The Meaning of Genesis I.—III.

The Junior Lessons in the Old Testament begin in the New Zealand version with Genesis i. 1, and the first three lessons cover all the essential parts of the first three chapters of that book, which the Victorian Commissioners had perhaps more wisely reserved for a late stage in the Senior Course. The creation of the world and the human race in six days the creation of woman out of a rib of man, Eve's conversation with the serpent and her deception by him, the consequent fall of man and the loss of Paradise—such are the subjects which are to form the child's first introduction to religion. What is the meaning intended to be conveyed by the chapters from which these extracts are taken? and what meaning will the lessons convey to the mind of a child? The first of these questions cannot be answered in a way that every man or even every Christian can agree to accept; to the second one answer and only one is possible. The earliest interpreters of the first chapter of Genesis saw no occasion to look beyond the plain literal signification of the words, viz., that the world and all that therein is were made in six consecutive days. The Rabbis fixed with comfortable precision the very day of the week and the month when the process began: the Christian chronology which still figures in the margin of our Bibles marks the year as B.C. 4004; and both these schools of interpretation accepted without question the historical and scientific accuracy of the whole narrative. When the advance of geology and other sciences spread the belief that the creation of the world must be reckoned not by thousands but by millions of years, the literal interpretation of the creation story naturally lost ground to theories which either put the narrative entirely aside as a myth or a lyric poem, or reconciled it with the teachings of science by the hypothesis that the six days of the creation were not days of twenty-four hours, but geological periods of immense and uncertain duration.