[32] McDonald, "Creation and the Fall."
[33] Literally, "ages" or "time-worlds," as they have been called.
[34] Genesis i., 8, 26-28.
[35] Job xxxviii., 37.
[36] Gen. i., 14; Deut. xvii., 3.
[37] Gen. xxviii., 17; Job xv., 15; Psa. ii., 4.
[38] Not "created," as some read. The verb is kana, not bara.
[39] The usual Septuagint rendering is Abyssus.
[40] Smith, "Assyrian Genesis." Brasseur de Bourbourg's translation of the "Popol Vuh" of the ancient Central American Indians.
[41] It is impossible to avoid recognizing in the Greek Theogony, as it appears in Hesiod and the Orphic poems, an inextricable intermingling of a cosmogony akin to that of Moses with legendary stories of deceased ancestors; and this has, I must confess, always appeared to me to be a more rational way of accounting for it than its reference to mere nature-myths. Chaos, or space, for the chaos of Hesiod differs from that of Ovid, came first, then Gaea, the earth, and Tartarus, or the lower world. Chaos gave birth to Erebos (identical with the Hebrew Ereb or Erev, evening) and Nyx, or night. These again give birth to Aether, the equivalent of the Hebrew expanse or firmament, and to Hemera, the day, and then the heavenly bodies were perfected. So far the legend is apparently based on some primitive history of creation, not essentially different from that of the Bible. But the Greek Theogony here skips suddenly to the human period; and under the fables of the marriage of Gaea and Uranos, and the Titans, appears to present to us the antediluvian world, with its intermarriages of the sons of God and men, and its Nephelim or Giants, with their mechanic arts and their crimes. Beyond this, in Kronos and his three sons, and in the strange history of Zeus, the chief of these, we have a coarse and fanciful version of the story of the family of Noah, the insult offered by Ham to his father, and the subsequent quarrels and dispersion of mankind. The Zeus of Homer appears to be the elder of the three, or Japheth, the real father of the Greeks, according to the Bible; but in the time of Hesiod Zeus was the youngest, perhaps indicating that the worship of the Egyptian Zeus, Ammon or Ham, had already supplanted among the Greeks that of their own ancestor. But it is curious that even in the Bible, though Japhet is said to be the greater, he is placed last in the lists. After the introduction of Greek savans and literati to Egypt, about B.C. 660, they began to regard their own mythology from this point of view, though obliged to be reserved on the subject. The cosmology of Thales, the astronomy of Anaxagoras, and the history of Herodotus afford early evidence of this, and it abounds in later writers. I may refer the reader to Grote (History of Greece, vol. i.) for an able and agreeable summary of this subject; and may add that even the few coincidences above pointed out between Greek mythology and the Bible, independently of the multitudes of more doubtful character to be found in the older writers on this subject, appear very wonderful, when we consider that among the Greeks these vestiges of primitive religion, whether brought with them from the East or received from abroad, must have been handed down for a long time by oral tradition among the people; but obscure though they may be, the circumstance that some old writers have ridden the resemblances to death affords no excuse for the prevailing neglect of them in more modern times.