19 God saw that it was good. Thus was it evening and morning, the fourth day. 20 And God said, Let the waters swarm with multitudes of living animals, and let winged fowl fly above the earth 21 on the firmament of the heaven! And God created the great water-animals and all living creatures, the animals that move with which the waters are filled after their kinds and every winged fowl after its kind. And God 22 saw that it was good. Then God blessed them, and said, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in 23 the sea, and let the fowl multiply on the earth! Thus was it evening and morning, the fifth day. 24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures Verse 20.-Shereç [to swarm,] is used in speaking of small agile creatures1, and thence also of man, connected with the idea of a moving multitude, and synonymous with remes', which however belongs more to reptiles and amphibious animals3.—'Al penei, (verse 20,) on the surface of the firmament,' is significant, and not exactly under, as the birds on the upper ocean appear as if they swam. The Creator pronounces a beautiful blessing upon the first living creatures, bidding them be fruitful and multiply; in which it seems as if the synonyms peru úrebu, having a similar sound, ('be fruitful and multiply,') and which increase the force of the expression, had been a usual formula of words, conveying the desire for increased fruitfulness: compare Gen. xxiv. 60. Verse 24.-Nefesh chaiah [living creatures,] include the three following kinds of animals: behemah, 'brutum,' dumb cattle, especially domestic animals, and amongst these the larger beasts of burden or 'jumenta'; remes', the reptiles of the earth, and chayetho-'eres, wild beasts; for in opposition to the idea of Schumann, that the animals moving and creeping on the earth should 1 Lev. xi. 29. 3 Compare verses 25, 26; chap. vii. 21; ix. 2. 2 Gen. ix. 7; Exod. i. 7. after their kinds, cattle and creeping thing, and beasts of 25 the field after their kinds! and it was so. And God made the beasts of the field after their kinds, and the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing of the earth 26 after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make men in our image, after our like be united into one class, 'reptiles living on the earth,' are accurately classified in verse 25. Respecting the form of definite construction of chayetho with the conjunctive vowel Vav, as formerly Jod', see Gesenius, Lehrgeb. p. 547, &c., and Ewald, Krit. Gram. p. 376. Menu (i. 43.) divides organic creatures into three classes,-jardyujás, utero nati,' audajás, egg-born, and svedajás, insects generated by humidity. In Genesis a gradual ascent is observed up to man, the chief work of creation; and, in order to exalt his dignity, the act of his creation is accompanied with the deliberation of the Creator. Verse 26.—The plural na aseh [let us make] is received by recent commentators, following Gesenius, as a plural of majesty, which, as in Elohim, may also occur in the verb3. Dathe and Hitzig call it a deliberative plural, as it is the thought of God expressed in language, when he takes counsel with himself; because the Deity addresses himself, or the subject is at the same time the object. This philosophical explanation is manifestly too artificial for an ancient language: in Isaiah, Jehovah addresses the Seraphim in a direct manner, and in no one passage of that book is such a plural to be found. In 2 Sam. xvi. 20, Absalom says to Ahitophel, "What shall we do?" In 2 Sam. xxiv. 14, David speaks to Gad of himself and others, just as Bildad 5 understands Job and his friends who speak thus, in opposition to his party (Job xvii. 3). Now if the plural of majesty was invented by the Rabbins in speaking of Elohim in order to preserve the mo 1 Gen. xxxi. 39; xlix. 11. 3 Compare Gen. xi. 7. 5 Job xviii. 2. 2 Lehrgeb. p. 799. 4 On Isaiah vi. 8. 6 Ewald, Krit. Gram. p. 641, note. ness, that they may rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over the cattle, and over the whole earth, and over every creeping thing that notheism, this cannot be the case here, and, as was often the case, the plural unconsciously escaped from the narrator's pen :-compare Gen. iii. 22, [one of us] where a manifest distinction of similar beings is found. The one only God could not speak in such a manner as that even the pronouns received the plural, and Gnostic sects freely inferred from this passage the existence of several divine beings, one of whom worked upon matter as [the architect or] Demiurgos, like the idea of Philo respecting the angels. 'Adàm [man] is here collective, as the pronouns and verb following show, but never a proper name, and it is first so employed in Tobit viii. 8, which the Septuagint and Luther follow. With the article, 'àdàm signifies the human race, including the notion of weakness and mortality; and this is alluded to in the unforced etymology of 'adàmàh', [ground,] after the observation that the body again becomes dust. Josephus3 and others have improperly laid an especial stress upon the brown-red colour of man, because the soil in Palestine consists of a reddish marl4. We could only refer to the Sanscrit adima, the first,' if we had found elsewhere in this narrative traces unconnected with the Semitic nation, and if the usage of the [Hebrew] language had designated 'àdàm specially as the first man. Tselem [image] is only applied to the outward and sensuous form, as if it were a shadowed outline according to its derivation, and is therefore used in speaking of the images of the gods, as the kindred Arabic sanam. The perfect resemblance is more exactly shown by děmuth, [likeness], especially when preceded by ki ‘according to.' In 2 Chron. iv. 3, the word (děmuth) is even applied to oxen, and nowhere does it contain the inward spiritual likeness which the Fathers of the Church first introduced into this 1 Compare Gen. ii. 7. 3 Arch. i. 1, 2. 2 Gen. iii. 19; Job x. 9; Eccles. iii. 20; xii. 7. 4 See Credner on Joel, p. 124, et seq. 52 Kings xi. 18; Daniel ii. 31. VOL. II. C 27 moveth upon the earth. And God created man after his [own] image, after the image of God created he him, 28 male and female created he them. And God blessed them and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and cause it to be subject to you, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every animal that moveth upon 29 the earth. And God said, Behold I have given to you every seed-bearing herb, that is upon the whole earth, and all trees upon which [are] the fruits of seed-bearing 30 trees; to you they shall be for food. But to all animals passage. It is a corporeal similitude of the form of man to that of God', which is transmitted to the children 2, and which still existed after the Deluge3, (as Livy also, v. 18, applies the expression to a youth, saying that he is "the likeness and image of his father+):" hence the opinion of Johannsen, that there is no human form here attributed to the Deity, but that all is spiritual, cannot be sustained. Verse 27.-Zàkàr ù nik'ébàh [male and female]. The question is not directly of a pair,—which comes more distinctly in the second chapter,—and we might look here for the dual. Upon this passage Is. Peyrerius rests his Præadamitic hypothesis"; namely, that here were created the first parents of the heathens who claimed to belong to very remote antiquity, and that in the second chapter the progenitors of the Jews were created. The work is very scarce, and the second part never appeared, the manuscripts of the author, with his little printed book, having been publicly burnt. Verse 30.-Yerek' [green] is not poetically the viror herbæ for 1 Compare Cicero, Nat. Deor. i. 18. 2 Genesis v. 3. 3 Genesis ix. 6. 5 Cosmog. p. 67. 12mo. 4 "Effigies atque imago patris." See especially Bretschneider, Grundlage des Evang. Pietism. p. 6. 6 Systema Theol. ex Præadamitarum Hypothesi, 1655, of the field and to all fowl of the heaven, and to all that moveth upon the earth, wherein is living breath, I have given the green leaves of the herb for food. And it was 31 SO. And God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good. Thus was it the evening and the morning, the sixth day. CHAPTER II. 1 Thus were completed the heaven and the earth and their green herb, but the foliage and leaves (Arab. wark') of the herb, while plants bearing seed and corn are assigned to man. It has been also observed, that vegetables only were [at first] appointed as food to man, and that the permission to eat animal food was afterwards given in chap. ix. ver. 3, which accords with the traditions of other nations 1, and with the conclusions of Blumenbach and J. Riston, that man does not appear to have been designed to eat animal food, that this food tends to render his nature savage, and so forth. Here however is only given the simple contrast with the food for animals; but the narrator [when he mentions coats of skins] in chap. iii. 21, implies an allusion, though he does not express it, to the killing of animals, and the mention of animal food would appear in this passage somewhat remarkable. If however we imagine the narrative to have had its origin among an agricultural people, the mention of corn and vegetables is perfectly in its place. CHAPTER II., verses 1-3 [which contain the rest and consecration of the seventh day] form the keystone of the whole structure of creation; indeed the new chapter ought to begin with verse 4 for its title.-Tsàbà' signifies elsewhere the host of heaven, the stars or the angels; but here it includes, in a general sense, the created things of the heaven and earth. Nehemiah (ix. 6) had this passage in view, but he resolved the series of connected 1 Compare the Hindoos and Ovid, Metam. xv. 96, et seq. |