spared for its
examination.

The purpose of the first chapter of Genesis is to tell us that--

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

From it we learn that the universe and all the parts that make it
up--all the different forms of energy, all the different forms of
matter--are neither deities themselves, nor their embodiments and
expressions, nor the work of conflicting deities. From it we learn that
the universe is not self-existent, nor even (as the pantheist thinks of
it) the expression of one vague, impersonal and unconscious, but
all-pervading influence. It was not self-made; it did not exist from all
eternity. It is not God, for God made it.

But the problem of its origin has exercised the minds of many nations
beside the Hebrews, and an especial interest attaches to the solution
arrived at by those nations who were near neighbours of the Hebrews and
came of the same great Semitic stock.

From the nature of the case, accounts of the origin of the world cannot
proceed from experience, or be the result of scientific experiment. They
cannot form items of history, or arise from tradition. There are only
two possible sources for them; one, Divine revelation; the other, the
invention of men.

The account current amongst the Babylonians has been preserved to us by
the Syrian writer Damascius, who gives it as follows:--

"But the Babylonians, like the rest of the Barbarians, pass
over in silence the one principle of the Universe, and they
constitute two, Tavthe and Apason, making Apason the husband
of Tavthe, and denominating her "the mother of the gods." And
from these proceeds an only-begotten son, Mumis, which, I
conceive, is no other than the intelligible world proceeding
from the two principles. From them also another progeny is
derived, Lakhe and Lakhos; and again a third, Kissare and
Assoros, from which last three others proceed, Anos and
Illinos and Aos. And of Aos and Dakhe is born a son called
Belos, who, they say, is the fabricator of the world."[26:1]

The actual story, thus summarized by Damascius, was discovered by Mr.
George Smith, in the form of a long epic poem, on a series of tablets,
brought from the royal library of Kouyunjik, or Nineveh, and he
published them in 1875, in his book on _The Chaldean Account of
Genesis_. None of the tablets were perfect; and of some only very small
portions remain. But portions of oth