THE STORY OF THE CREATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2362, 1 June 1899, Page 56

THE STORY OF THE CREATION.

Moses and geology, (says '" Peter Abelard," in the Church. Gazette) have supplied materials for many an ingenious and elaborately worked-up tome in defence of the "impregnable rock of Holy Scripture," but the end of such attempts is in sight. We now know that God did not reveal to Moses in dream or vision or in any other superhuman way the story of the work of those days when " the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." We know now that the Biblical account of the Creation is a variant of a cosmogonical story which was circulated throughout Western Asia, and that the only useful way to try to understand it is by comparison, not with geological strata, but with any other variant of the same primitive cosmogony. It is now 25 years since Mr Geo. Smith deciphered some Creation tablets which had been unearthed by Mr Hormuzd Rassam — at least, so he says — some 'years previously, and had been lying for some years unnoticed in the British Museum. Since that* date, scholars have been at work on these tablets, and a practical agreement has been arrived at as to their contents. They appear to be part of a great epic in seven books, of each of which we have portions, except the sixth. The account they give of the Creation is longer, more mythological, and more fanciful than that given in the Bible; and it belongs, in fact, to a lower, and therefore, genealogically speaking, an earlier stratum of thought. . This account, however, bears a striking resemblance to the Biblical one. In a biographical tablet we have the Sabbath spoken of as " the day of the rest of the heart." And m a calendar now in the British Museum is a' prescript : " The seventh day is a resting day to Merodach and Zarpanit, a holy day, a Sabbath. The shepherd of mighty nations must not eat flesh cooked at the fire or in the smoke. His clothes he changes not. A washing he must not make, ne must not offer sacrifice. The king must not drive in his chariot. He must not issue royal decrees. In a secret place the augur a muttering makes not. Medicine for the sickness of his body oho must not apply. For making a curse it is not fit. In the night the king makes his freewill offering before Merodach and Ista. Sacrifice he slays. The lifting of his hand finds favour with his god. " There is this difference, however, between the two sets of records : That while the one is largely, but not entirely, polytheistic, the other is almost entirely monotheistic. I say " almost entirely," because I cannot quite forget the allusions in Genesis i. to God as plural and to Elohim, a word which if it had come to denote a unity at the time of writing, yet does seem clearly enuogh to point to an earlier use in which it denoted a plurality. The only satisfactory solution is that they are both transcripts of a common West Asian cosmogony, which in Genesis has been moulded to suit the ethical requirements of a later monotheistic creed.