no covering."

The word _Rephaim_ here has been variously rendered "shades of the
dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of
certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.)
inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here
refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian
giants.[106]

It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of
the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an
eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the
record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken
into Noah's ark, but only a selection, the character of which is
clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given
in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer
tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting
of the ark, the disappearance of all visible shore, and the sounding
fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of
the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties
have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a
historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a
contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler
of the book.

After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the
Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their
alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political
scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian
nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men
would anticipate from that wide dispersion of the human race that
appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circumstances
of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or
tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of
union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the
race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The
attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and
thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked,
carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which
perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of Assyria and Babylon and
the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the
New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first