th, and
on the seventh day He rested, and was refreshed."

God made the sun, moon, and stars, and appointed them "for signs, and
for seasons, and for days, and years." The sun marks out the days; the
moon by her changes makes the months; the sun and the stars mark out the
seasons and the years. These were divisions of time which man would
naturally adopt. But there is not an exact number of days in the month,
nor an exact number of days or months in the year. Still less does the
period of seven days fit precisely into month or season or year; the
week is marked out by no phase of the moon, by no fixed relation between
the sun, the moon, or the stars. It is not a division of time that man
would naturally adopt for himself; it runs across all the natural
divisions of time.

What are the six days of creative work, and the seventh day--the
Sabbath--of creative rest? They are not days of man, they are days of
God; and our days of work and rest, our week with its Sabbath, can only
be the figure and shadow of that week of God; something by which we may
gain some faint apprehension of its realities, not that by which we can
comprehend and measure it.

Our week, therefore, is God's own direct appointment to us; and His
revelation that He fulfilled the work of creation in six acts or stages,
dignifies and exalts the toil of the labouring man, with his six days of
effort and one of rest, into an emblem of the creative work of God.

FOOTNOTES:

[15:1] T. N. Thiele, Director of the Copenhagen Observatory, _Theory of
Observations_, p. 1.

[16:1] T. N. Thiele, Director of the Copenhagen Observatory, _Theory of
Observations_, p. 1.

[Illustration: MERODACH AND TIAMAT.

[_To face p. 25._

Sculpture from the Palace of Assur-nazir-pel, King of Assyria. Now in
the British Museum. Damaged by fire. Supposed to represent the defeat of
Tiamat by Merodach.]

CHAPTER III

THE DEEP

The second verse of Genesis states, "And the earth was without form and
void [_i. e._ waste and empty] and darkness was upon the face of the
deep." The word _teh[=o]m_, here translated _deep_, has been used to
support the theory that the Hebrews derived their Creation story from
one which, when exiles in Babylon, they heard from their conquerors. If
this theory were substantiated, it would have such an important bearing
upon the subject of the attitude of the inspired writers towards the
objects of nature, that a little space must be