§ 2. THE GENERATIONS OF THE HEAVENS AND OF THE EARTH (Genesis 2:4-1).
EXPOSITION
THE subject handled in the present section is the primeval history of man in his paradisiacal state of innocence, his temptation and fall, and his subsequent development, in two diverging lines, of faith and unbelief, holiness and sin. On the ground of certain obvious, well-defined, and readily-explained characteristics which distinguish this from the preceding portion of the narrative, it is usual with the higher criticism to allege diversity of authorship; and, indeed, these same characteristics, magnified by misapplied ingenuity into insoluble contradictions, are the chief buttress of the documentary hypothesis of Astrue, Hupfeld, Tuch, Ewald, and others. Now the hypothesis that Moses, in the composition of the Pentateuch, and of this Book of Origins in particular, made use of existing documents that may have descended from a remote antiquity is, a prioir, neither incredible nor impossible; but, on the contrary, is extremely probable, and may be held as admitted; only the alleged peculiarities of the different portions of the narrative do not justify the reckless confidence with which it has been resolved by Stahelin, Bleek, De Wette, Knobel, Ewald, and Davidson into its so-called original fragments; and, in the case of Ewald, primordial atoms. The occurrence of the name Jehovah Elohim, instead of simply Elohim, as in the preceding section, is the chief peculiarity of the present portion of the narrative, so far as style and language are concerned; its angered irreconcilable differences in subject-matter are skillfully and succinctly put by Kalisch. "In the first cosmogony vegetation is immediately produced by the will of God; in the second its existence is made dependent on rain and mists and the agricultural labors: in the first the earth emerges from the waters, and is, therefore, saturated with moisture; in the second it appears dry, sterile, and sandy: in the first man and his wife are created together; in the second the wife is formed later, and from a part of man: in the former man bears the image of God, and is made ruler of the whole earth; in the latter his earth-formed body is only animated by the breath of life, and he is placed in Eden to cultivate and to guard it: in the former the birds and beasts are created before man; in the latter man before birds and beasts." For a reply to these "insoluble contradictions," which, though "too obvious to be overlooked or denied," are mostly, if not solely, due to a false exegesis and a misapprehension of the guiding purpose of the writer, see the Exposition following, which attempts no "artificial solution" such as Kalisch deprecates, and proposes no ingenious reconciliation of essentially opposing statements, but simply shows that, when naturally and literally interpreted, the narrative is free from those internal antagonisms which a 'microscopic criticism imagines it has detected in it. The internal unity of the present writing, or second document, as it is called, is apparent. The internecine struggle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, which the fratricidal act of Cain inaugurated (Genesis 4:1.), is the legitimate and necessary outcome of the sin and the grace revealed in Eden (Genesis 3:1.), while the melancholy story of the temptation and the fall presupposes the paradisiacal innocence of the first pair (Genesis 2:1.). Thus homogeneous in itself, it likewise connects with, the preceding section through Genesis 2:1; which, as a monograph on man, supplies a more detailed account of his creation than is given in the narrative of the six days' work, and, by depicting man's settlement in Eden as a place of trial, prepares the way for the subsequent recital of his seduction and sin, and of his consequent expulsion from the garden.
These are the generations is the usual heading for the different sections into which the Book of Genesis is divided (vial. Genesis 5:1; Genesis 6:9; Genesis 10:1; Genesis 11:10, Genesis 11:27; Genesis 25:12, Genesis 25:19; Genesis 36:1; Genesis 37:2). Misled by the LXX; who render toldoth by ἡ βιμβλος γενεμσεως, Ranks, Title, Havernick, Tuch, Ewald, and Stahelin disconnect the entire verse from the second section, which says nothing about the origination of the heavens and the earth, and append it to the preceding, in which their creation is described. Ilgen improves on their suggestion by transferring it to the commencement of Genesis 1:1, as an appropriate superscription. Dreschler, Vaihingel Bohlen, Oehler, Macdonald, et alii divide the verse into two clauses, and annex the former to what precedes, commencing the ensuing narrative with the latter. All of these proposals are, however, rendered unnecessary by simply observing that toldoth (from yaladh, to bear, to beget; hence begettings, procreations, evolutions, developments) does not describe the antecedents, but the consequents, of either thing or Person (Rosen; Keil, Kalisch). The toldoth of Noah are not the genealogical list of the patriarch's ancestry, but the tabulated register of his posterity; and so the generations of the heavens and the earth refer not to their original production (Gesenius), but to their onward movements from creation downwards (Keil). Hence with no incongruity, but with singular propriety, the first half of the present verse, ending with the words when they were created, literally, in their creation, stands at the commencement of the section in which the forward progression of the universe is traced. The point of departure in this subsequent evolution of the material heavens and earth is further specified as being in the day that the Lord God (Jehovah Elohim) made the earth and the heavens; not the heavens and the earth, which would have signified the universe (cf. on Genesis 1:1), and carried hack the writer's thought to the initial act of creation; but the earth and the atmospheric firmament, which indicates the period embracing the second and (possibly) the third creative days as the terminus a quo of the generations to be forthwith recorded. Then it was that the heavens and the earth in their development took a clear and decided step forward in the direction of man and the human family (was it in the appearance of vegetation?); and in this thought perhaps will be found the key to the significance of the new name for the Divine Being which is used exclusively throughout the present section—Jehovah Elohim. From the frequency of its use, and the circumstance that it never has the article, Jehovah may be regarded as the proper Personal name of God. Either falsely interpreting Exodus 20:7 and Le Exodus 24:11, or following some ancient superstition (mysterious names of deities were used generally in the East; the Egyptian Hermes had a name which (Cic. 'de Natura Deorum,' 8, 16) durst not be uttered: Furst), the later Hebrews invested this nomen tetra. grammaton with such sanctity that it might not bepronounced. Accordingly, it was their custom to write it in the sacred text with the vowel points of Adonai, or, if that preceded, Elohim. Hence considerable doubt now exists as to its correct pronunciation. Etymologically viewed it is a future form of havah, an old form of hayah; uncertainty as to what future has occasioned many different suggestions as to what constituted its primitive vocalization. According to the evidence which scholars have collected, the choice lies between
(1) Jahveh (Gesenius, Ewald, Reland, Oehler, Macdonald, the Samaritan),
(2) Yehveh or Yeheveh (Furst, W. L. Alexander, in Kitto's 'Cyclopedia'), and
(3) Jehovah (Michaelis, Meyer, Stier, Hoelmann, Tregelles, Murphy).
Perhaps the preponderance of authority inclines to the first; but the common punctuation is not so indefensible as some writers allege. Gesenius admits that it more satisfactorily accounts for the abbreviated syllables יִהוֹ and יוֹ than the pronunciation which he himself favors. Murphy thinks that the substitution of Adonai for Jehovah was facilitated by the agreement of their vowel points. The locus classicus for its signification is Exodus 3:14, in which God defines himself as "I am that I am," and commands Moses to tell the children of Israel that Ehyeh had sent him. Hengstenberg and Keil conclude that absolute self-existence is the essential idea represented by the name (cf. Exodus 3:14; ὁ ὠìν, LXX.; Revelation 1:4, Revelation 1:8; ὁ ὥν καὶ ὁ ἠν καὶ ὁ ἐρχομμενος, vd. Furst, 'Lex. sub nora.'). Baumgarten and Delitzsch, laying stress on its future form, regard it as = the Becoming One, with reference to the revelation, rather than the essence, of the Divine nature. Macdonald, from the circumstance that it was not used till after the fall, discovers a pointing forward to Jehovah as ὁ ἑρχομμενος in connection with redemption. Others, deriving from a hiphil future, take it as denoting "he who causes to be, the Fulfiller," and find in this an explanation of Exodus 6:3 (Exell). May not all these ideas be more or less involved in the fullness of the Divine name? As distinguished from Elohim, Deus omnipotens, the mighty One, Jehovah is the absolute, self-existent One, who manifests himself to man, and, in particular, enters into distinct covenant engagements for his redemption, which he in due time fulfils. In the present section the names are conjoined partly to identify Jehovah with Elohim, and partly because the subject of which it treats is the history of man.
And every plant of the field before it was (literally, not yet) in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew (literally, had not yet sprouted). Following the LXX; the English Version suggests an intention on the writer's part to emphasize the fact that the vegetation of the globe—here comprehended under the general terms, shiah, shrub, and eseb, herb—was not a natural production, but, equally with the great earth and heavens, was the creation of Jehovah Elohim—a rendering which has the sanction of Taylor Lewis; whereas the writer's object clearly is to depict the appearance of the earth at the time when the man-ward development of the heavens and the earth began. Then not a single plant was in the ground, not a green blade was visible. The land, newly sprung from the waters, was one desolate region of bleak, bare lava-hills and extensive mud-fiats. Up to that point the absence of vegetation is accounted for by the circumstance that the presently existing atmospheric conditions of the globe had not then been established, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and the ordinary agricultural operations on which its production was afterwards to depend had not then been begun, and there was not a man to till the ground.
But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. The dry land having been separated from the waters, and the atmospheric ocean uplifted above them both, vaporous exhalations began to ascend to the aerial regions, and to return again in the shape of rain upon the ground. Jehovah thus caused it to rain upon the ground, and so prepared it for the vegetation which, in obedience to the Almighty fiat, sprung up at the close of the third day, although the writer does not mention its appearance, but leaves it to be inferred from the preceding section. That soon after its emergence from the waters the land should be "dry, sterile, and sandy" will not be thought remarkable if we remember the highly igneous condition of our planet at the time when the dry land was upheaved and the waters gathered into the subsiding valleys. Nothing would more naturally follow that event than the steaming up of vapors to float in the aerial sea. In fact, the rapidity with which evaporation would be carried on would very speedily leave the newly-formed land hard and dry, baked and caked into a crust, till the atmosphere, becoming overcharged with aqueous vapor, returned it in the shape of rain. To talk of insuperable difficulty and manifest dissonance where everything is clear, natural, and harmonious is to speak at random, and betrays an anxiety to create contradictions rather than to solve them.
And the Lord God (Jehovah Elohim) formed man of the dust of the ground. Literally, dust from the ground. Here, again, Bleek, Kalisch, and the theologians of their school discover contrariety between this account of man's creation and that which has been given in the preceding chapter. In that man is represented as having been created by the Divine word, in the Divine image, and male and female simultaneously; whereas in this his creation is exhibited as a painful process of elaboration from the clay by the hand of God, who works it like a potter (asah; LXX; πλαμσσω), and, after having first constructed man, by a subsequent operation forms woman. But the first account does not assert that Adam and Eve were created together, and gives no details of the formation of either. These are supplied by the present narrative, which, beginning with the construction of his body from the fine dust of the ground, designedly represents it as an evolution or development of the material universe, and ends by setting it before us as animated by the breath of God, reserving for later treatment the mode of Eve's production, when the circumstances that led to it have been described. And (the Lord God) breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Literally, the breath of lives. "The formation of man from the dust and the breathing of the breath of life must not be understood in a mechanical sense, as if God first of all constructed a human figure from the dust" (still less does it admit of the idea that man's physical nature was evolved from the lower animals), "and then, by breathing his breath of life into the clod of earth which he had shaped into the form of a man, made it into a living being. The words are to be understood θεοπρεπῶς. By an act of Divine omnipotence man arose from the dust; and in the same moment in which the dust, by virtue of creative omnipotence, shaped itself into a human form, it was pervaded by the Divine breath of life, and created a living being, so that we cannot say the body was earlier than the soul" (Delitzsch). And man became a living soul. Nephesh chayyah, in Genesis 1:21, 80, is employed to designate the lower animals. Describing a being animated by a ψυχηì or life principle, it does not necessarily imply that the basis of the life principle in man and the inferior animals is the same. The distinction between the two appears from the difference in the mode of their creations. The beasts arose at the almighty fiat completed beings, every one a nephesh chayyah. "The origin of their soul was coincident with that of their corporeality, and their life was merely the individualization of the universal life with which all matter was filled at the beginning by the Spirit of God" (Delitzsch). Man received his life from a distinct act of Divine inbreathing; certainly not an in-breathing of atmospheric air, but an inflatus from the Ruach Elohim, or Spirit of God, a communication from the whole personality of the Godhead. In effect man was thereby constituted a nephesh chayyah, like the lower animals; but in him the life principle conferred a personality which was wanting in them. Thus there is no real contradiction, scarcely even an "apparent dissonance," between the two accounts of man's creation. The second exhibits the foundation of that likeness to God and world-dominion ascribed to him in the first.
HOMILETICS
The first man.
I. MADE FROM THE DUST. This does not imply that in the composition of humanity there is nothing but particles of dust, or "molecules of matter." Simply it designs to state that the point of departure in man's creation was the soil out of which all other living creatures were produced; that, so to speak, man was constructed from beneath upwards, the Divine Artificer proceeding with his creation in the same ascending scale of activity that had been observed in the production of the rest of the universe—first the material body, and then the immaterial soul; and that, so far as the former is concerned, man is wholly and solely of the earth, earthy,—an assertion which the researches of chemistry and physiology abundantly confirm,—the elements of organized bodies being the same as those which constitute the inorganic world, viz; carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, lime, iron, sulfur, and phosphorus. The statement is fitted to impress man with thoughts—
1. Of his lowly origin. While the Scripture in general labors to imbue his mind with correct ideas of his obscure nativity, comparing him to a wind, to a vapor, to a flower, to the beasts, to a worm, the sentiment of Moses takes him lower yet for his birthplace—to the dust of the ground, above which the wind blows, from which the vapors rise, on which the flowers bloom, across which the beasts roam, out of which the worm creeps.
2. Of his essential frailty. Being composed of little particles of dust, held together by what science calls "organization," but Holy Writ designates the power of God, it requires but the loosening of God's hand, as it were, for the framework of his body, so wondrously fashioned, so delicately carved, so finely articulated, so firmly knit, to resolve itself into a heap of dust.
3. Of his final destiny. Every mundane thing returns to the place whence it proceeded (Ecclesiastes 1:5, Ecclesiastes 1:7). The vapors climb into the sky, but descend again upon the hills, and seek the plains. The flowers bloom, but, after dispensing their fragrance, shed their leaves upon the earth. The young lions, that, as it were, are sprung from the soil, find a grave at last within their forest dens. As it is with the flowers and the beasts, so is it also with man. "All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again" (Ecclesiastes 3:18, Ecclesiastes 3:20; Job 10:9; Psalms 103:14).
Lessons:—
1. Humility of spirit (Job 4:19; Psalms 144:3, Psalms 144:4; Isaiah If. 1). "Holy living" (Taylor, § Genesis 4:9).
2. Care for the body—protecting its frailty from injury (Le Genesis 19:28) and its materiality from mastery (Romans 12:1; 1 Corinthians 6:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:4).
3. Preparation for death (Psalms 39:4; Psalms 90:12).
II. FASHIONED BY THE HAND OF GOD. Made from the dust, the first man neither sprung from the slime of matter, according to naturalism (οἱ αὐτοìχθονες), nor was evolved from the τοÌ πᾶν of pantheism, but was specifically formed by Divine creative power. This marked the first degree of man's superiority over other living creatures. Deriving existence, equally with man, from the creative power of God, it is not said of them that they were "formed" by God. Let this remind man—
1. Of the Divine origin of the body. If the physical structures of the lower organisms display such admirable proportions and striking adaptations as to evince the action of Divine intelligence, much more may a Creator's hand be recognized in the form and symmetry, proportion and adjustment of the human body. An examination of the hand, eye, or brain, of the muscular or nervous systems, instinctively awakens the devout feelings of the Psalmist: "I will praise Thee, O Lord; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalms 139:14).
2. Of the Divine estimate of the body. Shown by the personal care and attention which God devoted to its construction, since he designed it to be the noblest of his works, the shrine of an immortal spirit, a prophecy and type of the body of his Son, in the fullness of the times to be prepared by another special act of creation (Psalms 40:6; Hebrews 10:8). This estimate he has in many ways confirmed: by abundantly and generously sustaining it, although a partner in the spirit's sin (Genesis 1:29; Genesis 9:3); guarding its life with the strictest and severest penalties (Genesis 9:5, Genesis 9:6); taking it into union with himself, in the person of his Son (Hebrews 2:6); redeeming it, as well as the soul it enshrines, through his Son's blood (Romans 8:21, Romans 8:28); and constituting it, as well as the immaterial spirit, a partaker of resurrection glory (1 Corinthians 15:42).
Learn—
1. The true nobility of man's descent, and the duty of walking worthy of it.
2. The high value of the body, and the consequent obligation of neither dishonoring nor abusing it.
III. ANIMATED BY THE BREATH OF LIFE. The second degree of man's superiority to the lower animals. Like them, a living soul, his life is different from theirs—
1. In its nature. Theirs was a portion of that common life principle which God has been pleased to communicate to matter; his a direct afflatus from the personality of God.
2. In its impartation. Theirs was bestowed directly and immediately by the fiat of omnipotence; his conveyed into his material framework by a special Divine operation.
3. In its effect. Theirs constituted them "living souls;" his conferred on him personality. Theirs made them creatures having life; his caused him to become a spirit having life. Theirs left them wholly mortal; his transformed him into an immortal (Ecclesiastes 3:21).
Let man consider—
1. That his body is a temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 6:19).
2. That his spirit is the creation and the gift of God (Ecclesiastes 12:7; Isaiah 57:16; Zechariah 12:1).
3. That with both it becomes him to glorify his Divine Creator (1 Corinthians 6:20).
HOMILIES BY R.A. REDFORD
Man the living soul.
1. Life is a Divine bestowment.
2. Dust which is Divinely inspired is no longer mere dust; the true life is neither groveling on the earth, nor so much away from the earth as to be no longer the life of a living soul.
3. The creature who is last formed, and for whom all other things wait and are prepared, is made to be the interpreter of all, and the glory of God in them.—R.