pains of childbirth to thee; with pain shalt thou bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, 17 but he shall rule over thee. And unto the man he said, Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, about which I commanded thee, when I said, Thou shalt not eat of it, therefore let the ground be cursed for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat 18 of it all thy life long. Thorns also and thistles shall it

peans are accustomed to regard such things, for it must be remembered that in the East the chief impulses of desire are attributed to the female sex.-. :.—Mashal (rule): such is here its true meaning, as Maurer has rightly insisted against Schumann, who interpreted this word in a collateral sense like that which humbled' bears in the Pentateuch. The lordship here assigned to man accords with the position which woman holds in the East, who is never to be exempted from the control of the male sex1.

Verse 17.—In the place of ba aboreka (for thy sake) the Septuagint reads "in thy works," Symmach. Vulg. "in opere tuo,' which implies a Hebrew text ba abodeka (7, d, for 7, r, which is also found in one manuscript) at thy field-labour'; and the reading deserves to be considered, although ‘abod is more of an Aramæan expression. To translate the phrase for thy sake' appears somewhat harsh.-" Thorns and thistles are generally put for all kinds of weeds, as an obstacle to agriculture; and a curse rests upon the soil, inasmuch as its productions, especially the various kinds of grain, ('eseb, see Gen. ii. 5) cannot be produced without toil, and must be nurtured with skill. This clearly presupposes agriculture, which the Hebrews always regarded as toilsome; and here again the idea is derived from Persia, the greater part of which was naturally sterile, although, in compliance with the injunctions of the Zend religion, that country boasted a pre-eminent cultivation of the soil.

1 Menu, ix. 3.

bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the 19 field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till

thou return unto the earth from whence thou art taken; 20 for dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return. And

the man called his wife Chavah [Eve], for she was the 21 mother of all living. Then God Jehovah made garments of skins for the man and his wife and clothed 22 them. And God Jehovah said, Behold the man is be

Verse 20.-Chavah, (to live) for chayah, might appear ancient, but it might also with equal reason be explained as very recent and borrowed from the Aramæan; as ze'ah, (sweat) in verse 19, is decidedly a late word. The narrator was not content with the general name of the woman as a woman, 'ishshah; he gives also, from his predilection for etymology, a sort of proper name; and Chavah (Eve) might even at that early time have been a favourite and frequent name, as may confidently be believed of many others mentioned in Genesis, [and in Hebrew narrative, such as] Saul, Judith, Jacob, &c., on which the legend turns. Unquestionably, however, we must consider that the leading thought in the apparently interrupted course of the narrator's ideas was the following:-that when human nature is not allowed to attain to immortality, it is continued through all time by means of the female sex.

Verse 21.- Garments of skins.' In this phrase, the word skins which is added in order to limit the first word (garments), strictly contradicts it; for kithoneth (the usual close garment of the Hebrews) is unquestionably a foreign word, Xirúv, Kɩwv, a tunic, and essentially implies the material of the woollen or cotton stuff of which it was always made'. Cassianus and others dream of an originally spiritual human body, which was at this time changed into an animal body.

Verse 22.-Hayah, he is become,' has been arbitrarily taken

1 See Abhandl. der Deutsch. Gesellschaft, i. 74. Königsb. 1830.

2 In Clemens of Alex. Strom. iii. 14.

3 Compare Gen. ii. 7.

come as one of us, so that he knows good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand, and take of the tree of 23 life and live for ever; therefore God Jehovah sent him out from the garden of Eden, to till the earth from

to mean he has wished to become,' which interpretation was intended to favour a doctrinal object. Respecting the construction with pen (lest), and the referential Vav following it, see Ewald's Gram. § 480, 3, and 602, 3; according to which chay (life) assumes its form as a verb for chayay: compare Gen. v. 5; 2 Sam. xii. 21. There are frequent later allusions to the tree of life1 in the same sense as that which the Hindoos apply to their Kalpavriksha, and the Persians to the tree Hom; indeed the Persian idea must have become generally known in the East2.

In this 22nd verse we have the key to the whole myth :-Man had borne in his outward appearance the image which human conceptions assigned to God3, and the narrator of the second cosmogony necessarily entertained a similar idea of the external form in which man had been created, although the human being had to emerge, in the first instance, from the animal state, through the sentiment of shame and with the aid of clothing; and as he was then merely in an animal state, it was most wisely ordained that only the tree of knowledge should be prohibited. When man enjoyed the taste of the fruit of this tree, he became like the gods; but he was not destined, like them, to attain the second divine prerogative of long life1, after which the Easterns, and especially the Chinese and the Hindoos, used to strive incessantly by means of Amrita or potions, [i. e. draughts of Ambrosia or immortality]. The gods were represented as jealous, and Cherubim guarded the tree of life, to prevent any mortal reaching it, in order that the garden of Paradise, like the royal parks of earthly rulers, might remain sacred to the Deity alone.

1 Proverbs iii. 18; xi. 30; xiii. 12; xv. 4.

2 See Bretschneider, as cited above, p. 39.

3 Gen. i. 26.

4 Compare Buttmann, Berl. Monatschr. (Monthly Magazine) for April, 1804. 5 Tò letov plovepóv, Herod. i. 32; iii. 40. Compare Gen. vi. 3; xi. 6.

24 whence he was taken. And he drove out the man, and placed before the garden of Eden the Cherubim, with the flaming sword turning in every direction, to guard the to the tree of life.

way

Verse 24.-The Kerubim, or Cherubim, are, according to the description in Ezekiel', composite animals of the Hebrew mythology, employed in the service of Jehovah. They appear here to resemble in their functions the sphinx-formed creatures which are found as guardians of the sanctuary in Egyptian monuments; and both Philo and Clemens Alexandrinus decide unhesitatingly that they are sphinxes. Nevertheless much that has been thought to be of Egyptian origin has been derived from Upper Asia, and was not transmitted to Egypt until a later period, as for instance the worship of Serapis, which has been compared with the “Seraphim " and the Hebrew Sharaf, or serpent, which is in Sanscrit Sarpa. In the same manner the griffins guarding gold in Bactria and on the Caucasus are an original fiction of that part of Asia3, and Kerub (Cherub) as well as you, (griffin) are derived from gribh, Pers. griftan, to seize'. Some have tried to refer this passage to natural phenomena, eruptions of naphtha, or even to a volcano', but such an explanation is inadmissible: for by the "flaming sword turning every way," the narrator no doubt meant literally the gleaming of the blade. The word sword is used collectively in this passage for swords, and an idea may here have been in his mind, which will shortly be more fully developed.

1 Ezek. i. 6; x. 9.

2 Numbers xxi. 8; Hitzig on Isaiah vi. 2.

3 Herod. iii. 116; Ktesias, Indic. 7.

4 See Hitzig on Isaiah xxxvii. 16; and Rödiger, in the Encyclop. under this word.

5 Sickler, Ideen zu einem vulkan. Erdglobus (Ideas on a Volcanic Earthball), p. 6.

If we review the account of the Cosmogony and of Paradise presented to us in this section of Genesis, it will be seen that the writer intended to give a theory of creation in accordance with his own views, as well as a geographical delineation of the first abodes of the human race. The author was desirous to show, that man had been created mortal, and that he will remain mortal; and at the same time he wished to explain the emancipation of the first human pair from the state of mere animal existence, and the origin of various troubles, of which the cause may be traced to the striving after enjoyment; it is however only in the absence of these troubles that the description of Paradise can be considered to refer to the golden age.

An intimate knowledge of human nature is exhibited in the narrative of man's disobedience to the command of Jehovah, and the transgression itself appears to have been intended by the narrator, in order to elevate the mortal beings whom he described; there is indeed so little allusion either to divine retribution or to the origin of moral evil, and so little reference to a fall through sin, that the object of the writer seems rather to have been the elevation of the human race towards the Deity. Many untenable interpretations have been given of this myth of Paradise, and it has been misunderstood in every possible way; but the different modes of interpretation are collected together by Gabler1, and are arranged by Gesenius2 into four classes, viz. into those which are historical, figurative, allegorical and mythical.

The most untenable of all the interpretations is the hi

1 On Eichhorn's Urgeschichte (Primitive History), vol. ii.

2 Encyl. under Adam.