e relationship to the Zendavesta which tells how
Ahriman, the old Serpent, beguiled the first pair into sin and
misery. These correspondences, and also that between the tree of
life and the Zoroastrian plant hom, which gives life and will
produce the resurrection, are certainly striking. Buttmann sees in
God's declaration to Adam, "Behold, I have given you for food
every herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is fruit bearing
seed," traces of a prohibition of animal food. This was not the
vestige of a Hebrew usage, but the vegetarian tradition of some
sect eschewing meat, a tradition drawn from South Asia, whence the
fathers of the Hebrew race came.5 Gesenius says, "Many things in
this narrative were drawn from older Asiatic tradition." 6 Knobel
also affirms that numerous matters in this relation were derived
from traditions of East Asian nations.7 Still, it is not necessary
to suppose that the writer of the account in Genesis borrowed any
thing from abroad. The Hebrew may as well have originated such
ideas as anybody else. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the
Chaldeans, the Persians, the Etruscans, have kindred narratives
held as most ancient and sacred.8 The Chinese, the Sandwich
Islanders, the North American Indians, also have their legends of
the origin and altered fortunes of the human race. The
resemblances between many of these stories are better accounted
for by the intrinsic similarities of the subject, of the mind, of
nature, and of mental action, than by the supposition of
derivation from one another.

Regarding the Hebrew narrative as an indigenous growth, then, how
shall we explain its origin, purport, and authority? Of course we
cannot receive it as a miraculous revelation conveying infallible
truth. The Bible, it is now acknowledged, was not given in the
providence

3 Tuch, Kommentar uber Genesis, s. xcviii.

4 Zur altesten Sagenpoesie des Orients. Zeitschrift der deutschen
Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, band viii. ss. 772-779.

5 Mythologus, (Schopfung and Sundenfall, ) band i. s. 137.

6 Article "Adam," in Encyclopadia by Ersch and Gruber.

7 Die Genesis erklart, s. 28.

8 Palfrey's Academical Lectures, vol. ii. pp. 21-28.

of God to teach astronomy, geology, chronology, and the operation
of organic forces, but to help educate men in morality and piety.
It is a religious, not a scientific, work. Some unknown Hebrew
poet, in the early dawn of remembered time, knowing little
metaphysics a