they became islands in winter. As a great deal of building was done with clay, merely sundried into bricks, which easily softened with water, these great mounds were protected in various ways, and arched conduits were formed of properly burnt bricks to carry off the water and allow the foundations to dry in summer. We have a curious account on a cuneiform tablet of the condemnation of a contractor who constructed these vaulted drainage conduits with sun-dried brick, with the consequence that when the rains beat down in winter and the great floods came the conduits collapsed and the buildings were wrecked. The Babylonian idea of a sulking dragon desolating the earth and keeping it useless, void, or unfit for life, is indicated in the words used in Genesis i., 2. The Babylonian account was not that of a new creation from nothing, but a rescue of a devastated land from the deadly power of the dragon [of Winter], like Perseus and the thousand similar tales of all nations.

In Babylonia the land was, as we have seen, drowned by the winter floods, and the sun was hidden by clouds, and these conditions gave rise to the myth of Tihamat. This Tihamat, or Tehom in the Bible, is translated "waters or deep to hide its personal form. The

Genesis account admits that the earth existed, but in a devastated state; so there was no creation from nothing," but a mere "setting in order." Let us look more closely into the meaning of the words used.

The word translated was really means came to be" or "became," indicating that the Earth was not always in a chaotic state. The word in Hebrew for "without form,' Tohu, a desert or desolation, a devasted country, exactly the same as in Babylonian, and that used for void, Bohu, means null, of no value, or void as meaning worthless, a term meaning that it was formerly of worth, but now devoid of useful quality. This was the Babylonian idea when the Dragon reduced the earth from fertility to desert. The word for darkness, "Cheshek, means "to become dark," but also " misery or "calamity," and in a parallel form "Chesek" (S and Sh were identical in Hebrew) it means "to keep back," "resist," or to " sulk," describing. accurately the dark, angry, sullen face of Tehom resisting the benign influence of the Spring sun, Marduk, as told in the Babylonian accounts (see my Christianity). So the sentence in Genesis i., 2, may read :And the earth was reduced to a desert and

"a waste place, and the face of Tehom scowled with a sullen resistance," exactly the Babylonian picture.

Instead, however, of Marduk slaying the Dragon, as shown on our gold coinage and in the Psalms, Job, etc., the writer brings relief by making the fertile Queen of Heaven produce life or order out of the devastated earth. So the verse should go on, "but the mother "of the gods brooded on the water [and brought forth life], as all life comes out of the waters. (For full treatment of this Brooding," see my Christianity,

167-168.)

pp.

All this shows that the Bible, as we have it, was no piece of homogeneous literature written by an Almighty God, but a haphazard compilation of myths collected by men of literary inclinations, and when old enough to have gained gained sufficient authority, put forward as the true history and explanation as to how this world. came to be. It was reserved for a later age and alien people to put an exaggerated value on the defective text, and to put these interesting folk-lore tales forward as absolute truth. But when the most eminent professors of Church History, the Professor of the Inter

pretation of Holy Scripture in the Alma Mater of the Church, Oxford, tell us that the Hebrews "worshipped a small divine company under a supreme director," we are nearing the days of emancipation from the tyranny of ignorance.

CHAPTER VI

SIXTH STORY. FLOOD FORM OF CREATION

In the Flood story we have another ancient myth, which includes a symbolical creation story along the oldest lines (see Encyclopædia Biblica, columns 1064, 3207), in which, as it is represented, that all life comes out of the Universal Womb, Uma or Ooma, more recently Ruach, or Rkh (soul or life), finally Ark, and the original myth is told in the delightfully inconsequent childish way of all tales of the youth of the world. The opening verses are evidently, like the Tohu Bohu Tehom, Ruach verse of Genesis, a bit of the flotsam and jetsam of some fine old giant story. In old stories giants were always wicked, even modern dreamers take that view, as witness the Pilgrim's Progress of the poor tinker Bunyan; so here in chapter sixth we begin with the marvellous giants begotten by the sons of Eloi by intercourse with the beautiful daughters of men. Could anything link up more powerfully and completely the identity