Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The two names may be distinguished thus: Elohim, the plural of!iii?X, which is only used in the loftier style of poetry, is an infinitive noun from Pi's to fear, and signifies awe, fear, then the object of fear, the highest Being to be feared, like ins^ which is used interchangeably with it in chap. xxxi. 42, 53, and K'lio in Ps. Ixxvi. 12 (cf. Isa. viii. 12, 13). The plural is not used for the abstract, in the sense of divinity, but to express the notion of God in the fulness and multiplicity of the divine powers. It is employed both in a numerical, and also in an intensive sense, so that Elohim is applied to the (many) gods of the heathen as well as to the one true God, in whom the highest and absolute fulness of the divine essence is contained. In this intensive sense Elohim depicts the one true God as the infinitely great and exalted One, who created the heavens and the earth, and who preserves and governs every creature. According to its derivation, however, it is object rather than subject, so that in the plural form the concrete unity of the personal God falls back behind the wealth of the divine potencies which His being contains. In this sense, indeed, both in Genesis and the later, poetical, books, Elohim is used without the article, as a proper name for the true God, even in the mouth of heathen (1 Sam. iv. 7); but in other places, and here and there in Genesis, it occurs as an appellative with the article, by which prominence is given to the absoluteness or personality of God (chap. v. 22, vi. 9, etc.). — The name Jehovah, on the other hand, was originally a proper name, and according to the explanation given by God Himself to Moses (Ex. iii. 14, 15), was formed from the imperfect of the verb mn = n^n. God calls Himself n;ni«5 "^m nins, then more briefly n'jnx, and then again, by changing the first person into the third, 7V\n\ From the derivation of this name from the imperfect, it follows that it was either pronounced nin^ or i^)<}^, and had come down from the pre-Mosaic age; for the form nin had been forced out of the spoken language by riM even in Moses' time. The Masoretic pointing nin^ belongs to a time when the Jews had long been afraid to utter this name at all, and substituted ''P^.} the vowels of which therefore were placed as Keri, the word to be read, under the Kethib niH"', unless nin"" stood in apposition to ''J"'t?, in which case the word was read Q"'']''.^ and pointed nin]' (a pure monstrosity).^ This custom, which sprang from a misinterpretation of Lev. xxiv. 16, appears to have originated shortly after the captivity. Even in the canonical writings of this age the name Jehovah was less and less employed, and in the Apocrypha and the Septuagint version o Kvpto^ (the Lord) is invariably substituted, a custom in which the New Testament writers follow the LXX. (vid. OeJiler). — ^If we seek for the meaning of nin^, the expression riTix IK'S n\nK, in Ex. iii. 14, is neither to be rendered ea-ofiac o? eaofiaL {Aq., Theodt), " I shall be that I shall be " (Luilier), nor " I shall be that which I will or am to be" {M. Baumgarten). Nor does it mean, " He who will be because He is Himself, the God of the future '* (Hofmann). For in names formed from the third person imperfect, the imperfect is not a future, but an aorist. According to the fundamental signification of the imperfect, names so formed point out a person as distinguished by a frequently or constantly manifested quality, in other words, they express a distinctive characteristic {vid. Ewald, § 136; chap. xxv. 26, xxvii. 36, also xvi. 11 and xxi. 6). The Vulgate gives it correctly: ego sum qui sum, "I am who I am." " The repetition of the verb in the same form, and connected only by the relative, signifies that the being or act of the subject expressed in the verb is de-

^ For a fuller discussion of the meaning and pronunciation of the name Jehovah vid. Hengstenberg, Dissertations on the Pentateuch i. p. 213 sqq.; OeJikr in Herzog's Cyclopaedia; and Holemann in his Bibelstudien. The last, in common with Stier and others, decides in favour of the Masoretic pointing^ nin^_ as giving the original pronunciation, chiefly on the ground of Rev. i. 4 and 6, 8; but the theological expansion 6 uv kxI 6 tjv xxl 6 Ipxoi^'.vog cannot be regarded as a philological proof of the formation of mn^ by the fusion of nin, nin, >n'' into one word.

termined only by the subject itself" (ITofmann). The verb n^n signifies " to be, to happen, to become; " but as neither happening nor becoming is applicable to God, the unchangeable, since the pantheistic idea of a becoming God is altogether foreign to the Scriptures, we must retain the meaning "^0 be;" not forgetting, however, that as the Divine Being is not a resting, or, so to speak, a dead being, but is essentially living, displaying itself as living, working upon creation, and moving in the world, the formation of mn'' from the imperfect precludes the idea of abstract existence, and points out the Divine Being as moving, pervading history, and manifesting Himself in the world. So far then as the words riTiK "iB'N ^^^K are condensed into a proper name in nin"', and God, therefore, " is He who is," inasmuch as in His being, as historically manifested, He is the self-determining one, the name Jehovah, which we have retained as being naturalized in the ecclesiastical phraseology, though we are quite in ignorance of its correct pronunciation, " includes both the absolute independence of God in His historical movements," and " the absolute constancy of God, or the fact that in everything, in both words and deeds. He is essentially in harmony with Himself, remaining always consistent" (Oehler). The " 1 am who am," therefore, is the absolute /, the absolute personality, moving with unlimited freedom; and in distinction from Elohim (the Being to be feared). He is the personal God in His historical manifestation, in which the fulness of the Divine Being unfolds itself to the world. This movement of the personal God in history, however, has reference to the realization of the great purpose of the creation, viz. the salvation of man. Jehovah therefore is the God of the history of salvation. This is not shown in the etymology of the name, but in its historical expansion. It was as Jehovah that God manifested Himself to Abram (xv. 7), when He made the covenant with him; and as this name was neither derived from an attribute of God, nor from a divine manifestation, we must trace its origin to a revelation from God, and seek it in the declaration to Abram, " I am Jehovah." Just as Jehovah here revealed Himself to Abram as the God who led him out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give him the land of Canaan for a possession, and thereby described Himself as the author of all the promises which Abram received at his call, and which were renewed to him and to his descendants, Isaac and Jacob; so did He reveal Himself to Moses (Ex. iii.) as the God of his fathers, to fulfil His promise to their seed, the people of Israel. Through these revelations Jehovah became a proper name for the God, who was working out the salvation of fallen humanity; and in this sense, not only is it used proleptically at the call of Abram (chap, xii.), but transferred to the primeval times, and applied to all the manifestations and acts of God which had for their object the rescue of the human race from its fall, as well as to the special plan inaugurated in the call of Abram. The preparation commenced in paradise. To show this, Moses has introduced the name Jehovah into the history in the present chapter, and has indicated the identity of Jehovah with Elohim, not only by the constant association of the two names, but also by the fact that in the heading (ver. Ah) he speaks of the creation described in chap. i. as the work of Jehovah Elohim.

The account in vers. 5-25 is not a second, complete and independent history of the creation, nor does it contain mere appendices to the account in chap. i.; but it describes the commencement of the history of the human race. This commencement includes not only a complete account of the creation of the first human pair, but a description of the place which God prepared for their abode, the latter being of the highest importance in relation to the self-determination of man, with its momentous consequences to both earth and heaven. Even in tlie history of the creation man takes precedence of all other creatures, as being created in the image of God and appointed lord of all the earth, though he is simply mentioned there as the last and highest link in the creation. To this our present account is attached, describing with greater minuteness the position of man in the creation, and explaining the circumstances which exerted the greatest influence upon his subsequent career. These circumstances were — the formation of man from the dust of the earth and the divine breath of life; the tree of knowledge in paradise; the formation of the woman, and the relation of the woman to the man. Of these three elements, the first forms the substratum to the other two. Hence the more exact account of the creation of Adam is subordinated to, and inserted in, the description of paradise (ver. 7). In vers. 5 and 6, with which the narrative commences, there is an evident allusion to paradise: " Atid as yet there was (arose, grew) no shrub of the field upon the earth, and no herb of the field sprouted; for Jehovah El had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there icas no man to till the ground; and a mist arose from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground." ^^'^ in parallelism with noy means to become, to arise, to proceed. Although the growth of the shrubs and sprouting of the herbs are represented here as dependent upon the rain and the cultivation of the earth by man, we must not understand the words as meaning that there was neither shrub nor herb before the rain and dew, or before the creation of man, and so draw the conclusion that the creation of the plants occurred either after or contemporaneously with the creation of man, in direct contradiction to chap. i. 11, 12. The creation of the plants is not alluded to here at all, but simply the planting of the garden in Eden. The growing of the shrubs and sprouting of the herbs is different from the creation or first production of the vegetable kingdom, and relates to the growing and sprouting of the plants and germs which were called into existence by the creation, the natural development of the plants as it had steadily proceeded ever since the creation. This was dependent upon rain and human culture; their creation was not. Moreover, the shrub and herb of the field do not embrace the whole of the vegetable productions of the earth. It is not a fact that " the field is used in the second section in the same sense as the earth in the. first." nib' is not " the widespread plain of the earth, the broad expanse of land," but a field of arable land, soil fit for cultivation, which forms only a part of the " earth" or " ground." Even the "beast of the field" in ver. 19 and iii. 1 is not synonymous with the " beast of the earth" in chap. i. 24, 25, but is a more restricted term, denoting only such animals as live upon the field and are supported by its produce, whereas the " beast of the earth" denotes all wild beasts as distinguished from tame cattle and reptiles. In the same way, the " shrub of the field" consists of such shrubs and tree-like productions of the cultivated land as man raises for the sake of their fruit, and the "herb of the field," all seed-producing plants, both corn and vegetables, which serve as food for man and beast. — The mist (IN, vapour, which falls as rain. Job xxxvi. 27) is correctly regarded by Delitzsch as the creative beginning of the rain (1'''?^^) itself, from which we may infer, therefore, that it rained before the flood.

Ver. 7. " 21ien Jeliovali God formed man from dust of the groundr "ISJ? is the accusative of the material employed (Ewald and Gesenius). The Vav consec. imperf. in vers. 7, 8, 9, does not indicate the order of time, or of thought; so that the meaning is not that God planted the garden in Eden after He had created Adam, nor that He caused the trees to grow after He had planted the garden and placed the man there. The latter is opposed to ver. 15; the former is utterly improbable. The process of man's creation is described minutely here, because it serves to explain his relation to God and to the surrounding world. He was formed from dust (not de limo terrce, from a clod of the earth, for nsy is not a solid mass, but the finest part of the material of the earth), and into his nostril a breath of life was breathed, by which he became an animated being. Hence the nature of man consists of a material substance and an immaterial principle of life. " The breath of life," i.e. breath producing life, does not denote the spirit by which man is dis tinguished from the animals, or the soul of man from that of the beasts, but only the life-breath (yid. 1 Kings xvii. 17). It is true, i^^K'^ generally signifies the human soul, but in chap. vii. 22 D''*n miTipE^J is used of men and animals both; and should any one explain this, on the ground that the allusion is chiefly to men, and the animals are connected per zeugma, or should he press the ruach attached, and deduce from this the use of neshamah in relation to men and animals, there are several passages in which neshamah is synonymous with ruach (e.g. Isa. xlii. 5; Job xxxii. 8, xxxiii, 4), or n''''n nn applied to animals (chap. vi. 17, vii. 15), or again neshamah used as equivalent to nephesh (e.g. Josh. x. 40, cf. vers. 28, 30, 32). For neshamah, the breathing, ttvot], is " the ruach in action" (Auherlen). Beside this, the man formed from the dust became, through the breathing of the '' breath of life," a Tm B'p:, an animated, and as such a living being; an expression which is also applied to fishes, birds, and land animals (i. 20, 21, 24, 30), and there is no proof of pre-eminence on the part of man. As n>n K'DJ, '\lrv^ ^wca, does not refer to the soul merely, but to the whole man as an animated being, so nOE'3 does not denote the spirit of man as distinguished from body and soul. On the relation of the soul to the spirit of man nothing can be gathered from this passage; the words, correctly interpreted, neither show that the soul is an emanation, an exhalation of the human spirit, nor that the soul was created before the spirit and merely received its life from the latter. The formation of man from dust and the breathing of the breath of life we must not understand in a mechanical sense, as if God first of all constructed a human figure from dust, and then, by breathing His breath of life into the clod of earth which he had shaped into the form of a man, made it into a living being. The words are to be understood Oeo-irpeww^. By an act of divine omnipotence man arose from the dust; and in the same moment in which the dust, by virtue of creative omnipotence, shaped itself into a human form, it was pervaded by the divine breath of life, and created a living being, so that we cannot say the body was earlier than the soul. The dust of the earth is merely the earthly substratum, which was formed by the breath of life from God into an animated, living, self-existent being. When it is said, " God breathed into his nostril the breath of life," it is evident that this description merely gives prominence to the peculiar sign of life, viz. breathing; since it is obvious, that what God breathed into man could not be the air which man breathes; for it is not that which breathes, but simply that which is breathed. Consequently, breathing into the nostril can only mean, that " God, through His own breath, produced and combined with the bodily form that principle of life, which was the origin of all human life, and which constantly manifests its existence in the breath inhaled and exhaled through the nose" {Delitzsch, Psychol, p. 62). Breathing, however, is common both to man and beast; so that this cannot be the sensuous analogon of the supersensuous spiritual life, but simply the principle of the physical life of the soul. Nevertheless the vital principle in man is different from that in the animal, and the human soul from the soul of the beast. This difference is indicated by the way in which man received the breath of life from God, and so became a living soul. " The beasts arose at the creative word of God, and no communication of the spirit is mentioned even in ch. ii. 19; tho origin of their soul was coincident with that of their corporeaHtj, and their life was merely the individualization of the universal life, with which all matter was filled in the beginning by the Spirit of God. On the other hand, the human spirit is not a mere individualization of the divine breath which breathed upon the material of the world, or of the universal spirit of nature; nor is his body merely a production of the earth when stimulated by the creative word of God. The earth does not bring forth his body, but God Himself puts His hand to the work and forms him; nor does the life already imparted to the world by the Spirit of God individualize itself in him, but God breathes directly into the nostrils of the one man, in the whole fulness of His personality, the breath of life, that in a manner corresponding to the personality of God he may become a living soul" {Delitzsch). This was the foundation of the pre-eminence of man, of his likeness to God and his immortality; for by this he was formed into a personal being, whose immaterial part was not merely soul, but a soul breathed entirely by God, since spirit and soul were created together through the inspiration of God. As the spiritual nature of man is described simply by the act of breathing, which is discernible by the senses, so the name which God gives him (chap. v. 2) is founded upon the earthly side of his being: Adam, from nois (adamah), earth, the earthly element, like homo from humus, or from 'xafJia, ')(afiai, '^afidOev, to guard him from self-exaltation, not from the red colour of his body, since this is not a distinctive characteristic of man, but common to him and to many other creatures. The name man (Mensch), on the other hand, from the Sanskrit mdnuscha, manuschja, from man to think, manas = mens, expresses the spiritual inwardness of our nature.

Ver. 8. The abode, which God prepared for the first man, was a "garden in Eden,'' also called ''the garden of Eden" (ver. 15, chap. iii. 23, 24; Joel ii. 3), or Eden (Isa. li. 3; Ezek. xxviii. 13, xxxi. 9). Eden (n^, i.e. delight) is the proper name of a particular district, the situation of which is described in vers. 10 sqq.; but it must not be confounded with the Eden of Assyria (2 Kings xix. 12, etc.) and Coelesyria (Amos i. 5), which is written with double seghol. The garden {lit. a place hedged round) was to the east, i.e. in the eastern portion, and is generally called Paradise from the Septuagint version, in which the word is ren- dered irapaZeia-o^. This word, according to Spiegel, was derived from the Zendic pairi-daSza, a hedging round, and passed into the Hebrew in the form D^ns (Cant. iv. 13; Eccl. ii. 5; Neh. ii. 8), a park, probably through the commercial relations which Solomon established with distant countries. In the garden itself God caused all kinds of trees to grow out of the earth; and among them were two, which were called " the tree of life" and " the tree of knowledge of good and evil," on account of their peculiar significance in relation to man (see ver. 16 and chap. iii. 22). ^V^i], an infinitive, as Jer. xxii. 16 shows, has the article here because the phrase yTi 31L} nyT is regarded as one word, and in Jeremiah from the nature of the predicate. — ^Ver. 10. " And there was a river going out of Eden, to water the garden; and from thence it divided itself and became four heads;" i.e. the stream took its rise in Eden, flowed through the garden to water it, and on leaving the garden was divided into four heads or beginnings of rivers, that is, into four arms or separate streams. For this meaning of D''5i'K"i see Ezek. xvi. 25, Lam. ii. 19. Of the four rivers whose names are given to show the geographical situation of paradise, the last two are unquestionably Tigris and Euphrates. Hiddehel occurs in Dan. x. 4 as the Hebrew name for Tigris; in the inscriptions of Darius it is called Tigrd (or the arrow, according to Straho, Pliny, and Curtius), from the Zendic tighra, pointed, sharp, from which probably the meaning stormy (rapidus Tigris, Hor. Carm. 4, 14, 46) was derived. It flows before (p?^[^), in front of, Assyria, not to the east of Assyria; for the province of Assyria, which must be intended here, was on the eastern side of the Tigris: moreover, neither the meaning, " to the east of," nor the identity of DOlp and mp» has been, or can be, established from chap. iv. 16, 1 Sam. xiii. 5, or Ezek. xxxix. 11, which are the only other passages in which the word occurs, as Ewald himself acknowledges. F'rath, which was not more minutely described because it was so generally known, is the Euphrates; in old Persian, Ufrdta, according to Delitzsch, or the good and fertile stream; Ufrdtu, according to Spiegler, or the well-progressing stream. According to the present condition of the soil, the sources of the Euphrates and Tigris are not so closely connected that they could be regarded as the commencements of a common stream which has ceased to exist. The main sources of tlie Tigris, it is true, are only 2000 paces from the Euphrates, but they are to the north of Diarbekr, in a range of mountains which is skirted on three sides by the upper course of the Euphrates, and separates them from this river. We must also look in the same country, the highlands of Armenia, for the other two rivers, if the description of paradise actually rests upon an ancient tradition, and is to be regarded as something more than a mythical invention of the fancy. The name Phishon sounds like the Phasis of the ancients, with which Belaud supposed it to be identical; and Chavilah like ColcJiis, the well-known gold country of the ancients. But the ^aaa 6 Kok')(p^ {Herod. 4, 37, 45) takes its rise in the Caucasus, and not in Armenia. A more probable conjecture, therefore, points to the Cyrus of the ancients, which rises in Armenia, flows northwards to a point not far from the eastern border of Colchis, and then turns eastward in Iberia, from which it flows in a south-easterly direction to the Caspian Sea. The expression, " which compasseth the whole land of Chavilah^^ would apply very well to the course of this river from the eastern border of Colchis; for 320 does not necessarily signify to surround, but to pass through with different turns, or to skirt in a semicircular form, and Chavilah may have been larger than modern Colchis. It is not a valid objection to this explanation, that in every other place Chavilah is a district of Southern Arabia. The identity of this Chavilah with the Chavilah of the Joktanites (chap, x. 29, xxv. 18; 1 Sam. xv. 7) or of the Cushites (chap. X. 7; 1 Chron. i. 9) is disproved not only by the article used here, which distinguishes it from the other, but also by the description of it as land where gold, bdolach, and the shohamstone are found; a description neither requisite nor suitable in the case of the Arabian Chavilah, since these productions are not to be met with there. This characteristic evidently shows that the Chavilah mentioned here was entirely distinct from the other, and a land altogether unknown to the Israelites. — What we are to understand by Hphliri is uncertain. There is no certain ground for the meaning "pearls," given in Saad. and the later Kabbins, and adopted by Bochart and others. The rendering ^BeXka or ^BeWtov, bdellium; a vegetable gum, of which Dioscorus says, ol 8e fid8e\Kov at Be ^o\j(ov KaXovai, and Pliny, " alii hrochon appellant, alii malacham, alii maldacon" is favoured by the similarity in the name; but, on the other side, there is the fact that Pliny describes this gum as nigrum and hadrobolon, and Dioscorus as xnToireXiov (blackish), which does not agree with Num. xi. 7, where the appearance of the white grains of the manna is compared to that of bdolach. — The stone sJioham, according to most of the early versions, is probably the beryl, which is most likely the stone intended by the LXX. (o X/^o? o irpaa-Lvo^, the leek-green stone), as Pliny, when speaking of beryls, describes those as probatissimi, qui viriditatem puri maris imitantur; but according to others it is the onyx or sardonyx (yid. Ges. s. v.)} The Gihon (from H^a to break forth) is the Araxes, which rises in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates, flows from west to east, joins the Cyrus, and falls with it into the Caspian Sea. The name corresponds to the Arabic Jaihun, a name given by the Arabians and Persians to several large rivers. The land of Cush cannot, of course, be the later Cush, or Ethiopia, but must be connected with the Asiatic KoaaaLa, which reached to the Caucasus, and to which the Jews (of Shirwan) still give this name. But even though these four streams do not now spring from one source, but on the contrary their sources are separated by mountain ranges, this fact does not prove that the narrative before us is a myth. Along with or since the disappearance of paradise, that part of the earth may have undergone such changes that the precise locality can no longer be determined with certainty.^

^ The two productions furnish no proof that the Phishon is to be sought for in India. The assertion that the name bdolacJi is Indian, is quite unfounded, for it cannot be proved that madalaka in Sanscrit is a vegetable ■gum; nor has this been proved of madaTa, which is possibly related to it (cf. Lassen^s indische Altlik. 1, 290 note). Moreover, Pliny speaks of Bacti'iana as the land " in qua Bdellium est nominatissimum,''^ although he adds, " nascitur et in Arabia Indiaque, et Media ac Babylone;" and Isidorus says of the Bdella which comes from India, " Sordida est et nigra et majori gleha" which, again, does not agree with Num. xi. 7. — The shoJiam-stone also is not necessarily associated with India; for although Pliny says of the beryls, '"''India eos gignit, raro alibi repertos,^^ he also observes, " in nostra orbe aliquando circa Pontum inveniri putantur.^^

2 That the continents of our globe have undergone great changes since the creation of the huinan race, is a truth sustained by the facts of natural history and the earliest national traditions, and admitted by the most celebrated naturalists. (See the collection of proofs made by Keerl.) These changes must not be all attributed to the flood; many may have occurred before and many after, like the catastrophe in which the Dead Sea origin-

Vers. 15-17. After the preparation of the garden in Eden God placed the man there, to dress it and to keep it. inn''3;| not merely expresses removal thither, but the fact that the man was placed there to lead a life of repose, not indeed in inactivity, but in fulfilment of the course assigned him, which was very different from the trouble and restlessness of the weary toil into which he was plunged by sin. In paradise he was to dress (colere) the garden; for the earth was meant to be tended and cultivated by man, so that without human culture, plants and even the different varieties of com degenerate and grow wild. Cultivation therefore preserved ("inK^ to keep) the divine plantation, not merely from injury on the part of any evil power, either penetrating into, or already existing in the creation, but also from running wild through natural degeneracy. As nature was created for man, it was his vocation not only to ennoble it by his work, to make it subservient to himself, but also to raise it into the sphere of the spirit and further its glorification. This applied not merely to the soil beyond the limits of paradise, but to the garden itself, which, although the most perfect portion of the terrestrial creation, was nevertheless susceptible of development, and which was allotted to man, in order that by his care and culture he might make it into a transparent mirror of the glory of the Creator. — Here too the man was to commence his own spiritual development. To this end God had planted two trees in the midst of the garden of Eden; the one to train his spirit through the exercise of obedience to the word of God, the other to transform his earthly nature into the spiritual essence of eternal life. These trees received their names from their relation to man, that is to say, from the effect which the eating of their fruit was destined to produce upon human life and its development. The fruit of the tree of life conferred the power of eternal, immortal life; and the tree of knowledge was planted, to lead men to the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil was no mere experience of good and ill, but a moral element in that spiritual development, through ated, without being recorded in history as this has been. Still less must we interpret chap. xi. 1 (compared with x. 25), as Fabri and Keerl have done, as indicating a complete revolution of the globe, or a geogonic process, by which the continents of the old world were divided, and assumed their present physiognomy.

which the man created in the image of God was to attain to the filling out of that nature, which had already been planned in the likeness of God. For not to know what good and evil are, is a sign of either the immaturity of infancy (Deut. i. 39), or the imbecility of age (2 Sam. xix. 35); whereas the power to distinguish good and evil is commended as the gift of a king (1 Kings iii. 9) and the wisdom of angels (2 Sam. xiv. 17), and in the highest sense is ascribed to God Himself (chap. iii. 5, 22). Why then did God prohibit man from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with the threat that, as soon as he ate thereof, he would surely die? (The inf. abs. before the finite verb intensifies the latter: vid. Ewald, § 312a). Are we to regard the tree as poisonous, and suppose that some fatal property resided in the fruit? A supposition which so completely ignores the ethical nature of sin is neither warranted by the antithesis, nor by what is said in chap. iii. 22 of the tree of life, nor by the fact that the eating of the forbidden fruit was actually the cause of death. Even in the case of the tree of life, the power is not to be sought in the physical character of the fruit. No earthly fruit possesses the power to give immortality to the life which it helps to sustain. Life is not rooted in man's corporeal nature; it was in his spiritual nature that it had its origin, and from this it derives its stability and permanence also. It may, indeed, be brought to an end through the destruction of the body; but it cannot be exalted to perpetual duration, i.e. to immortality, through its preservation and sustenance. And this applies quite as much to the original nature of man, as to man after the fall. A body formed from earthly materials could not be essentially immortal: it would of necessity either be turned to earth, and fall into dust again, or be transformed by the spirit into the immortality of the soul. The power which transforms corporeality into immortality is spiritual in its nature, and could only be imparted to the earthly tree or its fruit through the word of God, through a special operation of the Spirit of God, an operation which we can only picture to ourselves as sacramental in its character, rendering earthly elements the receptacles and vehicles of celestial powers. God had given such a sacramental nature and significance to the two trees in the midst of the garden, that their fruit could and would produce supersensual, mental, and spiritual effects upon the nature of the first human pair. The tree of life was to impart the power of transformation into eternal life. The tree of knowledge was to lead man to the knowledge of good and evil; and, according to the divine intention, this was to be attained through his not eating of its fruit. This end was to be accomplished, not only by his discerning in the limit imposed by the prohibition the difference between that which accorded with the will of God and that which opposed it, but also by his coming eventually, through obedience to the prohibition, to recognise the fact that all that is opposed to the will of God is an evil to be avoided, and, through voluntaiy resistance to such evil, to the full development of the freedom of choice originally imparted to him into the actual freedom of a deliberate and self-conscious choice of good. By obedience to the divine will he would have attained to a godlike knowledge of good and evil, i.e. to one in accordance with his own likeness to God. He would have detected the evil in the approaching tempter; but instead of yielding to it, he would have resisted it, and thus have made good his 0"RTi property acquired with consciousness and of his own free-will, and in this way by proper self-determination would gradually have advanced to the possession of the truest liberty. But as he failed to keep this divinely appointed way, and ate the forbidden fruit in opposition to the command of God, the power imparted by God to the fruit was manifested in a different way. He learned the difference between good and evil from his own guilty experience, and by receiving the evil into his own soul, fell a victim to the threatened death. Thus through his own fault the tree, which should have helped him to attain true freedom, brought nothing but the sham liberty of sin, and with it death, and that without any demoniacal power of destruction being conjured into the tree itself, or any fatal poison being hidden in its fruit.

Vers. 18-25. Creation of the Woman. — As the creation of man is introduced in chap. i. 26, 27, with a divine decree, so here that of the woman is preceded by the divine declaration, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him ^''^P.? ""^^5 « help of his like: " i.e. a helping being, in which, as soon as he sees it, he may recognise himself " (Delitzsch). Of such a help the man stood in need, in order that he might fulfil his calling, not only to perpetuate and multiply his race, but to cultivate and govern the earth. To indicate this, the general word •njja "iTJ? is chosen, in which there is an allusion to the relation of the sexes. To call out this want, God brought the larger quadrupeds and birds to the man, " to see what he would call them (i^ lit. each one); and whatsoever the man might call every living being should be its name." The time when this took place must have been the sixth day, on which, according to chap. i. 27, the man and woman were created: and there is no difficulty in this, since it would not have required much time to bring the animals to Adam to see what he would call them, as the animals of paradise are all we have to think of; and the deep sleep into which God caused the man to fall, till he had formed the woman from his rib, need not have continued long. In chap. i. 27 the creation of the woman is linked with that of the man; but here the order of sequence is given, because the creation of the woman formed a chronological incident in the history of the human race, which commences with the creation of Adam. The circumstance that in ver. 19 the formation of the beasts and birds is connected with the creation of Adam by the imperf. c. 1 consec, constitutes no objection to the plan of creation given in chap. i. The arrangement may be explained on the supposition, that the writer, who was about to describe the relation of man to the beasts, went back to their creation, in the simple method of the early Semitic historians, and placed this first instead of making it subordinate; so that our modem style of expressing the same thought would be simply this: " God brought to Adam the beasts which He had formed." ^ Moreover, the allusion is not

1 A striking example of this style of narrative we find in 1 Kings vii. 13. First of all, the building and completion of the temple are noticed several times in chap, vi,, and the last time in connection with the year and month (chap. vi. 9, 14, 37, 38); after that, the fact is stated, that the royal palace was thirteen years in building; and then the writer proceeds thus: " And king Solomon sent and fetched Hiram from Tyre.... and he came to king Solomon, and did all his work; and made the two pillars," etc. Now, if we were to understand the historical preterite with 1 consec, here, as giving the order of sequence, Solomon would be made to send for the Tyrian artist, thirteen years after the temple was finished, to come and prepare the pillars for the porch, and all the vessels needed for the temple. But the writer merely expresses in Semitic style the simple thought, that " Hiram, whom Solomon fetched from Tyre, made the vessels," etc. Another instance we find in Judg. ii. 6.

to the creation of all the beasts, but simply to that of the beasts living in the field (game and tame cattle), and of the fowls of the air, — to beasts, therefore, which had been formed like man from the earth, and thus stood in a closer relation to him than water animals or reptiles. For God brought the animals to Adam, to show him the creatures which were formed to serve him, that He might see what he would call them. Calling or naming presupposes acquaintance. Adam is to become acquainted with the creatures, to learn their relation to him, and by giving them names to prove himself their lord. God does not order him to name them; but by bringing the beasts He gives him an opportunity of developing that intellectual capacity which constitutes his superiority to the animal world. " The man sees the animals, and thinks of what they are and how they look; and these thoughts, in themselves already inward words, take the form involuntarily of audible names, which he utters to the beasts, and by which he places the impersonal creatures in the first spiritual relation to himself, the personal being" (Delitzsch). Language, as W. v. Humboldt says, is " the organ of the inner being, or rather the inner being itself as it gradually attains to inward knowledge and expression." It is merely thought cast into articulate sounds or words. The thoughts of Adam with regard to the animals, to which he gave expression in the names that he gave them, we are not to regard as the mere results of reflection, or of abstraction from merely outward peculiarities which affected the senses; but as a deep and direct mental insight into the nature of the animals, which penetrated far deeper than such knowledge as is the simple result of reflecting and abstracting thought. The naming of the animals, therefore, led to this result, that there was not found a help meet for man. Before the creation of the woman we must regard the man (Adam) as being " neither male, in the sense of complete sexual distinction, nor androgynous as though both sexes were combined in the one individual created at the first, but as created in anticipation of the future, with a preponderant tendency, a male in simple potentiality, out of which state he passed, the moment the woman stood by his side, when the mere potentia became an actual antithesis" (Ziegler). — Then God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man (ver. 21). nOTnri, a deep sleep, in which all consciousness of the outer world and of one's own existence vanishes. Sleep is an essential element in the nature of man as ordained by God, and is quite as necessary for man as the interchange of day and night for all nature besides. But this deep sleep was different from natural sleep, and God caused it to fall upon the man by day, that He might create the woman out of him. " Everything out of which something new is to spring, sinks first of all into such a sleep ** {Ziegler). ]b): means the side, and, as a portion of the human body, the rib. The correctness of this meaning, which is given by all the ancient versions, is evident from the words, " God took one of his niV^V," which show that the man had several of them. " And closed up flesh in the place thereof;^ i.e. closed the gap which had been made, with flesh which He put in the place of the rib. The woman was created, not of dust of the earth, but from a rib of Adam, because she was formed for an inseparable unity and fellowship of life with the man, and the mode of her creation was to lay the actual foundation for the moral ordinance of marriage. As the moral idea of the unity of the human race required that man should not be created as a genus or plurality,' so the moral relation of the two persons establishing the unity of the race required that man should be created first, and then the woman from the body of the man. By this the priority and superiority of the man, and the dependence of the woman upon the man, are established as an ordinance of divine creation. This ordinance of God forms the root of that tender

^ Natural science can only demonstrate the unity of the human race, not the descent of all men from one pair, though many naturalists question and deny even the former, but without any warrant from anthropological facts. For every thorough investigation leads to the conclusion arrived at by the latest inquirer in this department, Th. Waitz, that not only are there no facts in natural history which preclude the unity of the various races of men, and fewer difficulties in the way of this assumption than in that of the opposite theory of specific diversities; but even in mental reepects there are no specific differences within the limits of the race. DelUzsch has given an admirable summary of the proofs of unity. " That the races of men," he says, " are not species of one genus, but varieties of one species, is confirmed by the agreement in the physiological and pathological phenomena in them all, by the similarity in the anatomical structure, in the fundamental powers and traits of the mind, in the limits to the duration of life, in the normal temperature of the body and the average rate of pulsation, in the duration of pregnancy, and in the unrestricted fruitfulness of marriages between the various races."

love with which the man loves the woman as himself, and hy which marriage becomes a type of tiie fellowship of love and life, which exists between the Lord and His Church (Eph. vi. 32). If the fact that the woman was formed from a rib, and not from -any other part of the man, is significant; all that we can find in this is, that the woman was made to stand as a helpmate by the side of the man, not that there was any allusion to conjngal love as founded in the heart; for the text does not s])eak of the rib as one which was next the heart. The word '"133 is worthy of note: from the rib of the man God builds the female, through whom the human race is to be built up by the male (chap. xvi. 2, XXX. 3). — Vers. 23, 24. The design of God in the creation of the woman is perceived by Adam, as soon as he awakes, when the woman is brought to him by God. Without a revelation from God, he discovers in the woman bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh." The words, " this is now (QJ'Sn Ut. this time) bone of my bones" etc., are expressive of joyous astonishment at the suitable helpmate, whose relation to himself he describes in the words, " she shall be called Woman, for she is taken out of man." ntJ't;? is well rendered by Luther, " Mdnnin" (a female man), like the old Latin vira from vir. The words which follow, " therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall become one flesh" are not to be regarded as Adam's, first on account of the l?"?!?, which is always used in Genesis, with the exception of chap. xx. 6, xlii. 21, to introduce remarks of the writer, either of an archaeological or of a historical character, and secondly, because, even if Adam on seeing the woman had given prophetic utterance to his perception of the mystery of marriage, he could not with propriety have spoken of father and mother. They are the words of Moses, written to bring out the truth embodied in the fact recorded as a divinely appointed result, to exhibit marriage as the deepest corporeal and spiritual unity of man and woman, and to hold up monogamy before the eyes of the people of Israel as the form of marriage ordained by God. But as the words of Moses, they are the utterance of divine revelation; and Christ could quote them, therefore, as the word of God (M-a.tt. xix. 5). By the leaving of father and mother, which applies to the woman as well as to the man, the conjugal union is shown to be a spiritual oneness, a vital communion of heart as well as of body, in which it finds its consummation. This union is of a totally different nature from that of parents and children; hence marriage between parents and children is entirely opposed to the ordinance of God. Marriage itself, notwithstanding the fact that it demands the leaving of father and mother, is a holy appointment of God; hence celibacy is not a higher or holier state, and the relation of the sexes for a pure and holy man is a pure and holy relation. This is shown in ver. 25: " They were both naked (Q"''?^"'!!, with dagesh in the o, is an abbreviated form of D''GiTy iii. 7, from -i^iy to strip), the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.'' Their bodies were sanctified by the spirit, which animated them. Shame entered first with sin, which destroyed the normal relation of the spirit to the body, exciting tendencies and lusts which warred against the soul, and turning the sacred ordinance of God into sensual impulses and the lust of the flesh.

The man, whom God had appointed lord of the earth and its inhabitants, was endowed with everything requisite for the develo])nient of his nature and the fulfilment of his destiny. In the fruit of the trees of the garden he had food for the sustenance of his life; in the care of the garden itself, a field of labour for the exercise of his physical strength; in the animal and vegetable kingdom, a capacious region for the expansion of his intellect; in the tree of knowledge, a positive law for the training of his moral nature; and in the woman associated with him, a suitable companion and help. In such circumstances as these he might have developed both his physical and spiritual nature in accordance with the will of God. But a tempter approached him from the midst of the animal world, and he yielded to the temptation to break the command of God. The serpent is said to have been the tempter. But to any one who reads the narrative carefully in connection with the previous history of the creation, and bears in mind that man is there described as exalted far above all the rest of the animal world, not only by the fact of his having been created in the image of God and invested with dominion over all the creatures of the earth, but also because God breathed into him the breath of life, and no help meet for him was found among the beasts of the field, and also that this superiority was manifest in the gift of speech, which enabled him to give names to all the rest — a thing which they, as speechless, were unable to perform, — it must be at once apparent that it was not from the serpent,.as a sagacious and crafty animal, that the temptation proceeded, but that the serpent was simply the tool of that evil spirit, who is met with in the further course of the world's history under the name of Satan (the opponent), or the Devil (o Bidl3o\o<;, the slanderer or accuser).^ When the serpent, therefore, is introduced as speaking, and that just as if it had been entrusted with the thoughts of God Himself, the speaking must have emautited, not from the serpent, but from a superior spirit, which had taken possession of the serpent for the sake of seducing man. This fact, indeed, is not distinctly stated in the canonical books of the Old Testament; but that is simply for the same educational reason which led Moses to transcribe tiie account exactly as it had been handed down, in the pure objective form of an outward and visible occurrence, and without any allusion to the causality which underlay the external phenomenon, viz. not so much to oppose the tendency of contemporaries to heathen superstition and habits of intercourse with the kingdom of demons, as to avoid encouraging the disposition to transfer the blame to the evil spirit which tempted man, and thus reduce sin to a mere act of weakness. But we find the fact distinctly alluded to in the book of Wisdom ii. 24; and not only is it constantly noticed in the rabbinical wi'itings, where the prince of the evil spirits is called the old serpent, or the serpent, with evident reference to this account, but it was introduced at a very early period into Parsism also. It is also attested by Christ and His apostles (John viii. 44; 2 Cor. xi. 3 and 14; Rom. xvi. 20; Rev. xii. 9, xx. 2), and confirmed by the tempta-

^ There was a fall, therefore, in the higher spiritual world before the fall of man; and this is not only plainly taught in 2 Pet. ii. 4 and Jude 6, but assumed in everything that the Scriptures say of Satan. But this event in the world of spirits neither compels us to place the fall of Satan before the six days' work of creation, nor to assume that the days represent long periods. For as man did not continue long in communion with God, so the angelprince may have rebelled against God shortly after his creation, and not only have involved a host of angels in his apostasy and fall, but have proceeded immediately to tempt the men, who were created in the image of God, to abuse their liberty by transgressing the divine command.

lion of our Lord. The temptation of Christ is the counterpart of that of Adam. Christ was tempted by the devil, not only like Adam, but because Adam had been tempted and overcome, in order that by overcoming the tempter He might wrest from the devil that dominion over the whole race which he had secured by his victory over the first human pair. The tempter approached the Saviour openly; to the first man he came in disguise. The serpent is not a merely symbolical term applied to Satan; nor was it only the form which Satan assumed; but it was a real serpent, perverted by Satan to be the instrument of his temptation (vers. 1 and 14). The possibility of such a perversion, or of the evil spirit using an animal for his own purposes, is not to be explained merely on the ground of the supremacy of spirit over nature, but also from the connection established in the creation itself between heaven and earth; and still more, from the position originally assigned by the Creator to the spirits of heaven in relation to the creatures of earth. The origin, force, and limits of this relation it is impossible to determine a -priori, or in any other way than from such hints as are given in the Scriptures: so that there is no reasonable ground for disputing the possibility of such an influence. Notwithstanding his self-willed opposition to God, Satan is still a creature of God, and was created a good spirit; although, in proud self-exaltation, he abused the freedom essential to the nature of a superior spirit to purposes of rebellion against his linker. He cannot therefore entirely shake off his dependence upon God. And this dependence may possibly explain the reason, why he did not come " disguised as an angel of light" to tempt our first parents to disobedience, but was obliged to seek the instrument of his wickedness among the beasts of the field. The trial of our first progenitors was ordained by God, because probation was essential to their spiritual development and self-determination. But as He did not desire that they should be tempted to their fall. He would not suffer Satan to tempt them in a way which should surpass their human capacity. The tempted might therefore have resisted the tempter. If, instead of approaching them in the form of a celestial being, in the likeness of God, he came in that of a creature, not only far inferior to God, but far below themselves, they could have no excuse for allowing a mere animal to persuade them to break the commandment of God. For they had been made to have dominion over the beasts, and not to take their own law from them. Moreover, the fact that an evil spirit was approaching them in the serpent, could hardly be concealed from them. Its s})eaking alone must have suggested that; for Adam had already become acquainted with the nature of the beasts, and had not found one among them resembling himself — not one, therefore, endowed with reason and speech. The substance of the address, too, was enough to prove that it was no good spirit which spake through the serpent, but one at enmity with God. Hence, when they paid attention to what he said, they were altogether without excuse.

Vers. 1-8. " The serpent was more subtle than all the beasts of the field, lohich Jehovah God had mader — The serpent is here described not only as a beast, but also as a creature of God; it must therefore have been good, like everything else that He had made. Subtilty was a natural characteristic of the serpent (Matt, X. 16), which led the evil one to select it as his instrument. Nevertheless the predicate D^iV is not used here in the good sense of ^povifio^ (LXX.), prudens, but in the bad sense of 7ravovpyo<;, callidus. For its subtilty was manifested as the craft of a tempter to evil, in the simple fact that it was to the weaker woman that it turned; and cunning was also displayed in what it said: " Hath God indeed said, Ye shall not eat of all the trees of the garden?" ^3 ^X is an interrogative expressing surprise (as in 1 Sam. xxiii. 3, 2 Sam. iv. 11): "Is it really the fact that God has prohibited you from eating of all the trees of the garden? " The Hebrew may, indeed, bear the meaning, "hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree?" but from the context, and especially the conjunction, it is obvious that the meaning is, " ye shall not eat of any tree." The serpent calls God by the name of Elohim alone, and the woman does the same. In this more general and indefinite name the personality of the living God is obscured. To attain his end, the tempter felt it necessary to change the living personal God into a merely general numen divinum, and to exaggerate the prohibition, in the hope of exciting in the woman's mind partly distrust of God Himself, and partly a doubt as to the truth of His word. And his words were listened to. Instead of turning away, the woman replied, " We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden^ God hath said,

Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.** She was aware of the prohibition, therefore, and fully understood its meaning; but she added, " neither shall ye touch it," and proved by this very exaggeration that it appeared too stringent even to her, and therefore that her love and confidence towards God were already beginning to waver. Here was the beginning of her fall: " for doubt is the father of sin, and skepsis the mother of all transgression; and in this father and this mother, all our present knowledge has a common origin with sin" (Ziegler). From doubt, the tempter advances to a direct denial of the truth of the divine threat, and to a malicious suspicion of the divine love (vers. 4, 5). " Ye will by no means die " (si? is placed before the infinitive absolute, as in Ps. xlix. 8 and Amos ix. 8; for the meaning is not, " ye will not die;** but, ye will positively not die). " But'- God doth know that in the day ye eat thereofy your eyes will be opened^ and ye will be like God, knowing good and evil.*^ That is to say, it is not because the fruit of the tree will injure you that God has forbidden you to eat it, but from ill-will and envy, because He does not wish you to be like Himself. " A truly Satanic double entendre, in which a certain agreement between truth and untruth is secured! " By eating the fruit, man did obtain the knowledge of good and evil, and in this respect became like God (vers. 7 and 22). This was the truth which covered the falsehood " ye shall not die," and turned the whole statement into a lie, exhibiting its author as the father of lies, who abides not in the truth (Jolin viii. 44). For the knowledge of good and evil, which man obtains by going into evil, is as far removed from the true likeness of God, which he wouH have attained by avoiding it, as the imaginary liberty of a sinner, which leads into bondage to sin and ends in death, is from the true liberty of a life of fellowship with God. — Ver. 6. The illusive hope of being like God excited a longing for the forbidden fruit. " The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a pleasure to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise (•'"'S^'lI signifies to gain or show discernment or insight); and she took of its fruit and ate, and gave to her husband by her (who was present), and he did eat'* As distrust of God's command leads to a disregard of it, so the longing for a false independence excites a desire for the seeming good that has been prohibited; and this desire is fostered by the senses, until it brings forth sin. Doubt, unbelief, and pride were the roots of the sin of our first parents, as they have been of all tlie sins of their posterity. The more trifling the object of their sin seems to have been, the greater and more difficult does th'3 sin itself appear; especially when we consider that the first men " stood in a more direct relation to God, their Creator, than any other man has ever done, that their hearts were pure, their discernment clear, their intercourse with God direct, that they were surrounded by gifts just bestowed by Him, and could not excuse themselves on the ground of any misunderstanding of the divine prohibition, which threatened them witli the loss of life in the event of disobedience " (Delitzsch). Yet not only did the woman yield to the seductive wiles of the serpent, but even the man allowed himself to be tempted by the woman. — Vers. 7, 8. " Then the eyes of them both were opened " (as the serpent had foretold: but what did they see?), " and they kneio that they were nakedJ' They had lost "that blessed blindness, the ignorance of innocence, which knows nothing of nakedness" (Ziegler). The discovery of their nakedness excited shame, which they sought to conceal by an outward covering. " They sewed Jigleaves together, and made themselves aprons^ The word '"i^^i? always denotes the fig-tree, not the pisang {Musa paradlsiaca), nor the Indian banana, whose leaves are twelve feet long and two feet broad, for there would have been no necessity to sew them together at all. n^in, irepi^oofjiara, are aprons, worn round the hips. It was here that the consciousness of nakedness first suggested the need of covering, not because the fruit had poisoned the fountain of human life, and through some inherent quality had immediately corrupted the reproductive powers of the body (as Hoffmann and Baumgarten suppose), nor because any pliysical change ensued in consequence of the fall; but because, with the destruction of the normal connection between soul and body through sin, the body ceased to be the pure abode of a spirit in fellowship with God, and in the purely natural state of the body the consciousness was produced not merely of the distinction of the sexes, but still more of the worthlessness of the flesh; so that the man and woman stood ashamed in each other's presence, and endeavoured to hide the dlsorace of their spiritual nakedness, by covering those parts of the body throutrU which the impurities of nature are removed. That the natural feehng of shame, the origin of which is recorded liere, had its root, not in sensuaHty or any physical corruption, but in the consciousness of guilt or shame before God, and consequently that it was the conscience which was really at work, is evident from the fact that the man and his wife hid themselves from Jehovah God among the trees of the garden, as soon as they heard the sound of His footsteps, nin^ pip (^the voice of Jehovah, ver. 8) is not the voice of God speaking or calling, but the sound of God walking, as in 2 Sam. v. 24, 1 Kings xiv. 6, etc. — In the cool of the day (Jit. in the wind of the day), i.e. towards the evening, when a cooling wind generallv blows. The men have broken away from God, but God will not and cannot leave them alone. He comes to them as one man to another. This w^as the earliest form of divine revelation. God conversed with the first man in a visible shape, as the Father and Instructor of His children. He did not adopt this mode for the first time after the fall, but employed it as far back as the period when He brought the beasts to Adam, and gave him the woman to be his wife (chap. ii. 19, 22). This human mode of intercourse between man and God is not a mere figure of speech, but a reality, having its foundation in the nature of humanity, or rather in the fact that man was created in the image of God, but not in the sense supposed by Jakohi, that " God theomorphised when creating man, and man therefore necessarily anthropomorphises when he thinks of God." The anthropomorphies of God have their real foundation in the divine condescension which culminated in the incarnation of God in Christ. They are to be understood, however, as implying, not that corporeality, or a bodily shape, is an essential characteristic of God, but that God having given man a bodily shape, when He created him in His own image, revealed Himself in a manner suited to his bodily senses, that He might thus preserve him in living communion with Himself.

Vers. 9-15. The man could not hide himself from God. "Jehovah God called unto A dam, and said unto him, Where art thou?" Not that He was ignorant of his hiding-place, but to bring him to a confession of his sin. And when Adam said that he had hidden himself tlirough fear of. his nakedness, and thus sought to hide the sin behind its consequences, his disobedience behind the feeUng of shame; this is not to be regarded as a sign of pecuhar obduracy, but easily admits of a psychological explanation, viz. that at the time he actually thought more of his nakedness and shame than of his transgression of the divine command, and his consciousness of the effects of his sin was keener than his sense of the sin itself. To awaken the latter God said, " Who told thee that thou wast nakedV^ and asked him whether he had broken His command. He could not deny that he had, but sought to excuse himself by saying, that the woman whom God gave to be with him had given him of the tree. When the woman was questioned, she pleaded as her excuse, that the serpent had beguiled her (or rather deceived her, e^airarrjcrev, 2 Cor. xi. 3). In offering these excuses, neither of them denied the fact. But the fault in both was, that they did not at once smite upon their breasts. " It is so still; the sinner first of all endeavours to throw the blame upon others as tempters, and then upon circumstances which God has ordained." — Vers. 14, \h. The sentence follows the examination, and is pronounced first of all upon the serpent as the tempter: " Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed before all cattle, and before every beast of the field." ip, literally out of the beasts, separate from them (Deut. xiv. 2; Judg. v. 24), is not a comparative signifying more than, nor does it mean by; for the curse did not proceed from the beasts, but from God, and was not pronounced upon all the beasts, but upon the serpent alone. The /crtcri?, it is true, including the whole animal creation, has been "made subject to vanity" and "the bondage of corruption," in consequence of the sin of man (E,om. viii. 20, 21); yet this subjection is not to be regarded as the effect of the curse, which was pronounced upon the serpent, having fallen upon the whole animal world, but as the consequence of death passing from man into the rest of the creation, and thoroughly pervading the whole. The creation was drawn into the fall of man, and compelled to share its consequences, because the whole of the irrational creation was made for man, and made subject to him as its head; consequently the ground was cursed for man's sake, but not the animal world for the serpent's sake, or even along with the serpent. The curse fell upon the serpent for having tempted the woman, according to the same law by which not only a beast whicli had injured a man was ordered to be put to death (chap. ix. 5; Ex. xxi. 28, 29), but any beast which had been the instrument of an unnatural crime was to be slain along with the man (Lev. xx. 15, 16); not as though the beast were an accountable creature, but in consequence of its having been made subject to man, not to injure his body or his life, or to be the instrument of his sin, but to subserve the great purpose of his life. " Just as a loving father," as Chrysoslom says, " when punishing the murderer of his son, might snap in two the sword or dagger with which the murder had been committed." The proof, therefore, that the serpent was merely the instrument of an evil spirit, does not lie in the punishment itself, but in the manner in which the sentence was pronounced. When God addressed the animal, and pronounced a curse upon it, this presupposed that the curse had regard not so much to the irrational beast as to the spiritual tempter, and tliat the punishment which fell upon the serpent was merely a symbol of his own. The punishment of the serpent corresponded to the crime. It had exalted itself above the man; therefore upon its belly it should go, and dust it should eat all the days of its life. If these words are not to be robbed of their entire meaning, they cannot be understood in any other way than as denoting that the form and movements of the serpent were altered, and that its present repulsive shape is the effect of the curse pronounced upon it, though we cannot form any accurate idea of its original appearance. Going upon the belly (= creeping, Lev. xi. 42) was a mark of the deepest degradation; also the eating of dust, which is not to be understood as meaning that dust was to be its only food, but that while crawling in the dust it would also swallow dust (cf. Micah vii. 17; Isa. xlix. 23). Although this punishment fell literally upon the serpent, it also affected the tempter in a figurative or symbolical sense. He became the object of the utmost contempt and abhorrence; and the serpent still keeps the revolting image of Satan perpetually before the eye. This degradation was to be perpetual. '•' While all the rest of creation shall be delivered from the fate into which the fall has plunged it, according to Isa. Ixv. 25, the instrument of man's temptation is to remain sentenced to perpetual degradation in fulfilment of the sentence, ' all the days of thy life,' and thus to prefigure the fate of the real tempter, for whom there is no deliverance" {Hengstenherg, Cliristoloo;y i. 15). — The presumption of the tempter wiis punished with the deepest degradation; and in like manner his sympathy with the woman was to be turned into eternal hostility (ver. 15) God established perpetual enmity, not only between the serpent and the woman, but also between the serpent's and the woman's seed, i.e. between the human and the serpent race. The seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head, and the serpent crush the heel of the woman's seed. The meaning, terere, conterere, is thoroughly established by the Chald., Syr., and Kabb. autlioritles, and we have therefore retained it, in harmony with the word avvrpi^eiv in Rom. xvi. 20, and because it accords better and more easily with all the other passages in which the word occurs, than the rendering inJdare, to regard with enmity, which is obtained from the combination of ^11^' with ^^^. The verb is construed with a double accusative, the second giving greater precision to the first (vid. Ges. § 139, note, and Ewaid, § 281). The same word is used in coimection with both head and heel, to show that on both sides the intention is to destroy the opponent; at the same time, the expressions head and heel denote a majus and minus, or, as Calvin says, superius et inferius. This contrast arises from the nature of the foes. The serpent can only seize the heel of the man, who walks upright; whereas the man can crush the head of the serpent, that ci*awls in the dust. But this difference is itself the result of the curse pronounced upon the serpent, and its crawling in the dust is a sign that it will be defeated in its conflict with man. However pernicious may be the bite of a serpent in the heel when the poison circulates throughout tiie body (chap. xlix. 17), it is not immediately fatal and utterly incurable, like the crushing of a serpent's head.

But even in this sentence there is an unmistakeable allusion to the evil and hostile being concealed behind the serpent. That the human I'ace should triumph over the serpent, was a necessary consequence of the original subjection of the animals to man. When, therefore, God not merely confines the serpent within the limits assigned to the animals, but puts enmity between it and the woman, this in itself points to a higher, spiritual power, which may oppose and attack the human race through the serpent, but will eventually be overcome. Observe, too, that although in the first clause the seed of the serpent is opposed to the seed of the woman, in the second it is not over the seed of the serpent but over the serpent itself that the victory is said to be gained. It, i.e. the seed of the woman, will crush thy head, and thou (not thy seed) wilt crnsh its heel. Thus the seed of the serpent is hidden behind the unity of the serpent, or rather of the foe who, through the serpent, has done such injury to man. This foe is Satan, who incessantly opposes the seed of the woman and bruises its heel, but is eventually to be trodden under its feet. It does not follow from this, however, apart from other considerations, that by the seed of the woman we are to understand one solitary person, one individual only. As the woman is the mother of all living (ver. 20), her seed, to which the victory over the serpent and its seed is promised, must be the human race. But if a direct and exclusive reference to Christ appears to be exegetically untenable, the allusion in the word to Christ is by no means precluded in consequence. In itself the idea of V"]T, the seed, is an indefinite one, since the posterity of a man may consist of a whole tribe or of one son only (iv. 25, xxi. 12, 13), and on the other hand, an entire tribe may be reduced to one single descendant and become extinct in him. The question, therefore, who is to be understood by the "seed" which is to crush the serpent's head, can only be answered from the history of the human race. But a point of much greater importance comes into consideration here. Against the natural serpent the conflict may be carried on by the whole human race, by all who are born of woman, but not against Satan. As he is a foe who can only be met with spiritual weapons, none can encounter him successfully but such as possess and make use of spiritual arras. Hence the idea of the " seed " is modified by the nature of the foe. If we look at the natural development of the human race. Eve bore three sons, but only one of them, viz. Seth, was really the seed by whom the human family was preserved through the flood and perpetuated in Noah: so, again, of the three sons of Noah, Shem, the blessed of Jehovah, from whom Abraham descended, was the only one in whose seed all nations were to be blessed, and that not through Ishmael, but through Isaac alone. Through these constantly repeated acts of divine selection, which were not arbitrary exclusions, but were rendered necessary by differences in the spiritual condition of the individuals concerned, the

"seed," to which the victory over Satan was promised, was spiritually or ethically determined, and ceased to be co-extensive with physical descent. This spiritual seed culminated in Christ, in whom the Adamitic family terminated, henceforward to be renewed by Christ as the second Adam, and restored by Him to its original exaltation and likeness to God. In this sense Christ is the seed of the woman, who tramples Satan under His feet, not as an individual, but as the head both of the posterity of the woman which kept the promise and maintained the conflict with the old serpent before His advent, and also of all those who are gathered out of all nations, are united to Him by faith, and formed into one body of which He is the head (Rom. xvi. 20). On the other hand, all who have not regarded and preserved the promise, have fallen into the power of the old serpent, and are to be regarded as the seed of the serpent, whose head will be trodden under foot (Matt, xxiii. 33; John viii. 44; 1 John iii. 8). If then the promise culminates in Christ, the fact that the victory over the serpent is promised to the posterity of the woman, not of the man, acquires this deeper significance, that as it was through the woman that the craft of the devil brought sin and death into the world, so it is also through the woman that the grace of God will give to the fallen human race the conqueror of sin, of death, and of the devil. And even if the words had. reference first of all to the fact that the woman had been led astray by the serpent, yet in the fact that the destroyer of the serpent was born of a woman (without a human father) they were fulfilled in a way which showed that the promise must have proceeded from that Being, who secured its fulfilment not only in its essential force, but even in its apparently casual form.

Vers. 16-19. It was not till the prospect of victory had been presented, that a sentence of punishment was pronounced upon both the man and the woman on account of their sin. The woman, who had broken the divine command for the sake of earthly enjoyment, was punished in consequence with the sorrows and pains of pregnancy and childbirth. " I will greatly mulliply (n2"in is the inf. ahs. for niinn, which had become an adverb: vid. Ewald, § 240c, as in chap. xvi. 10 and xxii. 1 7) thy sorroio and thy pregnancy: in sorroiv thou shall bring forth children^ As the increase of conceptions, regarded as the fulfilment of the blessing to "be fruitful and multiply" (i. 28), could be no punishment, "^Pi}] must be understood as in apposition to 'Jip.i2^*y thi/ sorroio (i.e. the sorrows peculiar to a woman's life), a7id indeed (or more especially) thy pregnancy (i.e. the sorrows attendant upon that condition). The sentence is not rendered more lucid by the assumption of a hendiadys. " That the woman should bear children was the original will of God; but it was a punishment that henceforth she was to bear them in sorrow, i.e. with pains which threatened her own life as well as that of the child" (Delitzsch). The punishment consisted in an enfeebling of nature, in consequence of sin, which disturbed the normal relation between body and soul. — The woman had also broken through her divinely aj)pointed subordination to the man; she had not only emancipated herself from the man to listen to the serpent, but had led the man into sin. For that, she was punished with a desire bordering upon disease (np^c^jn from piiB? to run, to have a violent craving for a thing), and with subjection to the man. ^^ And he shall rule over thee^ Created for the man, the woman was made subordinate to him from the very first; but the supremacy of the man was not intended to become a despotic rule, crushing the woman into a slave, which has been the rule in ancient and modern Heathenism, and even in Mahometanism also, — a rule which was first softened by the sin-destroying grace of the Gospel, and changed into a form more in harmony with the original relation, viz. that of a rule on the one hand, and subordination on the other, which have their roots in mutual esteem and love.

Vers. 17-19. '•'■And unto Adam:" the noun is here used for the first time as a proper name without the article. In chap. i. 26 and ii. o, 20, the noun is a])pellative, and there are substantial reasons for the omission of the article. The sentence upon Adam includes a twofold punishment: first the cursing of the ground, and secondly death, which affects the woman as well, on account of their common guilt. By listening to his wife, when deceived by the serpent, Adam had repudiated his superiority to the rest of creation. As a punishment, therefore, nature would henceforth offer resistance to his will. By breaking the divine command, he had set himself above his Maker; death would therefore show him the worthlessness of his own nature. " Cursed he the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall tilou eat it (the ground by synecdoche for its produce, as in Isa. i. 7) all the days of thy life: tliorns and, thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the fieldr The curse pronounced on man's account upon the soil created for him, consisted in tlie fact, that the earth no longer yielded spontaneously the fruits requisite for his maintenance, but the man was obliged to force out the necessaries of life by labour and strenuous exertion. The herb of the field is in contrast with the trees of the garden, and sorrow with the easy dressing of the garden. We are not to understand, however, that because man failed to guard the good creation of God from the invasion of the evil one, a host of demoniacal powers forced their way into the material world to lay it waste and offer resistance to man; but because man himself had fallen into the power of the evil one, therefore God cursed the earth, not merely withdrawing the divine powers of life which pervaded Eden, but changing its relation to man. As Luther says, " -primum in eo, quod ilia bona non fert quoe tulisset, si homo non esset lapsus, deinde in eo quoque, quod multa noxia fert quce non tulisset, sicut sunt infelix lolium, steriles avenoi, zizania, urticce, spince, tribuli, adde venena, noxias bestiolas, et si qua sunt alia hujus generis^ But the curse reached much further, and the writer has merely noticed the most obvious aspect.^ The disturbance and distortion of the original harmony of body and soul, which sin introduced into the nature of man, and by which the flesh gained the mastery over the spirit, and the body, instead of being more and more transformed into the life of the spirit, became a prey

^ '"''Non omnia incommoda enumerat Moses, quihiis se Jwmo per peccatum implicuit: constat enim ex eodem prodiisse fonte omnes prsesentis vitx xrumnas, quas experientia innumeras esse ostendit. Aeris iiitemperies, gelii, tunitrua, pluvial intempcsticx, uredo, grandines et quicquid inordinatum est in mundo, peccati sunt fructus. Nee alia morborum prima est causa: idque poeticis fahulis celebratum fuit: hand dubie quod per manus a patribus traditum esset. Unde illud Horatii:

Post ignem asllievea domo

Subductum, macies et novafehrium

Terris incuhdt coliors:

Semotique prius tarda necessitas

Lethi corripuit gradum.

Sed Moses qui hrevitati studet, sua more pro communi vulgi captu attingere contentus fuit quod marjis apparuit: ut sub exemplo uno discamus, hominis vitio inversum fuisse totum naiurse ordinem.^' — Calvin.

to death, spread over the whole material world; so that everywhere on earth there were to be seen wild and rugged wastes desolation and ruin, death and corruption, or fiaraioTr}^ and <f)6opd (Rom. viii. 20, 21). Everything injurious to man in the organic, vegetable and animal creation, is the effect of the curse pronounced upon the earth for Adam's sin, however httle we may be able to explain the manner in which the curse was carried into effect; since our view of the causal connection between sin and evil even in human life is very imperfect, and the connection between spirit and matter in nature generally is altogether unknown. In this causal Hnk between sin and the evils in the world, the wrath of God on account of sin was revealed; since, as soon as the creation {iraa-a rj tcTLaa, Rom. viii. 22) had been wrested through man from its vital connection with its Maker, He gave it up to its own ungodly nature, so that whilst, on the one hand, it has been abused by man for the gratification of his own sinful lusts and desires, on the other, it has turned against man, and consequently many things in the world and nature, which in themselves and without sin would have been good for him, or at all events harmless, have become poisonous and destructive since his fall. For in the sweat of his face man is to eat his bread (pnb the bread-corn which springs from the earth, as in Job xxviii. 5; Psa. civ. 14) until he return to the ground. Formed out of the dust, he shall return to dust again. This was the fulfilment of the threat, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," which began to take effect immediately after the breach of the divine command; for not only did man then become mortal, but he also actually came under the power of death, received into his nature the germ of death, the maturity of which produced its eventual dissolution into dust. The reason why the life of the man did not come to an end immediately after the eating of the forbidden fruit, was not that "the woman had been created between the threat and the fall, and consequently the fountain of human life had been divided, the life originally concentrated in one Adam shared between man and woman, by which the destructive influence of the fruit was modified or weakened" (v. Hoffmann), but that the mercy and long-suffering of God afforded space for repentance, and so controlled and ordered the sin of men and the punishment of sin, as to render them subservient to the accomplishment of His original purpose and the crlorification of His name.

Vers. 20-24. As justice and mercy were combined in the divine sentence; justice in the fact that God cursed the tempter alone, and only punished the tempted with labour and mortality,, mercy in the promise of eventual triumph over the serpent: so God also displayed His mercy to the fallen, before carrying the sentence into effect. It was through the power of divine grace that Adam believed the promise with regard to the woman's seed, and manifested his faith in the name which he gave to his wife, njn Eve, an old form of ri'Ilj signifying life (^(B77, LXX.), or life-spring, is a substantive, and not a feminine adjective meaning " the living one," nor an abbreviated form of n^no, from njn = n>n (xix. 32, 34), the life-receiving one. This name was given by Adam to his wife, " because" as the writer explains with the historical fulfilment before his mind, " she became the mother of all living," i.e. because the continuance and life of his race were guaranteed to the man through the woman. God also displayed His mercy by clothing the two with coats of skin, i.e. the skins of beasts. The words, " God made coats," are not to be interpreted with such bare literality, as that God sewed the coats with His own fingers; they merely affirm '' that man's first clothing was the -work of God, who gave the necessary directions and ability " (Delitzsch). By this clothing, God imparted to the feeling of shame the visible sign of an awakened conscience, and to the consequent necessity for a covering to the bodily nakedness, the higher work of a suitable discipline for the sinner. By selecting the skins of beasts for the clothing of the first men, and therefore causing the death or slaughter of beasts for that purpose. He showed them how they might use the sovereignty they possessed over the animals for their own good, and even sacrifice animal life for the preservation of human; so that this act of God laid the foundation for the sacrifices, even if the first clothing did not prefigure our ultimate "clothing upon" (2 Cor. v. 4), nor the coats of skins the robe of righteousness. — Vers. 22, 23. Clothed in this sign of mercy, the man was driven out of paradise, to bear the punishment of his sin. The words of Jehovah, " The man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil" contain no irony, as though man had exalted himself to a position of autonomy resembling that of God; for " irony at the expense of a wretched tempted soul might well befit Satan, but not the Lord." Likeness to God is predicated only with regard to the knowledge of good and evil, in which the man really had become like God. In order that, after the germ of death had penetrated into his nature along with sin, he might not ^Hake also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever CO contracted from ''^n = n^n^ as in chap. v. 5; 1 Sam. XX. 31), God sent him forth from the garden of Eden." With '•'"•np?')! (sent him forth) the narrative passes over from the words to the actions of God. From the Da (also) it follows that the man had not yet eaten of the tree of life. Had he continued in fellowship with God by obedience to the command of God, he might have eaten of it, for he was created for eternal life. But after he had fallen through sin into the power of death, the fruit which produced immortality could only do him harm. For immortality in a state of sin is not the ^wrj alctivia, which God designed for man, but endless misery, which the Scriptures call "the second death" (Rev. ii. 11, xx. 6, 14, xxi. 8). The expulsion from paradise, therefore, was a punishment inflicted for man's good, intended, while exposing him to temporal death, to preserve him from eternal death. To keep the approach to the tree of life, " God caused cherubim to dwell (to encamp) at the east (on the eastern side) of the garden, and the (i.e. with the) ^ame of the sword turning to and fro" (n^snno, moving rapidly). The word 31"I3 cherub has no suitable etymology in the Semitic, but is unquestionably derived from the same root as the Greek ypv-yjr or ypv7re<;, and has been handed down from the forefathers of our race, though the primary meaning can no longer be discovered. The cherubim, however, are creatures of a higher world, which are represented as surrounding the throne of God, both in the visions of Ezekiel (i. 22 sqq., X. 1) and the Revelation of John (chap. iv. 6); not, however, as throne-bearers or throne-holders, or as forming the chariot of the throne, but as occupying the highest place as living beings (rii^n, ^aja) in the realm of spirits, standing by the side of God as the heavenly King when He comes to judgment, and proclaiming the majesty of the Judge of the world. In this character God stationed them on the eastern side of paradise, not " to inhabit the garden as the temporary representatives of man," but " to keep the way of the tree of life," i.e. to render it impossible for man to return to paradise, and eat of the tree of life. Hence there appeared by their side the flame of a sword, apparently in constant motion, cutting hither and thither, representing the devouring fire of the divine wrath, and showing the cherubim to be ministers of judgment. With the expulsion of man from the garden of Eden, paradise itself vanished from the earth. God did not withdraw from the tree of life its supernatural power, nor did He destroy the garden before their eyes, but simply prevented their return, to show that it should be preserved until the time of the end, when sin should be rooted out by the judgment, and death abolished by the Conqueror of the serpent (1 Cor. xv. 26), and when upon the new earth the tree of life should flourish again in the heavenly Jerusalem, and bear fruit for the redeemed (Rev. xx. and xxi.).

Vers. 1-8. The propagation of the human race did not commence till after the expulsion from paradise. Generation in man is an act of personal free-will, not a blind impulse of nature, and rests upon a moral self-determination. It flows from the divine institution of marriage, and is therefore knowing (TJl) the wife. — At the birth of the first son Eve exclaimed with joy, " / have gotten (^JT'Jp) a man with Jehovah;" wherefore the child received the name Cain (J]^ from pp=n3p, KTciaOat). So far as the grammar is concerned, the expression nin^~nx might be rendered, as in apposition to K'''X, "a man, the Lord" {Luther), but the sense would not allow it. For even if we could suppose the faith of Eve in the promised conqueror of the serpent to have been sufficiently alive for this, the promise of God had not given her the slightest reason to expect that the promised seed would be of divine nature, and might be Jehovah, so as to lead her to believe that she had given birth to Jehovah now. HX is a preposition in the sense of helpful association, as in chap. xxi. 20, xxxix. 2, 21, etc. That she sees in the birth of this son the commencement of the fulfilment of the promise, and thankfully acknow ledges the divine help in this display of mercy, is evident from the name Jehovah, the God of salvation. The use of this name is significant. Although it cannot be supposed that Eve herself knew and uttered this name, since it was not till a later period that it was made known to man, and it really belongs to the Hebrew, which was not formed till after the division of tongues, yet it expresses the feeling of Eve on receiving this proof of the gracious help of God. — Ver. 2. But her joy was soon overcome by the discovery of the vanity of this earthly life. This is expressed in the name Ahel, which was given to the second son (?3n, in pause /"^rij i.e. nothingness, vanity), whether it indicated generally a feeling of sorrow on account of his weakness, or was a prophetic presentiment of his untimely death. The occupation of the sons is noticed on account of what follows. ^^ Ahel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the groundP Adam had, no doubt, already commenced both occupations, and the sons selected each a different department. God Himself had pointed out both to Adam, — the tilling of the ground by the employment assigned him in Eden, which had to be changed into agriculture after his expulsion; and the keeping of cattle in the clothing that He gave him (iii. 21). Moreover, agriculture can never be entirely separated from the rearing of cattle; for a man not only requires food, but clothing, which is procured directly from the hides and wool of tame animals. In addition to this, sheep do not thrive without human protection and care, and therefore were probably associated with man from the very first. The different occupations of the brothers, therefore, are not to be regarded as a proof of the difference in their dispositions. This comes out first in the sacrifice, which they offered after a time to God, each one from the produce of his vocation. — " In process of time^' (lit. at the end of days, i.e. after a considerable lapse of time: for this use of Q''D^ cf. chap. xl. 4; Num. ix. 2) Cain brought of the fruit of the ground a gift (i^i^^P) to the Lord; and Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and indeed (yav in an explanatory sense, vid. Ges. § 155, 1) of their fat," i.e. the fattest of the firstlings, and not merely the first good one that came to hand. Ci^37ri are not the fat portions of the animals, as in the Levitical law of sacrifice. This is evident from the fact, that the sacrifice was not connected with a sacrificial meal, and animal food was not eaten at this time. That the usage of the Mosaic law cannot determine the meaning of this passage, is evident from the word minchah, which is applied in Leviticus to bloodless sacrifices only, whereas it is used here in connection with Abel's sacrifice. " And Jehovah looked upon Abel and his gift; and upon Cain and his gift He did not lookr Tlie look of Jehovah was in any case a visible sign of satisfaction. It is a common and ancient opinion that fire consumed Abel's sacrifice, and thus showed that it was graciously accepted. Theodotion explains the words by Kal eveirvpLaev 6 0eo9. But whilst this explanation has the analogy of Lev. ix. 24 and Judg. vi. 21 in its favour, it does not suit the words, " upon Abel and his gift." The reason for the different reception of the two offerings was the state of mind towards God with which they were brought, and which manifested itself in the selection of the gifts. Not, indeed, in the fact that Abel brought a bleeding sacrifice and Cain a bloodless one; for this difference arose from the difference in their callings, and each necessarily took his gift from the produce of his own occupation. It was rather in the fact that Abel offered the fattest firstlings of his flock, the best that he could bring; whilst Cain only brought a portion of the fruit of the ground, but not the first-fruits. By this choice Abel brought irXeiova Ovaiav irapa Kaiv, and manifested that disposition which is designated faith (jrLaTL<;) in Heb. xi. 4. The nature of this disposition, however, can only be determined from the meaning of the offering itself.

The sacrifices offered by Adam's sons, and that not in consetjuence of a divine command, but from the free impulse of their nature as determined by God, were the first sacrifices of the human race. The origin of sacrifice, therefore, is neither to be traced to a positive command, nor to be regarded as a human invention. To form an accurate conception of the idea which lies at the foundation of all sacrificial worship, we must bear in mind that the first sacrifices were offered after the fall, and therefore presupposed the spiritual separation of man from God, and were designed to satisfy the need of the heart for fellowship with God. This need existed in the case of Cain, as well as in that of Abel; otherwise he would have offered no sacrifice at all, since there was no command to render it compulsory. Yet it was not the wish for forgiveness of sin which led Adam's sons to offer sacrifice; for there is no mention of exniation, and the notion that Abel, by slaughtering the animal, Confessed that he deserved death on account of sin, is transftrred to this passage from the expiatory sacrifices of the Mosa^fc law. The offerings were expressive of gratitude to God, to whom they owed all that they had; and were associated also with the desire to secure the divine favour and blessing, so that they are to be regarded not merely as thank-offerings, but as supplicatory sacrifices, and as propitiatory also, in the wider sense of the word. In this the two offerings are alike. The reason why they were not equally acceptable to God is not to be sought, as Hofmann thinks, in the fact that Cain merely offered thanks " for the preservation of this present life," whereas Abel offered thanks " for the forgiveness of sins," or " for the sin-forgiving clothing received by man from the hand of God." To take the nourishment of the body literally and the clothing symbolically in this manner, is an arbitrary procedure, by which the Scriptures might be made to mean anything we chose. The reason is to be found rather in the fact, that Abel's thanks came from the depth of his heart, whilst Cain merely offered his to keep on good terms with God, — a difference that was manifested in the choice of the gifts, which each one brought from the produce of his occupation. This choice shows clearly " that it was the pious feeling, through which the worshipper put his heart as it were into the gift, which made the offering acceptable to God" {Oehler); that the essence of the sacrifice was not the presentation of a gift to God, but that the offering was intended to shadow forth the dedication of the heart to God. At the same time, the desire of the worshipper, by the dedication of the best of his possessions to secure afresh the favour of God, contained the germ of that substitutionary meaning of sacrifice, which was afterwards expanded in connection with the deepening and heightening of the feeling of sin into a desire for forgiveness, and led to the development of the idea of expiatory sacrifice. — On account of the preference shown to Abel, " it hurned Cain sore (the subject, ' wrath,' is wanting, as it frequently is in the case of nnn, cf. chap, xviii. 30, 32, xxxi. 36, etc.), and his countenance fell" (an indication of his discontent and anger: cf. Jer. iii. 12; Job xxix. 24). God warned him of giving way to this, and directed his attention to the cause and consequences of his wrath. " Wki/ art thou loroth, and ichy is thy countenance fallenV The answer to this is given in the further question, " Is there not, if thou art good, a lifting wjt?" (sc. of the countenance)? It is evident from the context, and the antithesis of falling and lifting up (?Si: and KB'i), that D^JQ must be suppUed after nm. By this God gave him to understand that his look was indicative of evil thoughts and intentions; for the lifting up of the countenance, i.e. a free, open look, is the mark of a good conscience (Job xi. 15). " But if thou art not good, sin lieth before the door, and its desire is to thee (directed towards thee); but thou shouldst rule over it.'' The fem. nstsn is construed as a masculine, because, with evident allusion to the serpent, sin is personified as a wild beast, lurking at the door of the human heart, and eagerly desiring to devour his soul (1 Pet. v. 8). ^''P"''!}, to make good, signifies here not good action, the performance of good in work and deed, but making the disposition good, i.e. directing the heart to what is good. Cain is to rule over the sin which is greedily desiring him, by giving up his wrath, not indeed that sin may cease to lurk for him, but that the lurking evil foe may obtain no entrance into his heart. There is no need to regard the sentence as interrogative, "Wilt thou, indeed, be able to rule over it? " {Ewald), nor to deny the allusion in ia to the lurking sin, as Delitzsch does. The words do not command the suppression of an inward temptation, but resistance to the power of evil as pressing from without, by hearkening to the word which God addressed to Cain in person, and addresses to us through the Scriptures. There is nothing said here about God appearing visibly; but this does not warrant us in interpreting either this or the following conversation as a simple process that took place in the heart and conscience of Cain. It is evident from vers. 14 and 16 that God did not withdraw His personal presence and visible intercourse from men, as soon as He had expelled them from the garden of Eden. " God talks to Cain as to a wilful child, and draws out of him what is sleeping in his heart, and lurking like a wild beast before his door. And what He did to Cain He does to every one who will but observe his own heart, and listen to the voice of God" {Herder). But Cain paid no heed to the divine warning. Ver. 8. He " said to his brother AbeV* What he said is not stated. We may either supply " it," viz. what God had just said to him, which would be grammatically admissible, since "ip^^ is sometimes followed by a simple accusative (xxii. 3, xliv. 16), and this accusative has to be supplied from the context (as in Ex. xix. 25); or we may supply from what follows some such expressions as " let us go into the field" as the LXX., Sam., Jonathan^ and others have done. This is also allowable, so that we need not imagine a gap in the text, but may explain the construction as in chap. iii. 22, 23, by supposing that the writer hastened on to describe the carrying out of what was said, without stopping to set down the words themselves. This supposition is preferable to the former, since it is psychologically most improbable that Cain should have related a warning to his brother which produced so little impression upon his own mind. In the field " Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him." Thus the sin of Adam had grown into fratricide in his son. The writer intentionally repeats again and again the words " his brother," to bring clearly out die horror of the sin. Cain was the first man who let sin reign in him; he was " of the wicked one" (1 John iii. 12). In him the seed of the woman had already become the seed of the serpent; and in his deed the real nature of the wicked one, as " a murderer from the beginning," had come openly to light: so that already there had sprung up that contrast of two distinct seeds within the human race, which runs through the entire history of humanity.