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The first narrative commences, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth": and then follows the detail of God's work through the six days of creation, concluding with His rest on the Sabbath of the seventh. This carries us to the third verse of the second chapter. But with the fourth verse we make a new commencement. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created": words which appear to refer solely to what follows them, and to contain no recognition of the narrative which has just preceded. This second account traverses a new and more deeply interesting field, as far as the end of the fourth chapter. But with the fifth chapter again we seem to encounter a third commencement: "This is the book of the generations of Adam"; a clause which is followed up, after a very brief summary of creation containing no direct allusion to the fall, by the genealogy of the earliest line of Patriarchs.

1. The first chapter, as contrasted with the others, relates especially to the physical aspect of creation. It deals more with powers than with persons: more with the establishment of law, than with the gift of will.

2. But the second narrative at once enters on the moral record. Man is now charged with personal duties, and holds individual relations to the Personal Jehovah. There is a moral law, a moral probation, a punishment which it would need a moral principle to understand. While man's dominion is defined and explained, as the beasts are summoned to their master to receive their names, yet he is taught that he must obey as well as rule: that if he is higher than the brute creation, there is a law, again, which is higher than himself; which he cannot break without descending from his sovereignty, and submitting to the forfeiture of death. And then follows the minute history of his fatal trial, fall, expulsion from Eden. To this division belongs the whole fourth chapter, which does but lead us from that point of expulsion, through the original quarrel between Abel and Cain, up to the actual establishment of a Church, and the consequent establishment, by exclusion, of an ungodly world, when men began to call upon the name of Jehovah, and so again to recognize a personal God.

3. Then this scene also closes. It had unveiled relations which exist upon this world no longer. It had spoken of higher communion, and of purer glory, than the fallen mind can maintain, or than the eyes of the fallen can behold. Adam now stands only as the highest term in these our mortal genealogies. There is no further notice of the innocence which he had lost; of that open intercourse with God which he had forfeited; of the mode in which sin had found an entrance into this world; of the establishment of a Church, as defining and completing the separation, between those who were satisfied with their evil, and those who were struggling to recover their good. And this is the account of creation, which especially connects it with our present history.

(1) The object of revelation is to deal with man's moral and religious, but not with his material interests. It is obvious, therefore, that the physical account of creation must come first, though it was not necessary that we should be told more about it than would be sufficient to mark man's precise place in the creation, of which he forms so prominent a part. This, and no more than this, is the duty discharged by the first of these narratives. Next, the necessity of explaining how man fell, that is, how God's image came to be defaced, how man's eye came to be darkened, and his will corrupted, governs the arrangement of the second narrative. This is pursued simply to its natural completion; and then it gives place to the record of succeeding history. No order could be more perfect, none could more accurately follow out the very course which a clear view of the needs of the narrative would have led us to anticipate, than the precise order in which these chapters are arranged.

(2) The same is evident if we regard the subject from the other side. God's revelations of Himself have always been gradual. Ever since the fall this has been the law of His communications. We can trace it throughout the sacred records, through every point in which the Old Testament furnished any type or prophecy or symbol which had to wait for its explanation in the New. Now the Divine names which are used in these chapters furnish the strongest confirmation of the account which I have given, and of the propriety of the order on which the record proceeds. In the first narrative, the Creator describes Himself only as Elohim, that is, God. We can conceive that He might even here have been spoken of as Jehovah. He bears that name in other parts of Scripture in reference to this very act of creation: and the nearest name, when we know it, must surely be applicable even to His grandest operations. But the name of power, rather than the name of individuality, seems to have been intentionally chosen, for the very same reason that placed first the merely physical narrative of creation, and thus gradually introduced us to the moral attributes of God. In the next section, in perfect conformity with what might have been looked for, we read of Jehovah, the Lord: or rather we find the compound expression, Jehovah Elohim, the Lord God. The Personal Jehovah appears to us, with all His moral attributes, as soon as the personal Adam is disclosed. But that man may no more doubt His power than His goodness, the name of creation is retained, in combination with this nearer and more personal name.

(Archdeacon Hannah.)

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KJV: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

WEB: The heavens and the earth were finished, and all their vast array.