on hill and dale and plain." In irrigation lands like Mesopotamia it is
the combination of great heat and abundant water that makes for
luxuriant growth. Milton conceives the most romantic and wild scenery on
hill and dale and savage defile, suddenly brought into order for the use
of man. The Bible story speaks only of features to be found in a land
like Babylonia. Sir William Willcocks thinks that the word translated
"mist" would probably be better rendered "inundation," and that the
writer is speaking of a country where inundation rather than rainfall
was the support of life to the vegetable world. Genesis ii. 5 and 6
would then read:

"For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there
was not a man to till the ground.

"But there went up an inundation from the earth, and watered the whole
face of the ground."

The description of the planting of the garden is very suggestive of a
tract of bare land to which irrigation has been brought. "And _out of
the ground_ made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to
the sight." The garden, too, is watered, not by rainfall, but by a river
which parts into different heads, as do the Tigris and Euphrates when
they spread out upon the flat alluvial land below Baghdad.

Compare the "scenery" in St. John's Revelation with that of the writer
of Genesis when the kings of the earth and the great men sought to hide
from the wrath of God. They "hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks
of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and
hide us."