Language does not admit of using this mode
of expression in any other sense; and whenever such an expression is
found anywhere, it can only be understood in the sense in which only it
could have been used.

The passage, therefore, that I have quoted--that "these are the kings
that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children
of Israel," could only have been written after the first king began to
reign over them; and consequently that the book of Genesis, so far from
having been written by Moses, could not have been written till the time
of Saul at least. This is the positive sense of the passage; but the
expression, any king, implies more kings than one, at least it implies
two, and this will carry it to the time of David; and, if taken in
a general sense, it carries itself through all times of the Jewish
monarchy.

Had we met with this verse in any part of the Bible that professed to
have been written after kings began to reign in Israel, it would have
been impossible not to have seen the application of it. It happens then
that this is the case; the two books of Chronicles, which give a history
of all the kings of Israel, are professedly, as well as in fact, written
after the Jewish monarchy began; and this verse that I have quoted,
and all the remaining verses of Genesis xxxvi. are, word for word, In 1
Chronicles i., beginning at the 43d verse.

It was with consistency that the writer of the Chronicles could say as
he has said, 1 Chron. i. 43, "These are the kings that reigned in Edom,
before there reigned any king ever the children of Israel," because he
was going to give, and has given, a list of the kings that had reigned
in Israel; but as it is impossible that the same expression could have
been used before that period, it is as certain as any thing can be
proved from historical language, that this part of Genesis is taken from
Chronicles, and that Genesis is not so old as Chronicles, and probably
not so old as the book of Homer, or as AEsop's Fables; admitting Homer
to have been, as the tables of chronology state, contemporary with
David or Solomon, and AEsop to have lived about the end of the Jewish
monarchy.

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which
only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there
remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and
traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. The stor