Do Life, Truth, and Love produce death, error, and hatred? Does the Creator condemn His own creation? Does the unerring Principle of divine law change or repent? It cannot be so. Yet one might so judge, from an unintelligent perusal of the subsequent account now under comment.
It may be worth while here to remark that, according to the best scholars, there are clear evidences of two distinct documents in the early part of the Book of Genesis. One is called the Elohistic, because the Supreme Being is therein called Elohim. The other document is called the Jehovistic, because Deity therein is always called Jehovah, — or Lord God, as our common version translates it. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis, and in three verses of the second, — in what I call the spiritually scientific account of creation, — it is Elohim (God) who creates. From the fourth verse of chapter two to chapter five, the Creator is called Jehovah, or the Lord. Later on the different accounts become more and more closely intertwined, to the end of chapter twelve, after which the distinction is not definitely traceable. In the historic parts of the Old Testament it is usually Jehovah who is referred to as peculiarly the divine sovereign of the Hebrew people.
The idolatry that followed this material mythology is seen in the Phœnician worship of Baal, in the Moabitish god Chemosh, in the Moloch of the Amorites, in the Hindoo Vishnu, in the Greek Aphrodite, and in a thousand other so-called deities. It is found among the Israelites also, who constantly went after “strange gods.” They called the Supreme Being by the national name of Jehovah. In that name of Jehovah, or Lord, the true
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