Let us inquire a little more in detail into the general features of these early historic notices.
For the purposes of this inquiry we may content ourselves with the consideration of the ancient Hebrew documents incorporated in the Book of Genesis, and the remains which have been preserved of the old Chaldean literature. Both of these represent an antediluvian period of long duration. [32] Both refer the primitive seats of population to the Euphratean region of Western Asia. Both terminate the antediluvian age with a great diluvial catastrophe. These are sufficient points of general agreement to make it probable that both originated in one fundamental history, or at least were based on attempts to describe the same events. Otherwise there are great differences. The Chaldean accounts have a prolix iteration, which makes it probable that they were prepared for popular and liturgic use, and may not fairly represent the original documents in possession of the priestly class. They also naturally introduce all the personnel of the Chaldean pantheon, and as this must have been a thing of gradual growth it gives them an air of recency, though we know that they are very old. The Hebrew version, on the other hand, is monotheistic, and has an aspect of severe simplicity in striking contrast to the florid and popular Chaldean version.
[32] Hommel has proved (Journal of the Society of Biblical Archæology, 1893), what has always been suspected, that the ten patriarchs of Berosus are the same with those of the Sethite line in Genesis.
We may first notice what history can tell of the palanthropic age, supposing this to be the same with that historically known as antediluvian. The account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is altogether general, and has no local colouring. It evidently refers to the whole history of the making of the earth. The second chapter, on the other hand, begins at verse 4 the special history of man, and opens with a picture which is not, as some have rashly supposed, a repetition of the previous general account of creation, and still less contradictory to it, but a statement that immediately before the introduction of man the earth had been in a desolate and comparatively untenanted state, that state to which we know it had been reduced by the glacial cold and submergence.
Thus the two accounts of the creation of man, that in which he appears in his chronological position in the general development, and that in which he takes a first place, as introductory to his special history, are not contradictory, but complementary to each other; and the latter refers wholly to man and the creatures contemporary with him in the palanthropic age. It is in accordance with this, and no doubt intended by the editor to mark this distinction, that the name Elohim is used in the general narrative, and Jehovah Elohim in the special one. The failure of so many critics to notice this distinction, which must have been so plain to the primitive historian himself, is a marked illustration of the blindness of certain nineteenth-century savants, so full of their own special knowledge, yet so careless of science and common sense.
It would even seem that this distinction appeared in the Chaldean Genesis as well; for fragments of what has been called a second Chaldean Genesis have been found which seem to correspond with the statements of the second chapter of Genesis.
The following is an extract from this second Chaldean or Akkadian Genesis as translated by Pinches: [33]
1 The glorious house, the house of the gods, in a glorious place had not been made;
2 A plant had not been brought forth, a tree had not been created;
3 A brick had not been laid, a beam had not been shaped;
4 A house had not been built, a city had not been constructed;
5 A city had not been made, a foundation had not been made glorious;
6 Niffer had not been built, Ê-kura had not been constructed;
7 Erech had not been built, Ê-ana had not been constructed;
8 The Abyss had not been made, Ê-ridu had not been constructed;
9 (As for) the glorious house, the house of the gods, its seat had not been made—
10 The whole of the lands were sea.