The narrative then at once refers to our earth, with which, and with its inhabitants, the whole volume is to be in future directly concerned. "The earth was (or became) without form and void (chaotic), and darkness was on the face of the deep (or abyss)."
We have no positive knowledge of what the first condition of terrestrial matter was, apart from Revelation. The remarkable discoveries that the spectroscope has enabled, and the facts learned from the physical history of comets and meteorites, can do no more than make what is known as the "nebular hypothesis" highly probable. But it is amply sufficient for our purpose to point out, that if it is true that matter originated in a nebulous haze to the particles of which a spiral rotatory motion had been communicated, and if (confining our attention to one planet only) that attenuated matter gradually aggregated in a ring or rings, and then consolidated into a solid or partly solid globe, then the results are briefly, but adequately and sublimely, provided for by the form of the Mosaic statement.
Matter thus aggregating would have developed an enormous amount of heat, and there would have been a seething mass of molten mineral matters, with gases and other materials in the form of vapours, which would have gradually cooled and consolidated. Vast masses of water would in time be formed on one hand, and solid mineral masses on the other; the latter would contract as cooling progressed, causing great upheavals and depressions and contortions of strata. And before the advent of life-forms, it is not difficult to conceive that the first state of our globe was one which is intelligibly and very graphically described as being "without form and void." Nothing more than that, can, from actual physical knowledge, be stated.[[62]]
It is also stated that this confused elemental state of our earth was accompanied at first by darkness. Material darkness that is—for the potentiality of light and order was there; the SPIRIT OF GOD "moved" (or brooded) upon the face of the abyss. This presents no difficulty of interpretation, and may therefore be passed over for the present.
Practically, indeed, there has been no grave difficulty raised over this first portion. And if it is argued (on the ground of what I have already in general terms indicated) that the term "created" will, on my own interpretation, get us into difficulties, I reply that here, in its position and with the context, there is no room for doubt, for clearly the word implies both the great primary idea of the Divine design or plan formulated in heaven, and the subsequent result in time and space.[[63]] This will become more clear when I have further explained the subject.
II.—THE SECOND PART OF THE NARRATIVE.
But from this point the narrative commences to be more precise, and to exhibit a very singular and altogether unprecedented division of creative work into "days."
Now I have already indicated my doubt whether we ought to import any unusual meaning to explain this term.
In the first place, the objection that till the movements and relations of the sun to the earth were ordained there would be no measure of a day> will not stand a moment's examination. Nor will the further objection sometimes made, that even with the sun, a day is a very uncertain thing: for example, a day and a night in the north polar regions are periods of month-long duration, quite different from what they are in England, or at Mount Sinai. Obviously, a "day" with reference to the planet for which the term is used, means the period occupied by one rotation of the planet on its own axis. The rotation of the earth is antecedent to anything mentioned in the narrative we are considering. In the nature of things, it would have been coeval with the introduction of the prima materies—at least if any nebular hypothesis can be relied on. The "day" would be there whether it were obscured by vapours or not, and whether specially made countable and recognizable by what we call the rising and setting of the sun, or not, and whether we were standing in Nova Zembla or in Australia.
Nor is it of much use to refer to the general use of "day" for indefinite periods, which is just as common in the English of to-day as it was in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. But the double use of the term in different senses has become general, just because it was found in practice that no confusion ordinarily resulted; and surely such a practice would not have been common, or at any rate would have been specially avoided in the sacred volume, wherever any mistake or confusion was likely or even possible.