The Early Narratives of Genesis 93 brought into comparison with the narratives of the Bible. Little need be said of the Babylonian creation story. It is a debased, polytheistic, long-drawn-out, mythical affair, with- out order, only here and there suggesting analogies to the divine works in Genesis. The flood story has much more resemblance, but it too is debased and mythical, and lacks wholly in the higher ideas which give its character to the Biblical account. Yet this is the quarry from which our criti- cal friends would have us derive the narratives in the Bible. The Israelites borrowed them, it is thought, and purified these confused polytheistic legends and made them the vehicles of nobler teaching. We need not discuss the time and manner of this borrowing, for I cannot see my way to accept this version of events at all. There is not only no proof that these stories were borrowed in their crude form from the Baby- lonians, but the contrast in spirit and character between the Babylonians’ products and the Bible’s seems to me to forbid any such derivation. The debased form may conceivably arise from corruption of the higher, but not vice versa. Much rather may we hold with scholars like Delitzsch and Kittel, that the relation is one of cognateness, not of derivation. These traditions came down from a much older source, and are preserved by the Hebrews in their purer form. This appears to me to explain the phenomena as no theory of derivation can do, and it is in accordance with the Bible’s own representation of the line of revelation from the begin- ning along which the sacred tradition can be transmitted. Leaving Babylonia, I must now say a few words on the Scientific and historical aspects of these narratives. Science is invoked to prove that the narratives of creation in Genesis 1, the story of man’s origin and fall in chapters 2 and 3, the account of patriarchal longevity in chapters 5 and 11, the story of the deluge, and other matters, must all be rejected because in patent contradiction to the facts of modern knowl- edge. I would ask you, however, to suspend judgment until
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