These were the things that, doubtless, moved the patriarchs, the holy fathers and prophets of old, to examine diligently passages of this description in order to discover what these singular forms of speech might signify, being assured that the sacred historian intended by them something peculiar and great and especially worthy of knowledge.
For if you look at the mere animal life of which Moses is here speaking, there is no difference between the man and the ass. For the animal life in both stands in need of meat and drink. It needs sleep and rest. The bodies of both grow and are fattened alike by meat and drink. And from the want of meat and drink both waste and perish alike. In both the stomach receives the food and transmits it when digested to the belly, which generates the blood, by which all the members are refreshed and restored. When we consider these things in themselves, I say, there is no difference between the man and the beast. But Moses in this place so exalts the life of man that he says of him alone of all animals, that he "became a living soul;" not a living creature or a living thing like all the beasts of the earth, but in a more exalted sense "a living soul;" and that, because he was created "in the image of God," which image there can be no doubt whatever, shone with a peculiar brightness in the countenances of Adam and Eve, while yet in their state of innocence. Hence it is that even after the sin and fall, the heathen poets, etc., concluded from the position of his body, from his upright carriage and from the elevation of his eyes to heaven, that man was a creature far more excellent than any other creature in existence.
It is to this surpassing excellency that St. Paul refers when he recites the passage before us in 1 Cor. 15:45. It is there written, "The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit." By a living soul in this passage the apostle means the animal life, which consists in eating, drinking, growing, sleeping, generating, etc.; all which are found also in brutes. But by an antithesis he says that "the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit." This is a life which needs not, and knows not, the conditions of the animal life. Paul moreover here teaches us that Adam, even if he had not sinned, would yet have lived a corporeal life; a life which would have needed meat, drink and rest; a life which would have grown, increased and generated, etc., until God should have translated him to that spiritual life, in which he would have lived without natural animality, if I may so express it; namely, a life from within, derived from God alone; and not a life from without as before, sustained by herbs and fruits. And yet he would have been a man with body and bones, etc., and not a pure spirit, as angels are.
My reply therefore to the new inquiry, above admitted, is this: God by the mouth of Moses speaking in the passage before us designed to set forth the hope of that future and eternal life which Adam, if he had continued in his innocency, would have enjoyed after this present animal life. As if Moses had said, Man became a living soul; not merely in the sense of that life which beasts live, but in the sense of that life which God afterwards designed Adam to live, even without any animal life at all. And this same hope of immortality or an immortal life, we now have through Christ. Although on account of sin we are subject to death and all kinds of calamity. But Adam's natural life, when he became a living soul, was designed to be far exalted above that which we now live since the fall. He would have lived on earth sweetly, happily and with the highest pleasure; and then would have been translated at the time determined in the mind of God, out of the animal life into the spiritual and eternal life; and that translation would have been attended with no pain or trouble whatever. Whereas we are not translated out of this animal life into the life spiritual and eternal, but by death; and that, after an infinity of evils, perils and crosses.
It was after this manner that we ought, like the holy prophets, diligently to look into all these expressions of Moses, and to inquire why it is that, with such depth of purpose and design, he speaks concerning man in terms so different from those he used when speaking of all other living creatures. The design evidently was that our faith and hope of immortality might be confirmed, and that we might be assured that although the life of man as to his animal life is like that of all other living creatures, even of brutes, yet that he possesses a hope of immortality unpossessed by, and wholly unknown to, any other living creature; that he possesses and bears the image and similitude of God, with no particle of which any other animal is dignified or favored.
And thus by a most beautiful allegory, or rather by a most excellent figure, Moses here intimates, though obscurely, that God would become incarnate. For with reference to man's differing in no respect from a sheep, as to his animal life, though created in the image and after the similitude of God; that assertion is in fact, a kind of statement by contraries, as they term it in the schools; or, according to another term of theirs, an addition by opposition. And yet as man was created in the image of the invisible God, by this sublime fact is signified in obscure figure, as we shall hereafter hear from Moses, that God would reveal himself in this world in the Man, Christ. These seeds as it were of the greatest and most marvelous things, did the prophets diligently search out and gather from the divine historian Moses.
PART II. PARADISE.
I. V. 8. And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Here rises before us a whole sea of questions concerning paradise. In the first place, the word itself, whether it be Hebrew, Chaldean or Persian, for I do not think it is Greek, though Suidas endeavors to discover a Greek origin, is rendered by the Latins hortus, "a garden." This garden, Moses says, was planted BE EDEN, in Eden. For this name of the place is not appellative or descriptive, as our translation renders it, "paradise of pleasure." EDEN does, indeed, signify pleasure or delight, and from this name of the garden is doubtless formed the Greek word adona, but the preposition being here added to it plainly proves that Eden is in this place to be taken for the proper name of a place; which is further proved by the particular description of the place, for the garden is said to have been to the eastward of it. Our translation renders it a principio, "from the beginning," which is also a bad version of the expression. For the original term is MIKKEDEM, which does not properly signify "from the beginning," but "in front," that is according to our mode of expression and meaning, "toward the East." For the original word is an adverb of place, not of time.