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that such a coincidence should be accidental; and the question comes to be whether the Assyriologists or the biblical critics can produce the most convincing explanation of it. Now Hommel (AOD, 26 ff.) argues that if the word for Man is preceded by two others, these others must have been names of superhuman beings; and he thinks that his interpretation of the Bab. names bears out this anticipation. The first, Aruru, is the creative earth-goddess, and the second, Adapa (= Marduk) is a sort of Logos or Demiurge—a being intermediate between gods and men, who bears elsewhere the title zir amiluti ('seed of mankind') but is not himself a man. And the same thing must, he considers, hold good of Adam and Seth: Adam should be read, a personification of the earth, and Seth is a mysterious semi-divine personality who was regarded even in Jewish tradition as an incarnation of the Messiah. If these somewhat hazardous combinations be sound, then, of course, the inference must be accepted that the Sethite genealogy is dependent on the Bab. original of Berossus, and the Cainite can be nothing but a mutilated version of it. It is just conceivable, however, that the Bab. list is itself a secondary modification of a more primitive genealogy, which passed independently into Heb. tradition. VI. 1-4.—The Origin of the Nĕphîlîm.

This obscure and obviously fragmentary narrative relates how in the infancy of the human race marriage alliances were believed to have been formed by supernatural beings with mortal women (vv.$25f.$); and how from these unnatural unions there arose a race of heroes or demi-gods (v.$2$), who must have figured largely in Hebrew folklore. It is implied, though not expressly said, that the existence of such beings, intermediate between the divine and the human, introduced