Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended to Spitzbergen.
Verse 15. "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."
Here follows the injunction that "the man whom God had formed," (for he is not yet called Adam--the Adami--the people of Ad,) should not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.
And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man, "male and female"; and here we have him making woman over again from man's rib.
Verse 25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the Drift.
Then follows the appearance of the serpent. Although represented in the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world--the dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil. And as such he is regarded by the theologians.
He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we
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