Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

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 he alone; I will make him njp3 "iry, a help of his like: " i.e, a helping being, in w^hich, as soon as he sees it, he may recognise himself " (Delifzsch). 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 niJD ity 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 {S^ lit. each one); and whatsoever the man might call every living being should he its nameP 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. ^ 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 lirst instead of making it subordinate; so that our modem style of expressing the same thought w^ould be simply this: " God brought to Adam the beasts which He had formed." ^ Moreover, the allusion is not

^ 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 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 ves- Rels," 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 n^isrht 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). •^'pll^j ^ 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), PV 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 nij;^!»*," which show that the man had several of them. " And closed up Jlesfi 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 respects there are no specific differences within the limits of the race. Delitzsch 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 wMcli the man loves the woman as himself, and by which marriage becomes a type of the 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 conjugal love as founded in the heart; for the text does not Speak of the rib as one which was next the heart. The word n^3 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 Jlesh of Jiis fieshr The words, " this is now (pV^\} lit, this time) bone of my boneSy^ 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 mxinP ntTK is well rendered by Luther, " Mdnnin" (a female man), like the old Latin vij^a 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 |3"''V, which is always used in Genesis, with the exception of chap. xx. 6, xhi. 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 (Matt. 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 (D''t^^"iy, with dagesh in the d, is an abbreviated form of D''E)Ty iii. 7, from ^^ly to strip), the man and his wife, and were not ashamedr 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 development 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 Bcd^o\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 emanated, not from the serpent, but from a Buperior 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 the 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 writings, 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 map; 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.

tlon of our Lord. The temptation of Clirist is the counterpart of tliat 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 viTCst 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, ot 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 ^ny 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 Maker. 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 speaking 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 J which Jehovah God had made^ — 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 (f)p6vL/jLo^ (LXX.), prudens, but in the bad sense of Travovpyof;, 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 ^t< 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 nwnen divinum, and to exaggerate the prohibition, in the hope of excit ing 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 " (k'S is placed before the infinitive absolute, as in Ps. xlix. 8 and Aiwos 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 thereof y your eyes will be opened,^ and ye will be like God, knowing good and eviir 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 (John 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 would 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. — Yer. 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 Q'^'?^^\} 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 eatP 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 the sins of their posterity. The more trifling the object of their sin seems to have been, the greater and more difficult does the 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 with the loss of life in the event of disobedience " {Belitzsch). 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 knew that they were nakedr 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 figleaves together, and made themselves aprons^ The word ^\^'^ always denotes the fig-tree, not the pisang {Musa paradisiaca), 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. ^^^[], irepc^co/jiaTay 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 physical 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 disgrace of their spiritual nakedness, by covering those parts of the body through which the impurities of nature are removed. That the natural feehng of shame, the origin of which is recorded here, had its root, not in sensuality or any physical corruption, but in the consciousness of guilt or shame before God, and consequently that it was the conscience w^hich 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, njri] 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 (lit. in the wind of the day), i.e. towards the evening, when a cooling wind generally 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 was 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. Themancouldnot hide himself from God. ^'Jehovah God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?" Not that He was ignorant of his hiding-place, but to bring him to a confession of las sin. And when Adam said that he had hidden himself through fear of his nakedness, and thus sought to hide the sin behind its consequences, his disobedience behind the feehng 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 naked?" 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, i^aTrdrrjaeVy 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, 15. 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 evert/ beast of the field." p, 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 bi/; 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 ktlctl'^, 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 (Rom. 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 whicn not only a beast which had injured a man was ordered tobe 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 Clirysostom 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 that 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" (ffengstenberg, Clirlstology i. 15). — The presumption of the tempter was 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 Rabb. authorities, and we have therefore retained it, in harmony with the word o-vvrpiPeiv 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 inJiiare, to regard with enmity, which is obtained from the combination of ^^^' with ^^^. The verb is construed with a double accusative, the second giving greater precision to the first (vid. Ges. § 139, note, and Ewald, § 281). The same word is used in connection with both liead 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 crawls 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 sifrn 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 the body (chap. xlix. 17), it is not immediately fatal and utterly incurable, like the crushing af 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 race 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 thi/ head, and thou (not thy seed) wilt crush 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 IHT, the seed, is an indefinite one, since the posterity of a man may consist of a w^hole 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 arms. 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*iiot 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. " / will greatly multiply ('^S'ln is the inf, ahs. for •"I?"}'], which had become an adverb: vid. Ewald, § 240c, as in chap. xvi. 10 and xxii. 17) thy sorrow and thy pregnancy: in sorrow thou shalt 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, lp[}\ must be understood as in apposition to ^P.^^W ^% sorrow (i.e. the sorrows peculiar to a woman's life), and 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 appointed 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 (t\[>wn from p:itj> to run, to have a violent craving for a thing), and with subjection to the man. ''And he shall rule over theeT 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. 5, 20, the noun is appellative, 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 tJiou eat it (the ground by synecdoche for its produce, as in Isa. i. 7) all the days of thy life: thorns and, thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the fields The curse pronounced on man's account upon the soil created for him, consisted in the 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 qucE tulissetj si homo non esset lapsus, deinde in eo quogue, quod multa noxia fert qucB non tulisset, sicut sunt infelix lolium, steriles avence, zizania, urticce, spince, tribuli, adde venena, noxias bestiolas, et si qua sunt alia hujus generis.^^ But the curse reached much farther, 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

^ "iVbw omnia incommoda enumerat Moses, quibiis se homo per peccatum implicuit: constat enim ex eodem prodiisse fonte omnes prassentis vitx serumnas, qnas experientia innumeras esse ostendit. Aeris intemperies, gelu, tonitrua^ pluvias intempesticXy uredo, grandines et quicquid inordinatum est in mundo, peccati sunt fructus. Nee alia morhorum prima est causa: idque poeticis fahulis celehratum fuit: liaud duhie quod per manus a patribus traditum esset. Unde illud Horatii:

Post ignem astkerea domo

Subducium, macies et novafebrium

Terris incubuit cohors:

Semotique prius tarda necessitas

Lethi corripuit gradum,

Sed Moses qui brevitati studet, suo more pro communi vulgi captu attingere contentus fait quod magis apparuit: ut sub exemplo uno discamu^, hominis vitio inversum fuisse totum naturst ordinemy — 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 iiaTaiorr^^; 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 little 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 link between sin and the evils in the world, the wrath of God on account of sin was revealed; since, as soon as the creation (irao-a t) KTiat<;y 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 tall. For in the sweat of his face man is to eat his bread (Dn? 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 thfe 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 w^iy 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. Hoffmaim), 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 glorification 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 n^n^ signifying life (fo)/;, LXX.), or life-spring, is a substantive, and not a feminine adjective meaning " the living one," nor an abbreviated form of njnp, 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 hecame 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 ''take also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever (^n contracted from \^n = n^rij as in chap. v. 5; 1 Sam. XX. 31), God sent him forth from the garden of EdenV With 'I'^np^l (sent him forth) the narrative passes over from the words to the actions of God. From the D3 (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 ftw^ awavio^, 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) flame of the sword turning to and fro" (riDannp, moving rapidly). The word yr\3 cherub has no suitable etymology in the Semitic, but is unquestionably derived from the same root as the Greek ypir^ or ypime^, 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 (ni^rij ^(oa) 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 tlie 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 knovving Qn^) the wife. — At the birth of the first son Eve exclaimed with joy, " / have gotten ("TT'ip) a man with Jehovah;" wherefore the child received the name Cain (TP from pip=njp^ Krao-Oai). So far as the grammar is concerned, the expression njn^'nx might be rendered, as in apposition to t^^N, " 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 suflSciently 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. riK 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 Abel, which was given to the second son (vj?n, in pause ^3n, 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 groundJ^ 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 D"'PJ cf. chap. xl. 4; Num. ix. 2) Cain brought of the fruit of the ground a gift (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. Q^^^n are not ihQ 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 loohP The 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 /cat eveirvpLaev 6 0€O9. 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 ifKeiova Ovaiav irapa Kdlv, and manifested that disposition which is designated faith (TrtoTt?) 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 cousecjuence 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 expiation, and the notion that Abel, by slaughtering the animal, confessed that he deserved death on account of sin, is transferred to this passage from the expiatory sacrifices of the Mosaic 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 w^as 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 burned 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 feW^ (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. " Why art thou wroth, and xohy is thy countenance fallen?^* The answer to this is given in the further question, " Is there not, if thou art good, a lifting up'^ (sc. of the countenance)? It is evident from the context, and the antithesis of falling and lifting up (^D3 and KK^3), that D"':3 must be supplied after ngK^. By this God gave him to understand that his look was indicative of evil thoughts and intentions; for the lifting up of the countenance, Le, 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. ^l^?;^^ 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 in 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 w^ithout, 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. Yer. 8. He " said to his h^other Abel^ 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 "ipjj 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 himJ^ 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 the 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 hght: 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.

Vers. 9-15. Defiance grows with sin, and punishment keeps pace with guilt. Adam and Eve fear before God, and acknowledge their sin; Cain boldly denies it, and in reply to the question, " Where is Abel thy brotherV^ declares, " I know not, am I my brother s keeperV^ God therefore charges him with his crime: " What hast thou done! voice of thy brother s blood crying to Me from the earths The verb ^'crying^^ refers to the ''blood^^ since this is the principal word, and the voice merely expresses the adverbial idea of "aloud," or ''listen" (Ewald, § ^17 d), D'P"n (drops of blood) is sometimes used to denote natural hemorrhage (Lev. xii. 4, 5, xx. 18); but is chiefly applied to blood shed unnaturally, i,e, to murder. " Innocent blood has no voice, it may be, that is discernible by human ears, but it has one that reaches God, as the cry of a wicked deed demanding vengeance" {Delitzscli). Murder is one of the sins that cry to heaven. " Primum ostendit Deus se de factis hominum cognoscere utcunque nullus queratur vel accuset; deinde sibi rnagis charam esse hominum vitam quam ut sanguinem innoxium impune effundi sinat; tertio curam sibi piorum esse non solum quamdiu vivunt sed etiam post mortem" (Calvin). Abel was the first of the saints, whose blood is precious in the sight of God (Ps. cxvi. 15); and by virtue of his faith, he being dead yet speaketh through his blood which cried unto God (Heb. xi. 4). — Vers. 11, 12. " And now (sc. because thou hast done this) be cursed from the earths From: i.e. either awai/ from the earth, driven forth so that it shall no longer afford a quiet resting-place (Gerlach, Delitzsch, etc.), or out of the earth, through its withdrawing its strength, and thus securing the fulfilment of perpetual wandering {Baumgarten, etc.). It is difficult to choose between the two; but the clause, " which hath opened her mouth,^^ etc., seems rather to favour the latter. Because the earth has been compelled to drink innocent blood, it rebels against the murderer, and when he tills it, withdraws its strength, so that the soil yields no produce; just as the land of Canaan is said to have spued out the Canaanites, on account of their abominations (Lev. xviii. 28). In any case, the idea that " the soil, through drinking innocent blood, became an accomplice in the sin of murder," has no biblical support, and is not confirmed by Isa. xxvi. 21 or Num^ xxxv. 33. The suffering of irrational creatures through the sin of man is very different from their participating in his sin. " A fugitive and vagabond (^y\ V^, i.e. banished and homeless) shalt thou be in the earths Cain is so affected by this curse, that his obduracy is turned into despair. ''My sin^^ he says in ver. 13, 'Hs greater than can be bome^^ PP ^^\ signifies to take away and bear sin or guilt, and is used with reference both to God and man. God takes guilt away by forgiving it (Ex. xxxiv. 7); man carries it away and bears it, by enduring its punishment (cf. Num. V. 31). Luther, following the ancient versions, has adopted the first meaning; but the context sustains the second: for Cain afterwards complains, not of the greatness of the sin, but only of the severity of the punishment. " Behold, Thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from Thy face shall I be hid;... and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay meP The adamah, from the face of which the curse of Jehovah had driven Cain, was Eden (cf. ver. 16), where he had carried on his agricultural pursuits, and where God had revealed His face, i.e. His presence, to the men after their expulsion from the garden; so that henceforth Cain had to wander about upon the wide world, homeless and far from the presence of God, and was afraid lest any one who found him might slay him. By ''every one that findeth me" we are not to understand omnis creatura, as though Cain had excited the hostility of all creatures, but every man; not in the sense, however, of such as existed apart from the family of Adam, but such as were aware of his crime, and knew him to be a murderer. For Cain is evidently afraid of revenge on the part of relatives of the slain, that is to say, of descendants of Adam, who were either already in existence, or yet to be bom. Though Adam might not at this time have had " many grandsons and greatgrandsons," yet according to ver. 1 7 and chap. v. 4, he had undoubtedly other children, who might increase in number, and sooner or later might avenge Abel's death. For, that blood shed demands blood in return, " is a principle of equity written in the heart of every man; and that Cain should see the earth full of avengers is just like a murderer, who sees avenging spirits (^EpLvv6<i) ready to torture him on every hand." — Yer. 15. Although Cain expressed not penitence, but fear of punishment, God displayed His long-suffering and gave him the promise, ^^ Therefore (1?^ not in the sense of I? ^^?, but because it was the case, and there was reason for his complaint) whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.^* ]]\^ ^"]'"'"''? is cas. absolut, as in chap. ix. 6; and DIpn avenged, i.e. resented, punished, as Ex. xxi. 20, 21. The mark which God put upon Cain is not to be regarded as a mark upon his body, as the Rabbins and others supposed, but as a certain sign which protected him from vengeance, though of what kind it is impossible to determine. God granted him continuance of life, not because banishment from the place of God's presence was the greatest possible punishment, or because the preservation of the human race required at that time that the lives of individuals should be spared, — for God afterwards destroyed the whole human race, with the exception of one family, — but partly because the tares were to grow with the wheat, and sin develop itself to its utmost extent, partly also because from the very first God determined to take punishment into His own hands, and protect human life from the passion and wilfulness of human vengeance.

Vers. 16-24. The family of the Cainites, — Yer. 16. The geographical situation of the land of Nod, in the front of Eden (riDHiPj see chap. ii. 14), where Cain settled after his departure from the place or the land of the revealed presence of God (cf. Jonah i. 3), cannot be determined. The name Nod denotes a land of flight and banishment, in contrast with Eden, the land of delight, where Jehovah walked with men. There Cain knew his wife. The text assumes it as self-evident that she accompanied him in his exile; also, that she was a daughter of Adam, and consequently a sister of Cain. The marriage of brothers and sisters was inevitable in the case of the children of the first men, if the human race was actually to descend from a single pair, and may therefore be justified in the face of the Mosaic prohibition of such marriages, on the ground that the sons and daughters of Adam represented not merely the family but the genus, and that it was not till after the rise of several families that the bands of fraternal and conjugal love became distinct from one another, and assumed fixed and mutually exclusive forms, the violation of which is sin. (Comp. Lev. xviii.) His son he named Hanoch (consecration), because he regarded his birth as a pledge of the renovation of his life. For this reason he also gave the same name to the city which he built, inasmuch as its erection was another phase in the development of his family. The construction of a city by Cain will cease to surprise us, if we consider that at the commencement of its erection, centuries had already passed since the creation of man, and Cain's descendants may by this time have increased considerably in numbers; also, that "^""V does not necessarily presuppose a large town, but simply an enclosed space with fortified dwellings, in contradistinction to the isolated tents of shepherds; and lastly, that the words n:h ^n^i^ " he was building," merely indicate the commencement and progress of the building, but not its termination. It appears more surprising that Cain, who was to be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth, should have established himself in the land of Nod. This cannot be fully explained, either on the ground that he carried on the pursuits of agriculture, which lead to settled abodes, or that he strove against the curse. In addition to both the facts referred to, there is also the circumstance, that the curse, " the ground shall not yield to thee her strength," was so mollified by the grace of God, that Cain and his descendants were enabled to obtain sufficient food in the land of his settlement, though it was by dint of hard work and strenuous effort; unless, indeed, we follow Luther and understand the curse, that he should be a fugitive upon the earth, as relating to his expulsion from Eden, and his removal ad incertum locum et opuSy non addita ulla vel promissione vel mandatOp sicut arts qncB in liber o ccelo incerta vagatur. The fact that Cain undertook the erection of a city, is also significant. Even if we do not regard this city as " the first foundation-stone of the kingdom of the world, in which the spirit of the beast bears sway," we cannot fail to detect the desire to neutralize the curse of banishment, and create for his family a point of unity, as a compensation for the loss of unity in fellowship with God, as well as the inclination of the family of Cain for that which was earthly. The powerful development of the worldly mind and of ungodliness among th-e Cainites was openly displayed in Lamech, in the sixth generation. Of the intermediate links, the names only are given. (On the use of the passive with the accusative of the object in the clause " to Hanoch was born (they bore) Irad,^^ see Ges. § 143, 1.) Some of these names resemble those of the Sethite genealogy, viz. Irad and Jared, Mehujael and Mahalaleel, Methusael and Methuselah, also Cain and Cainan; and the names Enoch and Lamech occur in both families. But neither the recurrence of similar names, nor even of the same names, warrants the conclusion that the two genea^ iDgical *ables are simply different forms of one primary legend. For the names, though similar in sound, are very different in meaning. Irad probably signifies the townsman, Jered, descent, or that which has descended; Mehujael, smitten of God, and Mahalaleel, praise of God; Methusael, man of prayer, and Methuselah, man of the sword or of increase. The repetition of the two names Enoch and Lamech even loses all significance, when we consider the different places which they occupy in the respective lines, and observe also that in the case of these very names, the more precise descriptions which are given so thoroughly establish the difference of character in the two individuals, as to preclude the possibility of their being the same, not to mention the fact, that in the later history the same names frequently occur in totally different families; e.g. Korah in the families of Levi (Ex. vi. 21) and Esau (chap, xxxvi. 5); Hanoch in those of Keuben (chap. xlvi. 9) and Midian (chap. xxv. 4); Kenaz in those of Judah (Num. xxxii. 12) and Esau (chap. xxxvi. 11). The identity and similarity of names can prove nothing more than that the two branches of the human race did not keep entirely apart from each other; a fact established by their subset^uently intermarrying. — Lamech took two wives, and thus was the first to prepare the way for polygamy, by which the ethical aspect of marriage, as ordained by God, was turned into the lust of the eye and lust of the flesh. The names of the women are indicative of sensual attractions: Adah, the adorned; and Zillahy either the shady or the tinkling. His three sons are the authors of inventions which show how the mind and efforts of the Cainites were directed towards the beautifying and perfecting of the earthly life. Jahal (probably = jehul, produce) became the father of such as dwelt in tents, i.e. of nomads who lived in tents and with their flocks, getting their living by a pastoral occupation, and possibly also introducing the use of animal food, in disregard of the divine command (Gen. i. 29). Juhal (sound), the father of all such as handle the harp and pipe, i.e. the inventors of stringed and wind instruments. "1^33 a guitar or harp; ^J^V the shepherd's reed or bagpipe. Tuhal-Cain, " hammering all kinds of cutting things (the verb is to be construed as neuter) in brass and iron; " the inventor therefore of all kinds of edge-tools for working in metals: so that Cain, from rp to forge, is probably to be regarded as the surname which Tubal received on account of his inventions. The meaning of Tubal is obscure; for the Persian Tupal, iron-scoria, can throw no light upon it, as it must be a much later word. The allusion to the sister of Tubal-Cain is evidently to be attributed to her name, Naamah, the lovely, or graceful, since it reflects the worldly mind of the Cainites. In the arts, which owed their origin to Lamech's sons, this disposition reached its culminating point; and it appears in the form of pride and defiant arrogance in the song in which Lamech celebrates the inventions of Tubal-Cain (vers. 23, 24): ''Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: Men I slay for my wound, and young men for my stripes. For sevenfold is Cain avenged, and Lamech seven and seventy-fold.^^ The perfect '''^^^l^ is expressive not of a deed accomplished, but of confident assurance (Ges. § 126, 4; Ewald, § 135c); and the suffixes in mzin and '^^ are to be taken in a passive sense. The idea is this: whoever inflicts a wound or stripe on me, whether man or youth, I will put to death; and for every injury done to my person, I will take ten times more vengeance than that with which God promised to avenge the murder of my ancestor Cain. In this song, which contains in its rhythm, its strophic arrangement of the thoughts, and its poetic diction, the germ of the later poetry, we may detect " that Titanic arrogance, of which the Bible says that its power is its god (Hab. i. 11), and that it carries its god, viz. its sword, in its hand (Job xii. 6) " (Delitzsch), — According to these accounts, the principal arts and manufactures were invented by the Cainites, and carried out in an ungodly spirit; but they are not therefore to be attributed to the curse which rested upon the family. They have their roots rather in the mental powers with which man was endowed for the sovereignty and subjugation of the earth, but which, like all the other powers and tendencies of his nature, were pervaded by sin, and desecrated in its service. Hence these inventions have become the common property of humanity, because they not only may promote its intended development, but are to be applied and consecrated to this purpose for the glory of God.

Vers. 25, 26. The character of the ungodly family of Cainites was now fully developed in Lamech and his children. The history, therefore, turns from them, to indicate briefly the origin of the godly race. After Abel's death a third son was born to Adam, to whom his mother gave the name of Seth (p^y from ri^tJ^, a present participle, the appointed one, the compensation); ''for,^ she said, " God hath appointed me another seed (descendant) for Abel, because Cain slew him^ The words " because Cain slew him " are not to te regarded as an explanatory supplement, but as the words of Eve; and ""^ by virtue of the previous rinri is to be understood in the sense of ^3 nnri. What Cain (human wickedness) took from her, that has Elohim (divine omnipotence) restored. Because of this antithesis she calls the giver Elohim instead of Jehovah, and not because her hopes had been sadly depressed by her painful experience in connection with the first-born. — Yer. 26. " 7b Seth, to him also (fc5in Da J intensive, vid. Ges. § 121, 3) there was born a son, and he called his name EnoshP ^^^.^ from K^^^f to be weak, faint, frail, designates man from his frail and mortal condition (Ps. viii. 4, xc. 3, ciii. 15, etc.). In this name, therefore, the feeling and knowledge of human weakness and frailty were expressed (the opposite of the pride and arrogance displayed by the Canaanitish family); and this feeling led to God, to that invocation of the name of Jehovah which commenced under Enos. T\\r\\ DK^n N'jp, literally to call in (or by) the name of Jehovah^ is used for a solemn calling of the name of God. When applied to men, it denotes invocation (here and chap. xii. 8, xiii. 4, etc.); to God, calling out or proclaiming His name (Ex. xxxiii. 19, xxxiv. 5). The name of God signifies in general " the whole nature of God, by which He attests His personal presence in the relation into which He has entered with man, the divine self-manifestation, or the whole of that revealed side of the divine nature, which is turned towards man" (Oehler). We have here an account of the commencement of that worship of God which consists in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, or in the acknowledgment and celebration of the mercy and help of Jehovah. While the family of Cainites, by the erection of a city, and the invention and development of worldly arts and business, were laying the foundation for the kingdom of this world; the family of the Sethites began, by united invocation of the name of the God of grace, to found and to erect the kingdom of God.

generations from adam to noah. — chap. v.

The origin of the human race and the general character of its development having been thus described, all that remained of importance to universal or sacred history, in connection with the progress of our race in the primeval age, was to record the order of the families (chap, v.) and the ultimate result of the course which they pursued (chap. vi. 1-8). — First of all, we have the genealogical table of Adam with the names of the first ten patriarchs, who were at the head of that seed of the woman by which the promise was preserved, viz. the posterity of the first pair through Seth, from Adam to the flood. We have also an account of the ages of these patriarchs before and after the birth of those sons in whom the line was continued; so that the genealogy, which indicates the line of development, furnishes at the same time a chronology of the primeval age. In the genealogy of the Cainites no ages are given, since this family, as being accursed by God, had no future history. On the other hand, the family of Sethites, which acknowledged God, began from the time of Enos to call upon the name of the Lord, and was therefore preserved and sustained by God, in order that under the ti'aining of mercy and judgment the human race might eventually attain to the great purpose of its creation. The genealogies of the primeval age, to quote the apt words of M, Baumgarten, are " memorials, which bear testimony quite as much to the faithfulness of God in fulfilling His promise, as to the faith and patience of the fathers themselves." This testimony is first placed in its true light by the numbers of the years. The historian gives not merely the age of each patriarch at the time of the birth of the first-born, by whom the line of succession was continued, but the number of years that he lived after that, and then the entire length of his life. Now if we add together the ages at the birth of the several first-born sons, and the hundred years between the birth of Shem and the flood, we find that the duration of the first period in the world's history was 1656 years. We obtain a different result, however, from the numbers given by the LXX. and the Samaritan version, which differ in almost every instance from the Hebrew text, both in chap. v. and chap. xi. (from Shem to Terah), as will appear from the following table: —

^ The numbers in brackets are the reading of the Cod. Alexandrinus of the LXX. In the genealogical table, chap. xi. 10 sqq., the Samaritan text IS the only one which gives the whole duration of life.

The principal deviations from the Hebrew in the case of the other two texts are these: in chap. v. the Samaritan places the birth of the first-born of Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech 100 years earlier, whilst the Septuagint places the birth of the firstborn of all the other fathers (except Noah) 100 years later than the Hebrew; in chap. xi. the latter course is adopted in both texts in the case of all the fathers except Shem and Terah. In consequence of this, the interval from Adam to the flood is shortened in the Samaritan text by 349 years as compared with the Hebrew, and in the Septuagint is lengthened by 586 {Cod. Alex, 606). The interval from the flood to Abram is lengthened in both texts; in the Sam, by 650 years, in the Sept, by 880 {Cod. Alex. 780). In the latter, Cainan is interpolated between Arphaxad and Salah, which adds 130 years, and the age of the first-born of Nahor is placed 150 years later than in the Hebrew, whereas in the former the difference is only 50 years. With regard to the other differences, the reason for reducing the lives of Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech in the Samaritan text after the birth ^f their sons, was evidently to bring their deaths within the time before the flood. The age of Methuselah, as given in the Cod, Alex, of the LXX., is evidently to be accounted for on the same ground, since, according to the numbers of the Vatican text, Methuselah must have lived 14 years after the flood. In the other divergences of these two texts from the Hebrew, no definite purpose can be detected; at the same time they are sufficient to show a twofold tendency, viz. to lengthen the interval from the flood to Abram, and to reduce the ages of the fathers at the birth of their first-born to greater uniformity, and to take care that the age of Adam at the birth of Seth should not be exceeded by that of any other of the patriarchs, especially in the time before the flood. To effect this, the Sept. adds 100 years to the ages of all the fathers, before and after the flood, whose sons were bom before their 100th year; the Sam,y on the other hand, simply does this in the case of the fathers who lived after the flood, whilst it deducts 100 years from the ages of all the fathers before the flood who begot their first-born at a later period of their life than Adam and Seth. The age of Noah alone is left unaltered, because there were other data connected with the flood which prevented any arbitrary alteration of the text. That the principal divergences of both texts from the Hebrew are intentional changes, based upon chronological theories or cycles, is sufficiently evident from their internal character, viz. from the improbability of the statement, that whereas the average duration of life after the flood was about half the length that it was before, the time of life at which the fathers begot their first-born after the flood was as late, and, according to the Samaritan text, generally later than it had been before. No such intention is discernible in the numbers of the Plebrew text; consequently every attack upon the historical character of its numerical statements has entirely failed, and no tenable argument can be adduced against their correctness. The objection, that such longevity as that recorded in our chapter is inconceivable according to the existing condition of human nature, loses all its force if we consider " that all the memorials of the old world contain evidence of gigantic power; that the climate, the weather, and other natural conditions, were different from those after the flood; that life was much more simple and uniform; and that the after-effects of the condition of man in paradise would not be immediately exhausted" (JDelitzsch), This longevity, moreover, necessarily contributed greatly to the increase of the human race; and the circumstance that the children were not bom till a comparatively advanced period of life, — that is, until the corporeal and mental development of the parent was perfectly complete, — necessarily favoured the generation of a powerful race. From both these circumstances, however, the development of the race was sure to be characterized by peculiar energy in evil as well as in good; so that whilst in the godly portion of the race, not only were the traditions of the fathers transmitted faithfully and without adulteration from father to son, but family characteristics, piety, discipline, and morals took deep root, whilst in the ungodly portion time was given for sin to develop itself with mighty power in its innumerable forms.

The heading in ver. 1 runs thus: "This is the book (sepher) of the generations (tholedotk) of Adam." On tholedoth^ see chap. ii. 4. Sepher is a writing complete in itself, whether it consist of one sheet or several, as for instance the "bill of divorcement " in Deut. xxiv. 1, 3. The addition of the clause, " in the day that God created mayi^^ etc., is analogous to chap. ii. 4; the creation being mentioned again as the starting point, because all the development and history of humanity was rooted there. — Ver. 3. As Adam was created in the image of God, so did he beget " in his own likeness, after his image; " that is to say, he transmitted the image of God in which he was created, not in the purity in which it came direct from God, but in the form given to it by his own self-determination, modified and corrupted by sin. The begetting of the son by whom the line was perpetuated (no doubt in every case the first-born), is followed by an account of the number of years that Adam and the other fathers lived after that, by the statement that each one begat (other) sons and daughters, by the number of years that he lived altogether, and lastly, by the assertion nbjl " and he diedP This apparently superfluous announcement is " intended to indicate by its constant recurrence that death reigned from Adam downwards as an unchangeable law (yid, Rom. v. 14). But against this background of universal death, the power of life was still more conspicuous. For the man did not die till he had propagated life, so that in the midst of the death of individuals the life of the race was preserved, and the hope of the seed sustained, by which the author of death should be overcome.'* In the case of one of the fathers indeed, viz. Enoch (vers. 21 sqq.), life had not only a different issue, but also a different form. Instead of the expression " and he lived" which introduces in every other instance the length of life after the birth of the first-born, we find in the case of Enoch this statement, " lie walked with God (Elohim); " and instead of the expression " and he died," the announcement, ^^and he was not, for God (Elohim) took him" The phrase " walked with God," which is only applied to Enoch and Noah (chap. vi. 9), denotes the most confidential intercourse, the closest communion with the personal God, a walking as it were by the side of God, who still continued His visible intercourse with men (yid. iii. 8). It must be distinguished from "walking before God" (chap. xvii. 1, xxiv. 40, etc.), and " walking after God " (Deut. xiii. 4), both which phrases are used to indicate a pious, moral, blameless life under the law according to the directions of the divine commands. The onl}*" other passage in which this expression " walk with God " occurs is Mai. ii. 6, where it denotes not the piety of the godly Israelites generally, but the conduct of the priests, who stood in a closer relation to Jehovah under the Old Testament than the rest of the faithful, being permitted to enter the Holy Place, and hold direct intercourse with Him there, which the rest of the people could not do. The article in D\"i5'Kn gives prominence to the personality of Elohim, and shows that the expression cannot refer to inter course with the spiritual world. — In Enoch, the seventh from Adam through Seth, godliness attained its highest point; whilst ungodliness culminated in Lamech, the seventh from Adam through Cain, who made his sword his god. Enoch, therefore, like Elijah, was taken away by God, and carried into the heavenly paradise, so that he did not see (experience) death (Heb. xi. 5); i.e. he was taken up from this temporal life and transfigured into life eternal, being exempted by God from the law of death and of return to the dust, as those of the faithful will be, who shall be alive at the coming of Christ to judgment, and who in like manner shall not taste of death and corruption, but be changed in a moment. There is no foundation for the opinion, that Enoch did not participate at his translation in the glorification which awaits the righteous at the resurrection. For, according to 1 Cor. xv. 20, 23, it is not in glorification, but in the resurrection, that Christ is the first-fruits. Now the latter presupposes death. Whoever, therefore, through the grace of God is exempted from death, cannot rise from the dead, but reaches a(t>6apaia, or the glorified state of perfection, through being " changed " or " clothed upon " (2 Cor. v. 4). This does not at all affect the truth of the statement in Rom. v. 12, 14. For the same God who has appointed death as the wages of sin, and given us, through Christ, the victory over death, possesses the power to glorify into eternal life an Enoch and an Elijah, and all who shall be alive at the coming of the Lord without chaining their glorification to death and resurrection. Enoch and Elijah were translated into eternal life with God without passing through disease, death, and corruption, for the consolation of believers, and to awaken the hope of a life after death. Enoch's translation stands about half way between Adam and the flood, in the 987th year after the creation of Adam. Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, and Jared were still alive. His son Methuselah and his grandson Lamech were also living, the latter being 113 years old. Noah was not yet born, and Adam was dead. His translation, in consequence of his walking with God, was " an example of repentance to all generations," as the son of Sirach says (Ecclus. xliv. 16); and the apocryphal legend in the book of Enoch i. 9 represents him as prophesying of the coming of the Lord, to execute judgment upon the ungodly (Jude 14, 15). In comparison with the longevity of the other fathers, Enoch was taken away young, before he had reached half the ordinary age, as a sign that whilst long life, viewed as a time for repentance and grace, is indeed a blessing from God, when the ills which have entered the world through sin are considered, it is also a burden and trouble which God shortens for His chosen. That the patriarchs of the old world felt the ills of this earthly life in all their severity, was attested by Lamech (vers. 28, 29), when he gave his son, who was born 69 years after Enoch's translation, the name of Noah, saying, " This same shall comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursedP Noah, niJ from n^3 to rest and n^pn to bring rest, is explained by Dn^ to comfort, in the sense of helpful and remedial consolation. Lamech not only felt the burden of his work upon the ground which God had cursed, but looked forward with a prophetic presentiment to the time when the existing misery and corruption would terminate, and a change for the better, a redemption from the curse, would come. This presentiment assumed the form of hope when his son was born; he therefore gave expression to it in his name. But his liope was not reahzed, at least not in the way that he desired. A change did indeed take place in the lifetime of Noah. By the judgment of the flood the corrupt race was exterminated, and in Noah, who was preserved because of his blameless walk with God, the restoration of the human race was secured; but the effects of the curse, though mitigated, were not removed; whilst a covenant sign guaranteed the preservation of the human race, and therewith, by implication, his hope of the eventual removal of the curse (ix. 8-17). — The genealogical table breaks off with Noah; all that is mentioned with reference to him being the birth of his three sons, when he was 500 years old (ver. 32; see chap. xi. 10), without any allusion to the remaining years of his life, — an indication of a later hand. " The mention of three sons leads to the expectation, that whereas hitherto the line has been perpetuated through one member alone, in the future each of the three sons will form a new beginning (vid, ix. 18, 19, x. 1)." — M, Baumgarten,

The genealogies in chap. iv. and v., which trace the development of the human race through two fundamentally different lines, headed by Cain and Seth, are accompanied by a description of their moral development, and the statement that through marriages between the " sons of God*^ (Elohim) and the " daughters ofmen^^ the wickedness became so great, that God determined to destroy the men whom He had created. This description applies to the whole human race, and presupposes the intercourse or marriage of the Cainites with the Sethites. — Yer. 1 relates to the increase of men generally (^"J^i^, without any restriction), i.e. of the whole human race; and whilst the moral corruption is represented as universal, the whole human race, with the exception of Noah, who found grace before God (ver. 8), is described as ripe for destruction (vers. 3 and 5-8). To understand this section, and appreciate the causes of this complete degeneracy of the race, we must first obtain a coiTect interpretation of the expressions