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1. THE POINT OF VIEW FROM WHICH THE BIBLE CONTEMPLATES THE WORK OF CREATION.
It
is a significant thing that the narrative of creation, while it mentions the creation of the
heavens, devotes no further attention to the spiritual world. It concerns the material world
only, and represents this primarily as the habitation of man and as the theater of his activities.
It deals not with unseen realities such as spirits, but with the things that are seen. And because
these things are palpable to the human senses, they come up for discussion, not only in
theology, but also in other sciences and in philosophy. But while philosophy seeks to
understand the origin and nature of all things by the light of reason, theology takes its starting
point in God, allows itself to be guided by His special revelation respecting the work of creation,
and considers everything in relation to Him. The narrative of creation is the beginning of God’s
self-revelation, and acquaints us with the fundamental relation in which everything, man
included, stands to Him. It stresses the original position of man, in order that men of all ages
might have a proper understanding of the rest of Scripture as a revelation of redemption. While
it does not pretend to give us a complete philosophical cosmogony, it does contain important
elements for the construction of a proper cosmogony.
2. THE ORIGIN OF THE ACCOUNT OF CREATION.
The question as to the origin of the narrative
of creation has been raised repeatedly, and the interest in it was renewed by the discovery of
the Babylonian story of creation. This story, as it is known to us, took shape in the city of
Babylon. It speaks of the generation of several gods, of whom Marduk proves supreme. He only
was sufficiently powerful to overcome the primeval dragon Tiamat, and becomes the creator of
the world, whom men worship. There are some points of similarity between the narrative of
creation in Genesis and this Babylonian story. Both speak of a primeval chaos, and of a division
of the waters below and above the firmament. Genesis speaks of seven days, and the
Babylonian account is arranged in seven tablets. Both accounts connect the heavens with the
fourth epoch of creation, and the creation of man with the sixth. Some of these resemblances
are of little significance, and the differences of the two accounts are far more important. The
Hebrew order differs on many points from the Babylonian. The greatest difference is found,
however, in the religious conceptions of the two. The Babylonian account, in distinction from
that of Scripture, is mythological and polytheistic. The gods do not stand on a high level, but
scheme and plot and fight. And Marduk succeeds only after a prolonged struggle, which taxes
his strength, in overcoming the evil forces and reducing chaos to order. In Genesis, on the other
hand, we encounter the most sublime monotheism, and see God calling forth the universe and
all created things by the simple word of His power. When the Babylonian account was
discovered, many scholars hastily assumed that the Biblical narrative was derived from the
Babylonian source, forgetting that there are at least two other possibilities, namely, (a) that the
Babylonian story is a corrupted reproduction of the narrative in Genesis; or (b) that both are
derived from a common, more primitive, source. But however this question may be answered,