Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/43

 arranged and constant progress,” or “a genetic advance,” since the stars are not intermediate links between plants and animals, and, in fact, have no place at all in the scale of earthly creatures. If we pass on to the contents of our account of the creation, they differ as widely from all other cosmogonies as truth from fiction. Those of heathen nations are either hylozoistical, deducing the origin of life and living beings from some primeval matter; or pantheistical, regarding the whole world as emanating from a common divine substance; or mythological, tracing both gods and men to a chaos or world-egg. They do not even rise to the notion of a creation, much less to the knowledge of an almighty God, as the Creator of all things. Note: According to Berosus and Syncellus, the Chaldean myth represents the “All” as consisting of darkness and water, filled with monstrous creatures, and ruled by a woman, Markaya, or ̔Ομόρωκα (? Ocean). Bel divided the darkness, and cut the woman into two halves, of which he formed the heaven and the earth; he then cut off his own head, and from the drops of blood men were formed. - According to the Phoenician myth of Sanchuniathon, the beginning of the All was a movement of dark air, and a dark, turbid chaos. By the union of the spirit with the All, Μώτ, i.e., slime, was formed, from which every seed of creation and the universe was developed; and the heavens were made in the form of an egg, from which the sun and moon, the stars and constellations, sprang. By the heating of the earth and sea there arose winds, clouds and rain, lightning and thunder, the roaring of which wakened up sensitive beings, so that living creatures of both sexes moved in the waters and upon the earth. In another passage Sanchuniathon represents Κολπία (probably פּיח קול, the moaning of the wind) and his wife Βάαυ ( bohu) as producing Αὶών and πρωτόγονος, two mortal men, from whom sprang Γένος and Γενεά, the inhabitants of Phoenicia. - It is well known from Hesiod's theogony how the Grecian myth represents the gods as coming into existence at the same time as the world. The numerous inventions of the Indians, again, all agree in this, that they picture the origin of the world as an emanation from the absolute, through Brahma's thinking, or through the contemplation of a primeval being called Tad (it). - Buddhism also acknowledges no God as creator of the world, teaches no creation, but simply describes the origin of the world and the beings that inhabit it as the necessary consequence of former acts performed by these beings themselves. Even in the Etruscan and Persian myths, which correspond so remarkably to the biblical account that they must have been derived from it, the successive acts of creation are arranged according to the suggestions of human probability and adaptation. In contrast