a high religious meaning to the
author, is clear from the following: The account in Genesis I, 1-24,
belongs to that series of parts of the Pentateuch which we call the
original, and which has the Sinaitical Law as the centre of its belief. The
division of the days into weeks, each having six working days and one day
of rest, which possibly existed before, but which received obligatory
importance to Israel first by the Sinaitical legislation, so far controls
that account of the creation of the world that, next to the sublime
perception of the dignity and position of man, it forms its very
quintessence. The account makes that divine week of creation, with its six
working days and its divine day of rest, the divine prototype and model for
the human division of time; and the Decalogue also, in the conception which
it has in Exodus XX, directly bases the commandment of the Sabbath on the
divine week of creation. Now, if we suppose that the author took these days
as earthly days of twenty-four hours, we are first of all obliged to reject
as a child-like error the idea on which from _religious_ {297} reasons--not
from reasons of a mystical idea of God, but from direct practical religious
reasons--he puts great importance; an idea with which he establishes an
institution of human life which has been preserved through many thousands
of years and is still preserved as the exceedingly blissful basis of all
social life. For that the creation of the world, from the beginning of
things up to the appearance of man, demanded more than six times
twenty-four hours, is beyond any doubt. Moreover, we should be obliged to
reject the arguments of such a central religious custom as Sabbath-rest in
a record in which we have to assign an absolute and lasting religious value
to all other religious elements of it, as to the ideas of the unity,
omnipotence, and wisdom of God, of his creation through the creative word,
of the perfection of his works, of man bearing the image of God. We should
even see that idea of God which presents itself to us out of all other
characteristics of that record in such spotless purity and sublime
magnitude, sink down to a decided insignificance through the identification
of the divine days of creation with our earthly days of twenty-four hours.
All this certainly brings near to us the question: do we make a correct
exegesis, do we correctly _read_ that record, when we think that the
author, because he speaks of days, m