to be inconsistent with a six days' creation, and also with the view that the seventh was a day of rest; hence in ch. 2, he deletes 2b and 3b, and reads simply: "and God finished His work which He made on the seventh day, and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it."—This theory has been subjected to a searching criticism by Bu. (Urgesch. 487 ff.; cf. also Di. 15), who rightly protests against the subsuming of the creation of heaven and that of land and sea under one rubric as a 'separation of waters,' and gets rid of the difficulty presented by 22a by reading sixth instead of seventh (see on the verse). Bu. urges further that the idea of the Sabbath as a day on which work might be done is one not likely to have been entertained in the circles from which the Priestly Code emanated,[1] and also (on the ground of Ex. 2011) that the conception of a creation in six days followed by a divine Sabbath rest must have existed in Israel long before the age of that document.—It is to be observed that part of Bu.'s argument (which as a whole seems to me valid against the specific form of the theory advanced by We.) only pushes the real question a step further back; and Bu. himself, while denying that the seven days' scheme is secondary to P, agrees with Ew. Di. and many others in thinking that there was an earlier Hebrew version of the cosmogony in which that scheme did not exist.
The improbability that a disposition of the cosmogony in eight works should have obtained currency in Hebrew circles without an attempt to bring it into some relation with a sacred number has been urged in favour of the originality of the present setting (Holzinger, 23 f.). That argument might be turned the other way; for the very fact that the number 8 has been retained in spite of its apparent arbitrariness suggests that it had some traditional authority behind it. Other objections to the originality of the present scheme are: (a) the juxtaposition of two entirely dissimilar works under the third day; (b) the separation of two closely related works on the second and third days; (c) the alternation of day and night introduced before the existence of the planets by which their sequence is regulated (thus far Di. 15), and (d) the unnatural order of the fourth and fifth works (plants before heavenly bodies). These objections are not all of equal weight; and explanations more or less plausible have been given of all of them. But on the whole the evidence seems to warrant the conclusions: that the series of works and the series of days are fundamentally incongruous, that the latter has been superimposed on the former during the Heb. development of the cosmogony, that this change is responsible for some of the irregularities of the disposition, and that it was introduced certainly not later than P, and in all probability long before his time.
Source and Style.—As has been already hinted, the section belongs
to the Priestly Code (P). This is the unanimous opinion of all critics
who accept the documentary analysis of the Hexateuch, and it is
abundantly proved both by characteristic words and phrases, and
general features of style. Expressions characteristic of P are (besides
the divine name (
Hebrew characters)): (Hebrew characters) (see on v.1), (Hebrew characters) 27, (Hebrew characters)
- ↑ See Jerome's polemical note, in Quæst., ad loc.
