others-"God said: Let Light be!"-no act is now performed but by his spoken Word. Neither is any preliminary creation of Matter asserted: the first verse, "At the beginning of God's creating the heaven and the earth," only refers to the description of that act in verses 6-10. Verse 2, "when the earth had been shapeless and waste, and darkness over the face of the Abyss," assumes a new and obviously correcter sense. The earth and water, it is now seen, are supposed to have existed before the creation (or moulding into shape) of the earth, and there is no absurdity in the mention here of an element (the water) not spoken of in verse 1. So far from God creating the earth chaotic, verse 2 describes the chaotic state prior to what the writer in verse 1 terms its creation ("when the earth had until then been shapeless and waste" And as we have here a chaotic uncreated earth, so in the same ante-creational period we find a chaotic uncreated water-the Abyss, over which Darkness had been till then. And both earth and water are conceived as having only a sort of negative existence-indicated in the case of the earth by the "shapeless and waste," and in that of the water by the "darkness." But upon this state, which "had been," another supervened, when the breath of God was brooding over the face of the water," previously dark,-the breath that uttered the first creative words, "Let Light be !" The two periods are accurately distinguished in the Hebrew by the different tenses (perfect, had been, and participle, was brooding). The first act of creation, and the sole act of the first day, was therefore that of Light, as Milton seems to understand correctly, not only in his

"Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born,
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam,

May I express thee unblamed ?"

but also in

"O first-created beam, and thou great Word,
'Let there be Light!' and light was over all!"

And the same is rendered almost certain also by a comparison with the act of the fourth day-the creation of the Luminaries; since (as will be more fully shewn) there is a certain correspondence between the acts of the first three and the last three days. And as the fourth day witnesses the

creation of the luminous bodies only, the first may be presumed to have seen only that of the light itself: the addition of the creation of the heaven and the earth would entirely spoil this manifestly intentional correspondence. It is perhaps hardly needful to expatiate on the enhanced beauty with which the history of creation seems to me to be invested by this new conception of the first day's work. Milton has discovered it, even through the blind of the received versions, and shewn it in his most thrilling language to the world; and so it comes before us as no new idea, that Light was the "offspring of Heaven first-born." Life is the chief, if not the only created thing, in the eyes of a primitive unphilosophical age; that which is dead, immovable or unchangeable, would be regarded as performing no function, doing nothing for any one, and therefore as not the work of a Creator, whose works were created for a purpose. To create, therefore, was to the people of that age to infuse life. But life itself is too impalpable and mysterious an idea to be conceived strictly and properly. Light is its sine qua non. Life is action; and action can take place only in the light: "the night cometh when no man can work." Light, therefore, is assumed as the sensible equivalent of the insensible Life. How then should creation commence with anything else but Light? It is that alone which renders any further creation possible.

Without venturing far on a field where I cannot tread with confidence, I may be allowed to notice the striking correspondence between Gen. i. 1-3, as interpreted by me, and the Proem of the Fourth Gospel.

"At the beginning... God said, 'Let Light be !"" "In the beginning was the Word."

Can it be doubted that this Word is that very command, "Let Light be!" which was at the beginning of all things? or that the writer had this account of creation in his mind? And he continues, after saying that this Word was God's, or even was God, "Everything was made through it, and not a single thing was made apart from it;" inasmuch as (in my translation) every act of creation was effected by actual spoken words of God. And then, "In it was Life, and life was the Light of men"-again a reference to the "Let Light be!" meaning that the light, conceived in its relation

to the living being man, is Life: what light is to the universe, that life is to man: life therefore is (mathematically speaking) a function of light. Then, "The light shines in the darkness," for darkness still continued to exist after the creation of light, but "God made a division between the light and the darkness." This division protects the newlycreated light from invasion by the darkness; which may be alluded to in the next words of the Gospel, if their proper meaning be, "and the darkness did not suppress (i. e. was not permitted, was not able to suppress) the light."

This reference to the creation as described in Genesis, however, does not exclude the Alexandrine inspiration from which the Proem is usually explained. On the contrary, it traces the Logos doctrine to its very origin, and finds for it a foundation and justification in the very oldest and most sacred Hebrew Scriptures, without which it is difficult to conceive that it could have been accepted and adopted by a Jew like Philo from heathen philosophers only. Why indeed is that very word Logos used, for what is elsewhere (Prov. viii. 1, 22-31; Wis. vi-xi.; Ecclus. i., xxiv. et passim; Matt. xi. 19) called Wisdom? Is it not because the acts of Divine Wisdom are always represented as performed by Speech? Not only here in the organization of a world is this the case, but also in the organization of a nation; and the fundamental constitution of that nation is embodied in ten Divine utterances, which we loosely call the Ten Commandments, but which are properly the Ten Words (777); now Aóyos is the exact translation of 7. Any history of the Logos idea, therefore, which takes no account of the first chapter of Genesis as sanctioning, if not suggesting, it to its Hebrew adherents, must be imperfect. The philosophers who wished to find it there, found it without difficulty in the Divine words, and especially the first and greatest of these, "Let Light be !" Such a philosophical conception may indeed have been very far from the mind of the ancient writer. Yet a tendency towards separating the action from the essence of God, and treating the former as a distinct person, is observed very early indeed; especially in the angels (or men, as they are often called), who in Genesis appear mysteriously, and as mysteriously turn out in the end to be God himself: so the angel that appeared to Hagar, xvi. esp. v. 13; the three who come to Abraham, xviii.

esp. v. 13; the angel at the sacrifice of Isaac, xxii. esp. vv. 11, 12, 15, 16; the angel who wrestles with Jacob, xxxii. 24-30. If this tendency was natural to the Hebrews, and exhibited in their earliest books, the development of the later conception of the Divine Wisdom, and the still later adoption of the New Platonic ideas, require no further explanation: otherwise it would be quite unintelligible.

It is not necessary to go to such length in justifying my translation of the rest of the chapter. Though abounding in peculiar words and expressions, which we may have to consider in another connection, there is not room for much difference of opinion as to either the meaning of words or the logical relation of the clauses. In v. 5, the words evening and morning are without the article and therefore indefinite; and the meaning can only be, "And there was evening and there was morning" (like, "And there was a man of Benjamin," 1 Sam. ix. 1): to which, without grammatical connection, "First Day, Second Day," &c., is added as the concluding title of the preceding verses.-V. 6. Let it be observed once for all, that the Hebrew, water, is a noun that has no singular; it is therefore better rendered water than waters, just as tenebræ is shade rather than shades. V. 7. The subject of the verb divided is the lastmentioned noun, Firmament; this is grammatically the best, and is made certain by the analogy of the preceding verse. V. 11. Grass, herbs, fruit-trees, and most words denoting vegetable or animal species, including those used in later verses for beasts, birds, reptiles, men, &c., are generally used in the singular with a clear plural or collective meaning, and in many cases have no plural in use; it is therefore better to translate them by the English plural; except of course in cases like grass, sheep, cattle, &c., where the English practice happens to coincide with the Hebrew. The fruit-trees produce "fruit which has its own seed within it"-the seed of the apple being held within the fruit, whereas the herbs yield seed only-seed unprotected by a covering of fruit. Three gradations of plants are recognized the grass, which seems to spread of itself, without obvious seed; larger plants, which have conspicuous flowers and seeds; and fruit-trees, the highest form of vegetable life, which have not naked seeds, but fruit containing seeds within it. V. 14. Luminaries (n), not the same

word as Light (i) in v. 3, but a derivative, which from its form must denote a place or thing of light: any objections, therefore, which have been raised against the double creation of light (vv. 3 and 14), fall to the ground. Whether light as a principle can be conceived to have existed before the luminaries which now shed it on our earth, is another question, which we do not presume to decide here. For feasts: denotes literally an appointment, a place or time appointed to a certain purpose; and thence very frequently of the great religious feasts so appointed, as the Passover, regulated by the moon; which is the most likely meaning here, since that use of the sun and moon could hardly be omitted by the Hebrew writer, and is not indicated by any other word: the signs are probably portents, such as eclipses generally were in the ancient world. For days and years: i. e. to mark the passage of time generally (not for days, and for years). V. 16. The two great luminaries with the definite article. And the stars: object of the verb made at the beginning of the verse; the Authorized Version spoils the syntax by supplying he made and also. V. 20. Let the water swarm with a swarm: for the verb (properly to creep) has its own derivative

its object-"to swarm a swarm." Animal life (

as

WPA) : denotes not life (which is ), but animal (as in vv. 24, 25), and here depends on , and has the sense of the adjective animal. And let Birds fly: the birds were certainly not produced out of the water, as the Authorized Version gratuitously makes them to be; the two following verses make this clear. V. 24. Animal life, cattle, reptiles, land-animals: all indefinite here, but definite in the next verse. V. 26. Men (7): indefinite, like the animals in vv. 20, 24, and in the singular with plural sense (as was noted on v. 11), which appears incontrovertibly from the plural verb immediately following, "so that they may bear rule." This will be seen to have important consequences. V. 27. The words, "in the image of God he formed them," form no true parallelism to those preceding them, but are simply identical with them-the words image, God, formed, being all repeated from the previous clause: hence they must almost certainly be cancelled as an interpolation. Vv. 29, 30. The verb I give governs both these verses, and ought not to be repeated in v. 30, as it is in the Authorized