Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/479

Rh COSMOGONY 447 and value of Pliilo s work (only known from the extracts in Eusebius) have been discussed by Ewald and M. Kenan, with a tolerably satisfactory result. The latter, writing from the shores of Phoenicia, calls it &quot; the admirably faith ful mirror of that which I have under my eyes &quot; (Rev. an-hcol., iii. 172). Distorted and discoloured as the myths in Philo may be, they are such as no forger could have invented. Among them are parts of two, if not three, cosmogonies (Miiller, Fragm. Hist. Gr., iii. 505, comp. with caution Cory s Anc. Fragments, pp. 1-5). The text is here and there corrupt, and its mythic meaning obscure. Movers and Bunsen are fantastic, nor can we accept Mr Sayce s theory (Academy, March 20, 1875), though he k right in seeking for a clue in Babylonia. The first part, however, is clear, with its chaos black as Erebus, and its wind (comp. Gen. i. 2) which became enamoured of its own elements. The explanation of this is due to M. de Vogue&quot; (Melanges, pp. 60, 61). The wind is the creating deity regarded as one ; the ap^aL are the two sides or persons of the deity when analyzed. In the inscriptions we find both Baal and Tanith &quot;the Name, or Face, of Baal,&quot; i.e., the male and female principles, the conjugal union of which produced creation. In another cosmogony we meet with the woman Baau, &quot;which is interpreted Night,&quot; probably the boku,or chaos of Gun. i. 2 (a Babylonian parallel has also been found). On the whole these cosmogonies agree with the Babylonian and portions of the Hebrew, though laying a someYhat greater stress on the life-evolving power of matter (which may be due to the systematizers), and in one case (&quot; Chysor, the opener &quot; = the Egyptian demiurge Ptah) influenced from Egypt. The Semitic (and probably pre-Semitic) notion of creation by division is, however, no longer traceable. 1 Such were the myths current among the near relatives of the Israelites. But what beliefs had the Israelites them selves? The Old Testament contains three cosmogonies: Gen. L-ii. 4a; Gen. ii. 46-7; and Prov. iii. 19, 20, viii. 22-31 (with Job xv. 7, 8). Only the first is perfect. The second seems to be fragmentary, and adds but little to our knowledge. The third is poetical and speculative. All three apparently proceed from the lettered class, and have been attributed to an outburst of historic and prehis toric study in the Babylonian and Persian period. It would be too much to say that the Israelites had no cosmogony before the exile, but the probability is that it was com paratively undeveloped, and in the competition of beliefs had fallen into the background. The chief characteristic of Gen. i. is the union of two apparently inconsistent phraseo logies, the supernaturalistic and the evolutionary. Thus the pre-existence of matter seems to be asserted in vv. 2, 3. &quot;Now the earth was (i.e., was involved in) chaos [Heb. t-jhii va-bohu], and darkness was upon the face of the flood [Heb. tehom], and the wind of Elohim was hovering upon the face of the waters&quot; this describes the circumstances under which the following act took place ; &quot; then Elohim said, Let light (the condition of life) be, and light was.&quot; The writer uses language common to other cosmogonies, but strives to accommodate it to his own high type of religion. It was not, he consciously or unconsciously implies, a blind force inherent in nature, which produced the first beginnings of life, nor ,vas the Creator himself the offspring of chaos ; his demiurge was a supernatural being, whom some ortho dox commentators have identified with the Logos of laten writers, and who was from the first preparing the &quot; rude mass&quot; for its human inhabitants. The peculiar expression, &quot; the wind of Elohim was hovering,&quot; suggests different comparisons ; thus, on a far lower stage of religious pro- The writer regrets not to have received Graf Baadissin s Studien nothing to alter in the above remarks. gress, the Polynesians often describe the h-javen-and-air- god Tangaloa as a bird hovering over the waters (Wartz, vi. 241). In the earliest form of the narrative in Gen. i. it may have been &quot;the bird of Elohim;&quot; &quot;wind&quot; seems to be an interpretation. Another peculiar form of expres* siou is the creation of the light before the sun (v. 3), which may be supposed to be paralleled by similar expressions elsewhere. The Egyptian god Thoth, the demiurge, is said to have &quot; given the world light when all was darkness, and there was no sun ; &quot; and the Orphic light-god Phanes is anterior to the sun. But it is the place of a com mentator to trace similar phenomena throughout the first cosmogony, and also to exhibit the evidence of the various redactions through which the section has passed. For, as Dr Schrader (1863) and Mr R. Martineau (1868) have shown, the narrative in its original form did not divide creation into days, but merely -gave a catalogue of divine works. We need only add that the word for &quot; to create &quot; in Gen. i. originally meant &quot; to carve.&quot; The, Hellenistic Jews, it is true, took it in the sense of &quot;to create out of nothing,&quot; but many think this is not favoured by the context in Genesis. The problem of the origin of matter seems not to have arisen among the Jews of the 6th century B.C. The Egyptians have left us no ancient cosmogonical system, though speculation was early rife among them. They appear to have had three great creative deities. Ptah, &quot; the opener &quot; (of the world-egg 1), was probably the god of the cosmic fire, who prepared matter for Amen-Ra to organize. But it was to Ra that the honour of creation was chiefly ascribed (see the unsurpassable hymn in Records of the Past, ii. 129-136) to Ra, i.e., the sun-god, as the people supposed, or the anima mundi, as the priests. One of Ro. s (later) manifestations was Cknum, the divine breath which stirred the primeval waters (as in Gen. i. 2, except that Chnum is never represented as a bird), and the fashioner of gods and men (.see Records of the Past, ii. 145, and comp. Gen. ii. 7). Thoth, originally the moon-god, became the principle of creative intelligence, and with him were worshipped the eight cosmic forces called Sesennu. He is called &quot;the tongue of Ra,&quot; though elsewhere Ra himself is said to create I/ a word, and this ascription of speech to the deity is, according to M. Naville, one of the most important points in common between the Egyptian and the Hebrew cosmogonies, to be added therefore to those we&quot; have already mentioned, chaos, the divine breath, the creation of light before the sun, and the moulding hand of the deity. We hasten on to the Aryan nations of the East. The Iranian parallels to the early chapters of Genesis have been greatly exaggerated. The only really valuable ones are those contained in the Avesta, which, though the date of its final redaction is uncertain, is probably in the main earlier than the return of the Jews from Babylon. The cosmogonical parallels are (1) the ascription of creation to the will of a supernatural deity, and (2) the ideal perfection attributed to the newly created world. Yet even here some deduction is necessary. For apparently the world is produced out of pre-existent matter, according to Genesis (see above); out of nothing, according to the Avesta. And though Ahura-mazda(0rmuz&amp;lt;l) is generally described in the Avesta as the sole creator, there is an ancient passage (Yasn::, ch. xxx.) in which a good and an evil spirit are spoken of as j&amp;lt; dnt-creators. Still, in the period of Darius and Xerxes (to which the first Hebrew cosmogony in its final form probably belongs) we have the best possible evidence for the sole creatorship of Ahura-mazcla, for the great cuneiform inscription at Naksb-i-Rustam describes him as &quot;the great God of gods, who made heaven and earth, and made men, 1 and similar language occurs in the royal inscriptions at Elvend, Van, and Persepolis.
 * &amp;lt;/ semitischen Religionsgeschichte in time for this article, but finds