Again, If divine, the account must bear marks of human imperfection, since it was communicated through man. Ideas suggested to a human mind by the Deity would take shape in that mind according to its range of knowledge, modes of thought, and use of language, unless it were at the same time supernaturally gifted with the profound knowledge and wisdom adequate to their conception; and even then they could not be intelligibly expressed, for want of words to represent them.
The central thought of each step in the Scripture cosmogony—for example, Light,—the dividing of the fluid earth from the fluid around it, individualizing the earth,—the arrangement of its land and water,—vegetation,—and so on—is brought out in the simple and natural style of a sublime intellect, wise for its times, but unversed in the depths of science which the future was to reveal. The idea of vegetation to such a one would be vegetation as he knew it; and so it is described. The idea of dividing the earth from the fluid around it would take the form of a dividing from the fluid above, in the imperfect conceptions of a mind unacquainted with the earth’s sphericity and the true nature of the firmament,—especially as the event was beyond the reach of all ordinary thought.
Objections are often made to the word “day,”—as if its use limited the time of each of the six periods to a day of twenty-four hours. But in the course of the document this word “day” has various significations, and, among them, all that are common to it in ordinary language. These are—(1) The light,—“God called the light day,” v. 5; (2) the “evening and the morning” before the appearance of the sun; (3) the “evening and the morning” after the appearance of the sun; (4) the hours of light in the twenty-four hours (as well as the whole twenty-four hours), in verse 14; and (5) in the following chapter, at the commencement of another record of creation, the whole period of creation is called a “day.” The proper meaning of “evening and morning,” in a history of creation, is beginning and completion; and, in this sense, darkness before light is but a common metaphor.
A Deity working in creation like a day-laborer by earth-days of twenty-four hours, resting at night, is a belittling conception, and one probably never in the mind of the sacred penman. In the plan of an infinite God, centuries are required for the maturing of some of the plants with which the earth is adorned.
The order of events in the Scripture cosmogony corresponds essentially with that which has been given. There was first a void and formless earth: this was literally true of the “heavens and the earth,” if they were in a condition of a gaseous fluid. The succession is as follows:
(1.) Light.
(2.) The dividing of the waters below from the waters above the earth, (the word translated waters may mean fluid.)
(3.) The dividing of the land and water on the earth.
(4.) Vegetation; which Moses, appreciating the philosophical characteristic of the new creation distinguishing it from previous inorganic substances, defines as that “which has seed in itself.”
(5.) The sun, moon, and stars.
(6.) The lower animals, those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land.