this offence he was degraded from his
blessed condition, beneath a load of retributive ills. The
composition shows the characteristics of a philosopheme or a myth,
a scheme of conceptions deliberately wrought out to answer an
inquiry, a story devised to account for an existing fact or
custom. The picture of God performing his creative work in six
days and resting on the seventh, may have been drawn after the
septenary division of time and the religious separation of the
Sabbath, to explain and justify that observance. The creation of
Eve out of the side of Adam was either meant by the author as an
allegoric illustration that the love of husband and wife is the
most powerful of social bonds, or as a pure myth seeking to
explain the incomparable cleaving together of husband and wife by
the entirely poetic supposition that the first woman was taken out
of the first man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. All early
literatures teem with exemplifications of this process, a
spontaneous secretion by the imagination to account for some
presented phenomenon. Or perhaps this part of the relation
"and he called her woman [manness], because she was taken
out of man" may be an instance of those etymological myths with
which ancient literature abounds. Woman is named Isha because she
was taken out of man, whose name is Ish. The barbarous treatment
the record under consideration has received, the utter
baselessness of it in the light of truth as foundation for literal
belief, find perhaps no fitter exposure than in the fact that for
many centuries it was the prevalent faith of Christendom that
every woman has one rib more than man, a permanent memorial of the
Divine theft from his side. Unquestionably, there are many good
persons now who, if Richard Owen should tell them that man has the
same number of ribs as woman, would think of the second chapter of
Genesis and doubt his word!

There is no reason for supposing the serpent in this recital to be
intended as a representative of Satan. The earliest trace of such
an interpretation is in the Wisdom of Solomon, an anonymous and
apocryphal book composed probably a thousand years later. What is
said of the snake is the most plainly mythical of all the
portions. What caused the snake to crawl on his belly in the dust,
while other creatures walk on feet or fly with wings? Why, the
sly, winding creature, more subtle, more detestable, than any
beast of the field, deceived the first woman