in the text rather
expresses hovering or brooding than violent motion, and this better
corresponds with the old fable of the mundane egg, which seems to have
been derived from the event recorded in this verse. The more
evangelical view, which supposes the Holy Spirit to be intended, is
also more in accordance with the general scope of the Scripture
teachings on this subject; and the opposite idea is, as Calvin well
says, "too frigid" to meet with much favor from evangelical
theologians.

Chaos, the equivalent of the Hebrew "desolation and emptiness,"
figures largely in all ancient cosmogonies. That of the Egyptians is
interesting, not only from its resemblance to the Hebrew doctrine, but
also from its probable connection with the cosmogony of the Greeks.
Taking the version of Diodorus Siculus, which though comparatively
modern, yet corresponds with the hints derived from older sources, we
find the original chaos to have been an intermingled condition of
elements constituting heaven and earth. This is the Hebrew "deep." The
first step of progress is the separation of these; the fiery particles
ascending above, and not only producing light, but the revolution of
the heavenly bodies--a curious foreshadowing of the nebular hypothesis
of modern astronomy. After these, in the terms of the lines quoted by
Diodorus from Euripides, plants, birds, mammals, and finally man are
produced, not however by a direct creative fiat, but by the
spontaneous fecundity of the teeming earth. The Phoenician cosmogony
attributed to Sancuniathon has the void, the deep, and the brooding
Spirit; and one of the terms employed, "baau," is the same with the
Hebrew "bohu," void, if read without the points. The Babylonians,
according to Berosus, believed in a chaos--which, however, like the
literal-day theory of some moderns, produced many monsters before
Belus intervened to separate heaven and earth. But the Assyrian legend
found in the Nineveh tablets is very precise in its intimation of the
Chaos or _Tiamat_, the mother of all things; and, farther, it
recognizes this personified chaos as the principle of evil, whose
"dragon" becomes the tempter of the progenitors of mankind, exactly
like the Biblical serpent. This "dragon of the abyss" is thus
identical in name and function with the evil principle even of the
last book of the New Testament, and we have in this also probably the
origin of the Ahriman of the Avesta. Thus in these Eastern theologies
t