The word of God: Let there be: 1. How the growth of the world points back to the eternal existence of the word; 2. how the eternal word is the foundation for the growth of the world. The word— let there be—in its echo through time as the word of the creation, of the redemption and glorification. The first clearly defined creation: the light. The significance of light; its physical and religious significance. God’s survey of light. Light a source of life: 1. Its good as existing in its ground; 2. its beauty as disclosed in its appearing. The creation of light at the same time the creation of physical darkness (see Isaiah 23:45). How carefully we must guard against the commingling of natural and spiritual darkness. The natural darkness as it were a picture of the spiritual. But also a picture of the “shadow of His wings.”—Evening and morning, or the great daily phenomenon of the alternation of time. The creation of light a day’s work of God: 1. The first day’s work; 2. a whole day’s work; 3. a continuous day’s work; 4. a day’s work rich in its consequences. The first day. Genesis 2:6-8 : The second day’s work, or the firmament of heaven. The firmament in its changing phenomena a visible image of the invisible heaven.

Genesis 2:9-10 : Land and sea. The beauty of the land, the sublimity of the sea. The symbolical significance of the land: the firm institutions of God; of the sea: the wave-like life of nations. The second day of God. Genesis 2:9-13 : The earth and the vegetable world. The green earth a child of hope. The plant the prelude and symbol of all life (of animal, human, and spiritual). The providence of God in the creation of the vegetable world before the creation of animals and man. This providence a picture of the same providence with which he thought and commanded our salvation from eternity. The storehouses of the earth supplied before the appearance of man, according to the Scriptures and natural science (coal, minerals, salts, etc.). The third day. Genesis 2:14-19 : The creation of the heavenly lights for the earth. The sun. The moon. Sun and moon (Psa 8:19). The stellar world. A glance of faith into the stellar world. The office of the stars for the earth: 1. God’s sign for faith; 2. sacred signs for the festive periods of the solemnization of the faith; 3. spiritual watchers and guides for the spiritual life of Man 1:4. homes of life for creature-life. The fourth day. Genesis 2:20-23 : The life of the fishes in the sea and the birds under the heaven a sign of the possibility of an endlessly diversified existence of spiritual beings. The blessing of God on the animal world (in every climate and sea). The fifth day. Genesis 2:24-25 : The animals of the earth as the forerunners of man: 1. The first signs and pictures of human life; 2. its most intimate assistants; 3. its first conditions.

Gen 2:26–31: The creation of man: 1. A decree of God; 2. an announcement of the image of God; 3. the last work of God. The office of man: 1. God’s image in his power and perfection; 2. God’s likeness in his appearance. The perfect fulfilment of this destiny. The one divine similitude in the contrast of man and woman. The blessing of God on man: 1. His future; 2. his calling; 3. his possessions and his sustenance. The institution of marriage (see Genesis 1:2). The calling of man, throughout, a call to dominion: 1. In representing God; 2. in ruling over the beasts; 3. in the free self-control. The purity of the first creation. The verdict of God: Very good.

Genesis 2:24-25 The sixth day. The completion of the world, the sabbath of God. The significance of the rest of God on the seventh day. The sabbath of God, the sabbath of man: 1. Man a sabbath of God; 2. God the sabbath of man. The contrast between struggling creation and joyful labor, also in the life of man. The blessing of God on the sabbath. The sabbath in its significance: 1. Its source in the heart of God, like the life of man (the bliss of God); 2. its signs: the solemn pauses (God saw that it was good), like the evening-rest, preludes of the Sunday; 3. its fruitfulness: the festivals of the Old Covenant, the Sunday of the New Covenant, the eternal sabbath-rest, and celebration of the Sunday in eternity. The festal demeanor according to the pattern of God: 1. Reposing; 2. blessing; 3. hallowing. The first completion of the world a presage of its final completion.

Starke, Genesis 2:1 : The question what God did before the creation. He chose us (Ephesians 1:4), He prepared for us the kingdom (Matthew 25:34), He gave us grace in Christ (2 Timothy 1:9), He made the decree of the creation. Some understand by the beginning the Son of God (Colossians 1:16; Revelation 1:8), at which also the Chaldaic translation aims by rendering it: in wisdom (comp. Wisdom of Solomon Genesis 9:4; Psalms 104:24; Proverbs 8:22); but because the Son of God is nowhere absolutely called the beginning (see, however, Colossians 51:1, ἀρχή), and Moses, besides, intends to describe the origin of the world, the first explanation is reasonably preferred to the second (namely, from the beginning of the creation). Moses, with these words: in the beginning, overthrows all the reasons of the heathen philosophers and atheists with which they maintain the eternity of the world, or that it perchance has arisen from numberless atoms (see Romans 1:19-20). That the world is not eternal may be seen from the following passages: Psalms 90:2; Proverbs 8:22; Proverbs 8:24-25; Isaiah 45:11-12; comp. Genesis 2:13; Matthew 13:35; Matthew 24:21; Matthew 25:34; Mark 10:6; 2 Timothy 1:9; 2 Peter 3:4; John 17:24; Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20. The spirit of God (Psalms 33:6).

Genesis 2:3 : Of the speaking of God. Although God did not speak as we do, nevertheless the speaking of God was a real genuine speech, in a higher but also more appropriate sense than speaking is said of man. For as God really and properly, although not in a natural manner, generates like man, so also is it with divine speech.

Genesis 2:5 : God created light on a Sunday, and on that day the children of Israel passed through the Red Sea, etc. God is a father of lights (James 1:17), of the external light, of the internal, natural light of reason, of the spiritual light of grace, and the eternal light in yonder world of glory.

Genesis 2:11 : The herbs not only a house of supply, but also a store for healing. To this third day belong also the subterranean treasures, as precious stones, metals, and other minerals.

Gen 2:29: We cannot say that they had not the liberty of eating flesh. Whether they really used this or preferred to eat fruits and herbs, we can reasonably refer to its proper place. (Gen 2:31: Since God could have created everything in a moment, no reasonable cause can be given why He preferred six days, unless we reflect that it had perhaps a reference to the six great changes in the church, to which will finally succeed the sabbath of the saints. Thus the first day is a prefiguration of the time from Adam to Noah, etc.)—A Christian can use the creatures, but he must not misuse them (1 Corinthians 7:31) that they groan not against him (Romans 8:19). Genesis 2:3 : Discussion whether the first men were bound to respect the sabbath. On the contrary: 1. Every service of God connected with certain times and places had a view to man after the fall; 2. man in a state of innocence has served God at all times and in all places; the sabbath was first instituted in the wilderness: God gave the sabbath only to the Jews. Reasons for it: Appeal to the contents of our passage, etc. The sabbath-day a favor of God.

Schröder to Genesis 2:3 : Then spake God, says Chrysostom, “let there be light,” and there was light, but now He has not spoken it, but Himself has become our light. From Valerius Herberger: But it is much more that the Lord Jesus will finally transport us, after this temporal light, into the eternal light of heaven, where we shall see God in His light face to face, and praise Him in the everlasting heavenly light and glory. From Luther: He utters not grammatical words, but real and material things. Thus sun, moon, heaven, earth, Peter, Paul, I and thou are scarcely to be reckoned words of God, yea, hardly a syllable and letter (?) in comparison to the entire creation. From Michaelis: Moses endeavors in the whole history of the creation to present God not merely as almighty, but at the same time as perfect, wise, and good, Who considers all His works and has created the best world.

Genesis 2:6-8 : The conclusion of the first day’s work was an actual prophecy of the work of the second day of creation. It was on the basis of the light shining into and separating the moist chaos of the world, that God made the division. From Calvin: We well know that torrents of rain arise in a natural manner, but the flood sufficiently proves how soon we can be overwhelmed by the violence of the clouds, if the cataracts of heaven are not stayed by the hand of God. God named. The subsequent naming on the part of man is only the prophetic fulfilment of the naming of God here and elsewhere.

Genesis 2:9-13 : The first (rather the second) division (Genesis 2:6-8) is followed by a second, both closely and intimately clinging to and antithetically conditioning each other, for which reason some would even reckon Genesis 2:9-10 to the preceding day. Valentin Herberger: Is it not a miracle? We take a handful of seed and strew them on one earth and soil, where they have the same food, sap, and care, nevertheless they do not commingle, but each produces its kind: the one white, the other yellow, the fruit sweet and sour, brown and black, red and green, fragrant and offensive, high and low. Thus we, though, like the seeds, buried in one consecrated ground (Sir 40:1), will nevertheless at the day of judgment not be confounded with each other, but each will go forth in his flesh, yet incorruptible (1 Corinthians 15:38).

Genesis 2:14-19. From Luther: He maintains the same order as in the three preceding days, in that He first adorns the heavens with lights and stars, and afterwards the earth. Even the heathen philosopher Plato says, that eyes are especially given to men that, by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their movements, they may be to them as guides to the knowledge of God. It is by the heavenly bodies that men judge of the weather; by their help they find their way on the water and on the land. So, too, a star led the wise men to the manger, etc. Michaelis: They (the stars) are the great and almost infallible clock of the world, ever moving at the same rate. From Luther: Hereby is developed and shown to us the immortality of the soul, from the fact that, with the exception of man, no creature can understand the movement of the heavens, nor measure the heavenly bodies. The hog, the cow, and the dog cannot measure the water that they drink, but man measures the heavens and all their hosts. Therefore there shows itself here a spark of eternal life. From Calvin: “Moses paid more attention to us than to the stars, precisely as became a theologian.”—The true morning-star is Christ (Revelation 22:16), the sun of righteousness (Malachi 4:2). The animals of the water are in marked contrast with the animals of the air. Water and air. The latter is as it were the embodied liquid light, the former embodied darkness; in its depths there is neither summer nor winter, it is the heavy melancholy element, whilst the air, light and cheerful, gives life and breath everywhere. The inhabitants of the former are opposed to those of the latter, the fish to the birds, as water and air, darkness and light. The fish is cold, stiff, mute; the bird warm, free, and full of melody. Yet not without reason were both created on one and the same day. They have many things in common, and are in structure and movement closely and intimately allied; the variegated scaly mail of the fish points to the colored feathery coat of the bird, and what the wings are to the latter, the fins are to the former. Water and air once lived together, and do so now; as the air descends into sea and earth, and vivifyingly penetrates the water, the latter, for its part, rises into the air, and mingles with the atmosphere to its remotest border. That God blesses the animals, expresses the thought, that God creatively endows animals with the power of propagating their kind, and also points to the work of preserving the world. “Here we see what a blessing really means, namely, a powerful increase. When we bless we do nothing more than to wish good; but in God’s blessing there is a sound of increase, and it is immediately efficacious; so again, His curse is a withering, and its effect in like manner immediately consuming.” Luther. Only the largest water-animals are introduced, because from them the greatness, omnipotence, and glory of the creator most clearly shine forth. The land-animals a product of the earth—with heads bent downwards. Various views as to the time of the creation of the angels (p. 20). The Redeemer rests also through the seventh day in the grave. In divinely solemn stillness lay the young world, a mirror of the Godhead, before the eyes of the still unfallen first human pair, as with Him they kept holy day, representing in their divine similitude the sabbath of God in the creation, and the sabbath of the creation in God, harmoniously joined in one. Of a sabbath-law, there is nothing said in the text. Israel’s later sabbaths (as the whole law was to awaken a sense of sin) were reminding copies of this sabbath of God after the creation, and unfulfilled prophecies not only of the completion of the theocracy of the Old in the Christocracy of the New Covenant, but also of the final consummation of the present order of things, especially on the last great sabbath, etc. The ancient allegorizing of the days of creation according to the periods of the kingdom of God (p. 23). “Six days,” says Calvin, “the Lord occupied in the structure of the world, not as if He needed these periods, before whom a moment is a thousand years, but because He will bind us to the observing of each one of His works. He had the same object in His repose on the seventh day.” (Augustine had already expressed himself in the same way. There lies at the base of this an abstract comprehension of the divine omnipotence, and a great ignoring of the idea of nature. Luther’s conjecture: The fall occurred on the first day of creation, about noon.)

Lisco: Death is nothing in the creation. Everything lives, but in very manifold modification. Man is created in the image of God, i. e., so that all divine glory shines forth in him in a reduced scale. He has a nature allied to God, and therein lies the possibility and capability of becoming ever more like God. The whole human race is one great family. All are blood-relations. The dominion of man over nature obtains, in progressive development and extension, by the arts and sciences, by investigation of nature’s laws, and by using its powers (of course, under the conditioning of life in the spirit through community with God).

Gerlach: The whole subsequent history is written only for men (i. e., according to the human stand-point); therefore sun, moon, and stars, the host of heaven (Genesis 2:1), appear merely as lights in the firmament of heaven, and nothing is told us of the inhabitants of heaven, although even in this book the angels frequently appear, and the fall of some is already in Genesis 1:3 presupposed, etc. All things have had a beginning. The world was to develop itself in the contrast of heaven and earth, which repeats itself on a small scale—on earth, in spirit and nature, and in man, in spirit and flesh. It is self-evident, therefore, that God’s speaking is not the production of an audible sound, but the realization of His thoughts through an act of His will. The “ naming” is equivalent to determining something in accordance with its nature or its appearance. There is thereby indicated the power of God as ruling and thinking all things. (The naming here is not meant as a creative calling, but as an expression of the divine adaptation.)—The upper firmament from which descend light and warmth and fertilizing moisture, casting blessings on the earth, attracting with its wonderful moving and fixed lights the observation of the rudest man, and drawing forth the anticipation of, and longing for, a higher home than this earthly one, is, the visible pledge, yes, perhaps the distant gleam, of a heavenly world of light. It bears with it, therefore, a name which is the same with the kingdom, where in undimmed light “our Father in heaven” reveals Himself. As originally everything was sea, thus in the glorified earth there will be no more sea. It is absurd to suppose, because fruit-trees only are here spoken of, that the others, as thorns and thistles, did not appear until after the fall of man. (Only the fact that they at a later period burdened the field, is alluded to by Augustine as a punishment.) A very fitting distinction of a similitude of man, which cannot be lost, and of such a one as has been lost. The reader must carefully guard against the Jewish fables which have also found their way among Christians, namely, that man was at first created as man and woman in one person, and afterwards both sexes were separated from it. God rested, etc. Perfect rest and the greatest activity are one in Him (see John 5:17). Whether a fixed observance of the seventh day was ordered with the revelation of the history of creation, or whether this was first given to the people of the law with the other laws, presents an obscure question, but the latter view is the more probable; in Genesis, at least, there is found no trace of the observance of the sabbath, and still less among heathen nations; the division of weeks, as found among some, might have been made according to the quarters of the moon. (The knowledge of the week, and the religious consecration of this knowledge, forms, indeed, the patriarchal religious basis of the sabbath-law, which no more came into the world abruptly than any other religious institution.)

Calwer Bible Exposition: The number seven, important through the whole Old Testament, reminds one of the year of jubilee and the rest of the sabbath which is allotted to the people of God above, whither Jesus has gone before to prepare a place for His own. Bunsen: The days of creation go from light to light, from one (outstreaming) of light to another. Man as the real creature of light is the last progressive step. Fruits of trees “above the earth” in contrast with bulbous plants, which are included in the herbs (?). Signs. Sun, moon, and stars; especially sun and moon are to be signs for three important points: for festive periods (new moons and sabbaths), for days of the month, and for the new year (beginning of the solar and lunar year). The week has its natural basis in the approximate duration of the four phases or appearances of the moon’s disk, whose unity forms the first measure of time, or the month, according to the general view of all Shemites. Astronomically the number seven has in the ancient world, and especially among the Shemites, its representation in the seven planets, or wandering stars, according to the view of the senses (?): the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thence comes also the series of our week-days. Arndt (Christ in the Old Covenant): As long as there is a world there is an advent. The birth of the world is the great moment of which it is declared: God said: Let there be light, and there was light.

[Note on the Creation-Sabbath. The question of the sabbath in all its aspects stands wholly clear from any difficulty as to the length of the creative days. We have already shown that there is not only a bare consistency but a beautiful scriptural harmony in the less being made a memorial of the greater. See Introd. to Genesis 1:1 pp. 135, 136. God’s great rest, or ceasing from His work of creation, commences with the first human consciousness following the inspiration that makes the primus homo. Then the heavens and the earth are finished. Nature and the world are complete in this crowning work, and the divine sabbath begins. This is blessed and hallowed. Time, as a part of nature, is now proceeding in its regular sun-divided order, and from this time a seventh returning part is also blessed and hallowed for man, as a season in which he is to rest from his works, and contemplate that now unceasing sabbath of God, which, from the very nature of the case, can have no such shorter recurring intervals. Hence the force of our Saviour’s words that the sabbath, the weekly solar sabbath, was made for man. They who contend that the divine sabbath is simply the first twenty-four hours after creation is finished, make it unmeaning, as predicated of God and His works. In this sense God no more rested on that solar day than on every one that follows until a new creative æon, or a new creative day, arises in the eternal counsels. Such a view destroys the beautiful analogy pervading the Scripture, by which the less is made the type of the greater, the earthly of the heavenly, the temporal of the eternal. It makes the earthly human sabbath a memorial of something just like itself, of one long-past solar day, of one single transient event, instead of being the constantly recurring witness of an æonian state, an eternal rest, ever present to God, and reserved for man in the unchanging timeless heavens.

But the question with which we are most concerned is in regard to the sabbath as established for man. Does this seventh day, or this seventh portion of time, which God blessed and hallowed, have thus an eternal and universal ground as a memorial of the creative work with its sevenfold division, or does it derive its sanction from a particular law made long after for a particular and peculiar people? The question must be determined by exegesis, and for this we have clear and decisive, if not extensive, grounds. It demands the close consideration of two short passages, and of a word or two in each. “And God blessed the seventh day,” Genesis 2:3. Which seventh day? one might ask, the greater or the less, the divine or the human, the æonian or the astronomical? Both, is the easy answer; both, as commencing at the same time, so far as the one connects with astronomical time; both, as the greater including the less; both, as being (the one as represented, the other as typically representing) the same in essence and idea. The attempt to make them one in scale, or in measure, as well as in idea, does in fact destroy that universality of aspect which comes from the recurring, moving type as representing the standing antitype. Take away this, and all that we can make out of the words, as they stand in Genesis 2:3, is that God blessed that one seventh day (be it long or short), or, on the narrower hypothesis, that one day of twenty-four hours which first followed His ceasing to create, and left it standing, sacred and alone, away back in the flow of time. But blessing the day means blessing it for some purpose: it is the expression of God’s love to it as a holy and beneficent thing among the things of time, as carrying ever with it something of God, some idea of the Blesser, and of the love and reverence due to Him as the fountain of all blessedness and of all blessed things. So the blessing upon man looks down through all the generations of man. No narrower idea of the blessing of the sabbath can be held without taking from the word all meaning. “ And hallowed it, וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֹתוֹ, and made it holy. This also is a very plain Hebrew word, especially in its Piel form, as any one may see by examining it with a concordance. We have given to the word unholy (the etymological opposite) too much the vague sense of wickedness in general, to allow of its fairly representing the opposite in idea. The holy throughout the Old Testament is opposed to the common, however lawful in itself it may be. To hallow is to make uncommon. To hallow a time is to make it a time when things which are common at other times, and peculiar to other times, should not be done, but the time so hallowed should be devoted to other and uncommon uses. Of course, things essential and necessary at all times are not included, or excluded, in such distinction. Neither will it hold of days or times that mere human authority thus devotes to any separate uses. Such devotion may be as partial, or as indefinite, as the authority chooses to make it. But when God hallows a time it is for Himself. Not simply whatever man does, but whatever he does for himself, or for his individual worldly interest, at other times, that must he not do on the times that God has hallowed for His own special remembrance; but he must, on the contrary, do other things which are more immediately connected with that special remembrance. Anything less than this as a general principle leaves the word to hallow or make holy, as used by God, and of God (unless specially limited to some partial application), an unmeaning utterance. It is the portion of time which the Creator of time keeps for Himself, out of the time He has given to man. It is elevating a portion of the human time to the standard, or in the direction at least, of God’s own eternal sabbath. There can be no hallowed time to God alone; there can be no hallowed time in itself irrespective of any agents in time. Therefore, the expression, He hallowed it, must be for men, for all men who were to be on the earth, or it is a mere blank. It is God’s day in which men should live specially for Him. It is sometimes said, we should live every day for God. If it be meant that there should be no special times in which we live to God as we do not, and cannot, at all times (when God permits us, in living for Him, to live also for ourselves), then is it a hyper-piety which becomes profanity in claiming to be above the need of a provision instituted by the divine wisdom and grace. Like to this is the plea, that, if there be a sabbath at all, it should be spent, not in religious acts, so called, but in the study and the contemplation of nature. This cavil has a high sound, but it would soon be abandoned, perhaps, by many that use it, if the contemplation of nature spoken of were what it ought to be, a contemplation of the very sabbath of God—nature itself being that holy pause in which God rests from His creative energies, that ineffable repose in which, though superintending and preserving, He provides for man through law that he can comprehend, and an executing Word that he can devoutly study.

If we had no other passage than this of Genesis 2:3, there would be no difficulty in deducing from it a precept for the universal observance of a sabbath, or seventh day, to be devoted to God, as holy time, by all of that race for whom the earth and its nature were specially prepared. The first men must have known it. The words “He hallowed it,” can have no meaning otherwise. They would be a blank unless in reference to some who were required to keep it holy. After the fall, the evil race of Cain, doubtless, soon utterly lost the knowledge. In the line of Seth it may have become greatly dimmed. Enoch, we cannot hesitate to believe, kept holy sabbath, or holy seventh day (whether the exact chronological seventh or not), until God took him to the holy rest above. It lingered with Noah and his family, if we may judge from the seven-day periods observed in the ark. Of the other patriarchs, in this respect, nothing is directly told us. They were devout men, unworldly men, confessing themselves pilgrims on earth, seeking a rest. Nothing is more probable, prima facie, than that such men, as we read of them in Genesis, and as the Apostle has described them to us, should have cherished an idea so in harmony with their unearthly pilgrim-life, even though coming to them from the faintest tradition. To object that the Bible, in its few brief memoranda of their lives, says nothing about their sabbath-keeping, any more than it tells us of their forms of prayer and modes of worship, is a worthless argument. The Holy Scripture never anticipates cavils; it never shows distrust of its own truthfulness by providing against objections—objections we may say that it could have avoided, and most certainly would have avoided, had it been an untruthful book made either by earlier or later compilers. The patriarchs may have lost the tradition of the sabbath; it may not have come to them over the great catastrophe of the flood; or they may have lost the chronological reckoning of it; but, in either case, it would not affect the verity of the great facts and announcements in Genesis 1:1, however, or by whatever species of inspiration, the first author of that account obtained his knowledge. For all who believe the Old Scriptures, as sanctioned by Christ and supported by the general biblical evidence, there it stands unimpaired by anything given or omitted in the subsequent history.

But there is another passage which shows conclusively that, through whatever channel it may have come, such a knowledge of the sabbath was in the world after the time of the patriarchs. The language of the fourth commandment (Exodus 20:8), to say nothing of Exodus 16:22-27, cannot be interpreted in any other way. Remember the sabbath-day, זָכוֹר אֶת יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת. The force of the article is there, though omitted, in the Hebrew syntax, because of the specifying word that follows. It is just as though we should say in English: Remember sabbath-day. Take the precisely similar language, Mal 3:22, זִכְרוּ תּוֹרַת משֶׁה: Remember the law of Moses, or, Remember Moses’ law. As well might one contend that this was the first promulgation of the Pentateuch, as that Exodus 20:8 was the first setting forth of the sabbatical institution. There was no call for such language had that been the case. It would have been in the style of the other commands: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods; Thou shalt not take the name, etc.; Thou shalt keep a sabbath, or rest,’ etc. We dwell not upon the distinct reference that follows to the creation-sabbath, and the perfect similarity of reason and of language. The artless introduction is enough to show that those to whom it was addressed are supposed to have known something of the ancient institution, however much its observance may have been neglected, or its reckoning, perhaps, been forgotten. The use of the word זְכוֹר (remember) would seem to point to some such danger of misreckoning, as though the Lawgiver meant to connect it back chronologically, by septennial successions, with the first sabbath, or the first day of the conscious human existence. Or he may have had in view future reckonings. The old law of a seventh day, or a seventh of time, being preserved as an immutable principle, there might have been a peculiar memorial reckoning for the Jewish people, as there afterwards was for the Christian church when the resurrection of Christ was taken for the initial day of reckoning, as being, in a most solemn sense, to the church, what the creative finishing had been to the world. So that, in this respect, the Christian seventh day may have been no more a substitution than the Jewish.

A seventh part of time is holy for man. God blessed it and hallowed it. Such is the deduction from the language of Genesis 2:3. There are other questions relating to the sabbath, its adaptation to the human physical constitution, and the change of reckoning as between the Jewish and Christian dispensations, but they would come more in place in commenting on some other parts of the sacred volume, to which they may be, therefore, referred. The religious aspect appears more in the universal hallowing in Genesis than in the more national establishment among the Jews, where mere rest from labor seems more prominent than religious worship, or that holy contemplation of the divine which is the living thought in the creative account, and which comes out again so emphatically in the Christian institution as more suggestive, than the Jewish, of the eternal rest. It is a great, though very common, mistake, that the Jewish aspect of the sabbath is the more severely religious, as compared with the Christian, which is sometimes claimed to be more free in this respect. Strict as the Jewish institution was, in its prohibitions of labor, it was in fact the less religious; it had less of holy contemplation; it had no worship prescribed to it; it was, in a word, more secular than the primitive or the Christian, as being enjoined more for secular ends, namely bodily rest and restoration for man and beast, and even for the land. These, indeed, are important ends still remaining. The connections between the sabbath and the physical constitution of man form a most valuable part of the general argument, but as they bear upon the biblical view as collateral confirmation rather than as connected with its direct sanctions, we would simply refer the reader to some of the more instructive works that have been written on this branch of the subject.

James Aug. Hessey: “Sunday, its Origin, History, and Present Obligation” (Bampton Lectures preached before the University of Oxford), London. 1860; James Gilfillan: “The Sabbath viewed in the Light of Reason, Revelation, and History, with Sketches of its Literature,” Edinburgh, 1862, republished by the N. Y. Sabbath Committee and the American Tract Society, New York, 1862; Philip Schaff: “The Anglo-American Sabbath (an Essay read before the National Sabbath Convention, Saratoga, Aug. 11, 1863), New York, 1863 (republished in English and in German by the American Tract Society); Mark Hopkins: “The Sabbath and Free Institutions” (read before the same Convention), New York, 1863; Robert Cox: “The Literature on the Sabbath-Question,” Edinburgh, 1865, 2 vols. On the practical aspects of the sabbath-question, comp. the Documents prepared and published by the N. Y. Sabbath Committee from 1857 to 1867. T. L.]

Footnotes:

[1][We get the best order of senses in the root צָבָא and its cognate צָבָה, by regarding, as the primary, the idea of splendor, or glory, as it remains in the noun צְבִי. See its use, Isaiah 4:2, where it seems synonymous with כָבוֹד, Isaiah 13:19, and a number of other places. The secondary sense of host, orderly military array (comp. Song of Solomon 6:10), comes very easily and naturally from it. Or we may say that along with the idea of hosts, as in the frequent יְהוָֹה צְבָאוֹת, Jehovah of hosts, it never loses the primary conception. “Thus the earth and the heavens were finished and all their glory,” or their glorious array. Compare the Syriac ܨܒܬܐ, decus, ornamentum, where the servile tau has become radical. The LXX. and Vulgate translators seem to have had something of this idea: πᾶς ὁ κόσμος αὐτῶν— omnis ornatus eorum. There is a grand significance in the Greek κόσμος and Latin mundus as thus used for the world or the array (artistic unity) of the worlds. צָבָא is the Hebrew for κόσμος, and thus there is a most sublime parallelism presented by its two expressions: יְהוָֹה צְבָאוֹת and מֶלֶךְ עֹלָמִים—Lord of the worlds in space, King of the worlds in time: βασιλεὺς τῶν αἰώνων, Psalms 145:13; Isaiah 26:4; 1 Timothy 1:17. The Hebrew far transcends the Greek. T. L.]

[2][“The Scriptures,” says Delitzsch in his comment on וַיִּשְׁבֹּת, p. 129, “do not hesitate to speak anthropopathically of God’s entrance into rest.” As far as the word שָׁבַת is concerned, there is no anthropathism here except as all human language, and all human conception, in respect to Deity, is necessarily such—that is, necessarily representing him in space and time. The primary sense of the word שָׁבַת is simply to cease, cease doing—as the LXX. render it, κατέπαυσε—not ἀνέπαυσε which carries the idea of recreation or refreshment after fatigue, like ἀναψύχω, or the Hebrew Niphal יִנָּפֵשׁ. When joined with this latter verb, as in Exodus 31:17, the whole language may be called anthropopathic, but the added word shows that the idea expressed by it is not in the first. If ceasing from creation, wholly or partially, implies mutability, it is no less implied in the emanation-theory, unless we suppose an emanation, or necessary creation, of every possible thing, everywhere, always, and of the highest degree—in other words, an unceasing and unvaried filling of infinite space and infinite time with infinite perfection of manifestation. But waiving all such inconceivable subtleties, it may be truly said that rest, of itself, is a higher and more perfect state than outward action—if we may speak of anything as higher and lower in respect to God. Rest is not inertia. Rest in physics is the equilibrium of power, and so the maximum of power (re-sto, re-sisto). Motion is the yielding, or letting out, of power, necessary, indeed, for its manifestation or patent effect, yet still a dispersing or spending of that static energy which was in the quiescence. Absolute rest in the kosmos (the bringing it into, or keeping it in, that state) would be the highest exercise of the divine might; but as it would preclude all sensation, and all sentiency, both of which are inseparable from change or motion of some kind, it would be an absence of all outward manifestation; that is, it would be non-phenomenal or non-appearing. So also rest is the highest power (activity) of mind or spirit, and thus its highest state. This is Aristotle’s dictum, Ethic. Nichomach. x. 8, Genesis 1:7 : ἡ τελεία εὐδαιμονία θεωρητική τις ἐστὶν ἐνέργεια, “the perfect blessedness is a contemplative energy;” “so that (sec. 8) that energy of God which excels all in blessedness must be contemplative (or theoretical), and, of human things, that which is most akin to this must be most blessed” (εὐδαιμονικωτάτη). In this way, too, may we strive to obtain a conception of the sabbath or “ rest of the saints.” The Scripture thought of this would seem to be as much opposed to torpor or inertia, on the one hand, as it is, on the other, to that busy doing which enters so much into some modern conceptions of the future life. They that believe have entered into rest. There can be no doubt, too, that the idea of holy contemplation, or sabbath-keeping in the festal sense of the word, on which Lange so much insists, enters into the idea of שָׁבַת here in Genesis, although derived, perhaps, from its subsequent use. In this sense, there is something of a sabbath whenever there come the words: and God saw (surveyed, contemplated), “saw that it was good.” It is a solemn pausing to behold the divine ideas in their outward appearing—not as a change in Deity, as though with him this took place at intervals, but as a presentation, for the time, of that constant, immutable aspect of the divine character as it comes forth at intervals for us. This eternal rest of God is the sun ever shining calmly above the clouds, yet now and then revealing itself through them as they break away over our changing world of nature and of time. It is such a timeless sabbath that is intended by Rabbi Simeon, as quoted by Raschi in his comment. on the words seventh day, Genesis 2:2. “Flesh and blood has need to add the common to the holy time (to reckon them by passing intervals) but to the Holy One, blessed be He, it is as the thread that binds the hair, and all days appear as one.” Compare it with the צְרוּר הַחַיִּים, “the bundle of life,” or lives, 1 Samuel 25:29, and which is so often referred to by the Rabbinical writers. T. L.]

[3][The simplest rendering of the Hebrew here would give the easiest and the plainest sense. It is that presented in our marginal reading, taking לַעֲשׂוֹת, not as a gerund (faciendo), but literally, as an infinitive of purpose: which God had created to make. It suggests nearly the distinction given by Delitzsch between the fundamental and that which follows—the ground-laying and the finishing, the material-gathering and the architectural arrangement of the structure. So the Vulgate: Quod Deus creavit ut faceret, and Onkelos: די ברא יי למעבד. T. L.]

[4][This word is not to be found in any English dictionary, but we are compelled to Latinize here, and form a word, from principium principia, to correspond to Lange’s word prinzipielle. Our “principal” is too vague, and used in too many senses, to answer the purpose. T. L.]

[5]With respect to dogmatical literature on the account of the Creation, examine Bretschneider: “Systematical Development of Dogmatic Ideas,” p. 450.

[6][For this thought of Lange, which some might regard as pure fancy, there is an etymological ground in the Hebrew language. The words for light, and for the motions of light, have a close affinity to those for flying, compare עוף, volare, עופף, vibrare, עיפה rendered tenebræ, but which strictly means the earliest twilight or twinkling of the morning, and that beautiful word, עַפְעַפֵי שַׁחַר, palpebræ auroræ, Job 3:9; Job 41:10—ἡμέρας βλέφαρον, Soph. Antig. 103, “the eye-lids,” the opening wing “of the morning.” Compare also נצא, volavit, Jeremiah 48:9, and נצץ, splenduit, micavit, shone, glistened, glimmered, נְץ, a flower, etc. It is something more than a mere poetical image when we speak of light as having wings, especially as the conception is applied to the faint gleaming, glimmering, fluttering, we may say, just waving up out of the darkness. How natural the order of the images: to fly, flutter, palpitate, vibrate, quiver, twinkle, glimmer, gleam, shine. Comp. Engl.: fly, Hare, flash; Latin: volo (volito), flo, flare, flamma. So spiritually, idea and reflection support the same analogy. It may be the piercing eye of the eagle that represents the idea, but the other view has the best philological grounds. T. L.]

[7][We have placed this sentence in italics as containing a truth of vast importance, transcending all science on the one hand, and all theology that places itself in antagonism to science on the other. If it contains truth in respect to the world, then, a fortiori, is it true in respect to man, who is the final cause, or “the spiritual core of the world,” as Lange elsewhere styles him. There is an eternal ground for the world; much more is there an eternal ground for humanity (Adam-ity); beyond all, is there an eternal ground for the new humanity (Christ-ianity). “Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world.”—T. L.]

[8] [This conception seems to be sanctioned by Lange, but there is no proof of it. Instead of being suggested by the figure of the mundus (which is not like an egg, or the earth like its yolk, unless we make very ancient the knowledge, or notion, of the earth’s sphericity), this so common feature of the old cosmogonies came most probably from the idea of a brooding, cherishing, life-producing power, represented in Genesis by the רוּחַ מְרַחֶפֶת, the throbbing, pulsating, moving spirit-from רָחַף, primary sense in Piel, palpitare, secondary sense, yet very ancient in the Syriac, to love warmly, or with the strongest affection. Hence in the Greek cosmogony the first thing born of this egg was ἔρως, the primitive love, which shows that the egg had nothing to do with the figure of the earth, either real or supposed. See the Birds of Aristophanes, 697, where the poet calls it ὑπηνέμιον, the egg produced without natural impregnation:

Ἐξ οὗ περιτελλομέναις ὥραις ἔβλαστεν Ἔρως ὁ ποθεινός,

From which sprang Love the all desired,—
only the Greeks, as usual, inverted the primitive idea, and made the generating cause itself the effect. Eros then produced the human race, etc. In other respects the heathen cosmogonies are very fairly given here by Lücken; but what a contrast do these monstrosities present to the pure, harmonious, monotheistic grandeur of the Bible account! If the Mosaic cosmogony was derived from the heathen, as is contended, how very strange it is, and counter to what takes place in all similar derivations, that the Hebrew mind (a very gross mind, they say) should have taken it in this impure and monstrously confused state, and refined it back to that chaste and sublime consistency which the Bible narrative, whatever may be thought of its absolute truth, may so justly claim. T. L.]

[9][Dr Lange’s fancy here seems altogether too exuberant. The parallelism with the Mosaic account in the 104th Psalm is too striking to be mistaken. It was doubtless, too, in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse, as it is also evident in the beginning of the Gospel of John, but many of the resemblances here traced by Dr. Lange altogether fail to satisfy. T. L.]

[10][Dr. Lange’s rendering here is that of Luther, and is the same with our English translation. But there can be hardly a doubt of its being erroneous. It should be, “that there shall be no more delay”—that is, in what is to follow. See Bloomfield. T. L.]

[11][It may seem strange that Dr. Lange, while laying so much stress on these remoter, if not altogether fanciful, parallelisms with the creative account which he finds in the Apocalypse, should have overlooked the much more distinct reference in the beginning of the Gospel of John. Whether the principium there is the same with that in Genesis, may admit of discussion, but there can be no doubt of the parallelism, and the mention of light and life immediately following makes it unmistakable. It is a higher light, indeed, for “the darkness overtakes it not,” as it should be rendered. There is no night following that new and eternal day, and so there are no mornings and evenings to succeed. It is a new creation, and a new chronology, but this idea only makes more clear the reference to the old Mosaic creation and the Mosaic days. T. L.]

[12][Compare Hebrews 1:3, where Christ is called “the express image,” which is a poor translation of the Greek χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως, the impression, stamp, or image of the substance. Compare, also, Coloss. Genesis 1:15 : εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ�—“image of the invisible God.”—T. L.]

[13][Unless it be Proverbs 8:22, יְהוָֹה קָנָנִי רֵאשִׁית דַּרְכּוֹ, which can only be rendered “Jehovah possessed me, or begat me, the beginning of his way.” This probably was the ground of the translation in the Jerusalem Targum, and there would seem to be something in it, if we would in any way connect the creation of the world with the eternal beginning, as Lange does in respect to the creation of the church—chosen in Him, created in Him. The expressions seem parallel. T. L.]