figures belong to a chronological system that runs through the whole book; the outgrowth of later speculations, which fixed the end of the world at four thousand years from the creation, and placed the exodus of Israel from Egypt midway in this period. 1

We have thus far met few of the fanciful naturemyths that abound in similar traditions of other peoples-the tendency to which was repressed in Israel by its stern and spiritual monotheism. But in this list there is at least one figure which looks very much like a solar-myth; that of Enoch, “the opener," as Ewald paraphrases his name; the man of three hundred and sixty-five years, who ascended into the heavens. Yet, so completely did this poetry stiffen, later on, into prose, that Enoch became a celebrated prophet, to whom reference is made in the Epistle of Jude, and in whose name a remarkable book was written which has been lately brought to light.2

IV. The fourth original chapter begins at the ninth verse of our sixth chapter, and ends at the close of our ninth chapter (vi. 9-ix.). It contains the story of the deluge-too familiar to need even an outline here. Its numerous self-contradictions that have so bothered good people, prove to be the result. of the dove-tailing together of two separate versions of the tradition. These separate accounts can be tolerably well disentangled, and then each reads co* See Note 14 to Chapter IV.

1 See Note 13 to Chapter IV.

2

herently enough.1 The incredibilities of the story, when read as a literal history, of course do not trouble us; since the story is so plainly one of the primitive legends; and we need not puzzle our children with its perplexities. It is another great prosc-poem; in which out of the germ of a tradition of some actual flood, or possibly out of one of the oldest nature-myths, the stern moral sense of the Hebrews wove a story of divine retribution upon human sin. It, too, was probably a growth; its cruder and less ethical form being found in the very ancient tradition of a flood which we know to have been held in common among so many peoples.3 We all remember from our school-days the Greek story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, spared on account of their piety from a great deluge. Celts and Germans in Europe, and in Asia Syrians, Phoenicians, Persians, and Hindus have had similar traditions. The Chaldean legend tells of a Xisuthros, a great ruler, who was forewarned of the coming judgment by the highest god, and who took his relations and friends. with him into a great ship, together with all kinds of beasts and birds and insects, and sailed for Armenia. By sending birds out of the ship he tried the state of the earth; the birds bringing back mud on their feet the second time, and not coming back at all the third time. Whereupon Xisuthros and his

1 See Note 15 to Chapter IV. 2 Sce Note 16 to Chapter IV. See Note 17 to Chapter IV.

2

wife left the vessel, but were rapt away to the home of the gods in reward for their piety. We may feel quite sure, therefore, that our Hebrew version of the Deluge was drawn from the Chaldaic tradition; either in the original migration from Chaldea, or during the exile in Babylonia; or, more probably, at the first departure from the race home, in a rude form which was improved on their return there in later times. As we have the story, it represents a long growth. Childish notions of an early age linger on in the crude representations of Jehovah's repentance at having made man, His smelling Noah's sacrifice, etc.; expressions which afterward became sublimated by poetic feeling, until they were read as we read them, without offence. And into this legend, as into others, the Hebrews breathed their noble moral spirit; making it a graphic picture of the certain retribution following upon man's wrongdoing. To be sure, the story represents this punishment as wholly arbitrary in the form it took. For aught that the narrative shows, a fire might just as well have been sent as a flood. We correct this representation of the Divine dealing by the larger knowledge which centuries of God's education of man have bequeathed to us. He does not punish men for one class of offences by visiting them with calamities of another class in nowise connected with their wrong-doing. His punishments are

1 See Note 18 to Chapter IV. 2 See Note 19 to Chapter IV.

natural, entailed in the wrong; so that we may see the connection and learn the law in obeying which we shall be happy. He does not punish the vice and crime of New York by a tidal wave from the Atlantic. Our punishment for these wrongs comes through our taxes, through the disease that breeds in this moral and physical filth. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that the physical nature does not respond to the moral order in the punishment of wrong. The lone Campagna breathing deadly poison where once was a thriving population; the drouths coming upon our country by the selfish greed or thoughtlessness of private parties who care not for the commonwealth, and ruthlessly destroy its forests; the fearful epidemics which ravage cities and nations-tell of physical judgments as real as the Flood.1 A French Revolution and a Russian Nihilism, with their reigns of terror, are the Divine judgments working through the social order; the awful retribution coming upon the classes which have abused the trusts of power and repeated the selfish strife and fleshly lusts of the antediluvians, saying, "after us the deluge."

The thread of hopefulness in man, spun out of the thought of God, and running under the story of human degeneracy which culminates in the Flood, as told by the narrator of this chapter, issues in this last scene into light; in the beautiful and im

See Note 20 to Chapter IV.

1

pressive covenant of mercy made by Jehovah, whose sign was set in the rainbow. Other peoples have dreamed over the mystery of the lovely rainbow, and have given us charming fancies. The Hebrew saw in it-with singular fidelity to the symbolism of nature in this physical phenomenon-a sacrament of the victory of light over darkness, of the following of peace upon storm, of the working, even in the most appalling forces of disorder, of a beneficent purpose toward a beautiful order; a vision which makes us feel the inbreathings of the Spirit of Truth. Here, as elsewhere, they saw so much of spiritual truth because One was showing that truth to them -revealing or unveiling Himself.1

To this story of the Flood is appended a brief ethnological chart-a legendary account of the branches of the new humanity; which is of slight interest to us at present, whatever delight our slave-holding fathers may have taken in it, except inasmuch as it preserves a very early attempt at grouping the races of earth, and as it embalms, in the story of Noah's culture of the vine and of his fall into drunkenness and shame through it, the earliest warning on record against intemperance.2

V. The next two original chapters may be grouped together. They cover the tenth of our chapters, and the eleventh down to the twenty-seventh verse.

I

1 See Note 21 to Chapter IV.

2

See Note 22 to Chapter IV.