X.

(Lecture III., page 67.)

NARRATIVES OF THE CREATION AND OF THE FALL.

It is a well-known commonplace of modern criticism that the primary creation narrative (Gen. i-ii. 3,) and the narrative beginning with the fourth verse of the second chapter to the end of the third chapter, are from different sources.

“The book of Genesis was not written by one man, but was put together from works of very different dates; works, too, whose authors by no means all stood upon the same religious level. This very chapter will furnish us with illustrations of the fact, for immediately after the first account of the creation, a second follows, which by 226no means agrees with it. . . . The same writer” (who gives the second account of creation) “continues his narrative, and tells us how Paradise was lost.”—‘The Bible for Young People, by Dutch Divines’ (translation), i. 52, 58.

Of the question as to how these and other sections of Genesis are related to one another, Oehler says (Old Test. Theology, i. 74): “I certainly consider that the present shape of Genesis arose by the re-editing of an Elohistic narrative, and the interpolation of Jehovistic passages. But, at the same time, it must appear improbable that the author would place at the head of his work two contradictory accounts of the creation.