nd "reh-mes" by "creeping things."

Having taken a good deal of trouble to show what Genesis i.-ii. 4 does
not mean, in the preceding pages, perhaps it may be well that I should
briefly give my opinion as to what it does mean. I conceive that the
unknown author of this part of the Hexateuchal compilation believed,
and meant his readers to believe, that his words, as they understood
them--that is to say, in their ordinary natural sense--conveyed the
"actual historical truth." When he says that such and such things
happened, I believe him to mean that they actually occurred and not that
he imagined or dreamed them; when he says "day," I believe he uses the
word in the popular sense; when he says "made" or "created," I believe
he means that they came into being by a process analogous to that which
the people whom he addressed called "making" or "creating"; and I think
that, unless we forget our present knowledge of nature, and, putting
ourselves back into the position of a Phoenician or a Chaldaean
philosopher, start from his conception of the world, we shall fail to
grasp the meaning of the Hebrew writer. We must conceive the earth to
be an immovable, more or less flattened, body, with the vault of heaven
above, the watery abyss below and around. We must imagine sun, moon,
and stars to be "set" in a "firmament" with, or in, which they move;
and above which is yet another watery mass. We must consider "light" and
"darkness" to be things, the alternation of which constitutes day and
night, independently of the existence of sun, moon, and stars. We must
further suppose that, as in the case of the story of the deluge, the
Hebrew writer was acquainted with a Gentile (probably Chaldaean or
Accadian) account of the origin of things, in which he substantially
believed, but which he stripped of all its idolatrous associations by
substituting "Elohim" for Ea, Anu, Bel, and the like.

From this point of view the first verse strikes the keynote of the
whole. In the beginning "Elohim [11] created the heaven and the earth."
Heaven and earth were not primitive existences from which the gods
proceeded, as the Gentiles taught; on the contrary, the "Powers"
preceded and created heaven and earth. Whether by "creation" is meant
"causing to be where nothing was before" or "shaping of something which
pre-existed," seems to me to be an insoluble question.

As I have pointed out, the second verse has an interesting parallel in
Jeremiah iv. 23: