By Professor James Orr, D.D. United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland.
By the early narratives of Genesis are to be understood the first eleven chapters of the book - those which precede the times of Abraham. These chapters present peculiarities of their own, and I confine attention to them, although the critical treatment applied to them is not confined to these chapters, but extends throughout the whole Book of Genesis, the Book of Exodus, and the later history with much the same result in reducing them to legend.
We may begin by looking at the matter covered by these eleven chapters with which we have to deal. See what they contain. First, we have the sublime proem to the Book of Genesis, and to the Bible as a whole, in the account of the Creation in Gen. 1. However it got there, this chapter manifestly stands in its fit place as the introduction to all that follows. Where is there anything like it in all literature? There is nothing anywhere, in Babylonian legend or anywhere else. You ask perhaps what interest has religious faith in the doctrine of creation - in any theory or speculation on how the world came to be? I answer, it has the very deepest interest. The interest of religion in the doctrine of creation is that this doctrine is our guarantee for the dependence of all things on God - the ground of our assurance that everything in nature and Providence is at His disposal. “My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth.” Suppose there was anything in the universe that was not created by God - that existed independently of Him - how could we be sure that that element might not thwart, defeat, destroy the fulfillment of God’s purposes? The Biblical doctrine of creation forever excludes that supposition.
Following on this primary account of creation is a second narrative in a different style - from chapter 2 to 4 - but closely connected with the first by the words, “In the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.” This is sometimes spoken of as a second narrative of creation, and is often said to contradict the first. But this is a mistake. As the critic Dillmann points out, this second narrative is not a history of creation in the sense of the first at all. It has nothing to say of the creation of either heaven or earth, of the heavenly bodies, of the general world of vegetation. It deals simply with man and God’s dealings with man when first created, and everything in the narrative is regarded and grouped from this point of view. The heart of the narrative is the story of the temptation and the fall of man. It is sometimes said that the Fall is not alluded to in later Old Testament Scripture, and therefore cannot be regarded as an essential part of revelation. It would be truer to say that the story of the Fall, standing there at the commencement of the Bible, furnishes the key to all that follows. What is the picture given in the whole Bible - Old Testament and New? Is it not that of a world turned aside from God - living in rebellion and defiance to Him - disobedient to His calls and resisting His grace? What is the explanation of this universal apostasy and transgression if it is not that man has fallen from his first estate? For certainly this is not the state in which God made man, or wishes him to be. The truth is, if this story of the Fall were not there at the beginning of the Bible, we would require to put it there for ourselves in order to explain the moral state of the world as the Bible pictures it to us, and as we know it to be. In chapter 4, as an appendage to these narratives, there follows the story of Cain and Abel, with brief notices of the beginning of civilization in the line of Cain, and of the start of a holier line in Seth.
Next, returning to the style of Gen. 1 - what is called the “Elohistic” style - we have the genealogical line sf Seth extending from Adam to Noah. You are struck with the longevity ascribed to those patriarchal figures in the dawn of time, but not less with the constant mournful refrain which ends each notice, Enoch’s alone excepted, “and he died.” This chapter (Gen. 5.) connects directly with the account of creation in Genesis 1, but presupposes equally the narrative of the Fall in the intervening chapters. We often read in critical books assertions to the contrary of this. The “priestly writer,” we are told, “knows nothing” of a Fall. But that is not so. Wellhausen, that master-critic, is on my side here. Speaking of the so-called “priestly” sections in the story of the flood, he says, “The flood is well led up to; in ‘Q’. [that is his name for the priestly writing] we should be inclined to ask in surprise how the earth has come all at once to be so corrupted after being in the best of order. Did we not know it from ‘J’. ‘E’.? [that is, the Fall Narrative].” Another leading critical authority, Dr. Carpenter, writes in the same strain.
Then you come to the flood story in Gen. 6:9, in which two narratives are held to be interblended. There are two writers here, criticism says - the Elohistic and the Jehovistic, - yet criticism must own that these two stories fit wonderfully into one another, and the one is incomplete without the other. If one, for instance, gives the command to Noah and his house to enter the Ark, it is the other that narrates the building of the Ark. If one tells of Noah’s “house,” it is the other that gives the names of Noah’s sons. What is still more striking, when you compare these Bible stories with the Babylonian story of the deluge, you find that it takes both of these so-called “narratives” in Genesis to make up the one complete story of the tablets. Then, following on the flood and the covenant with Noah, the race of mankind spreads out again as depicted in the table of nations in chapter 10. In verse 25 it is noted that in the days of Peleg was the earth divided; then in chapter 11 you have the story of the divine judgment at Babel confusing human speech, and this is followed by a new genealogy extending to Abraham.