that I should briefly give my opinion as to what it does mean.
I conceive that the unknown author of this part of the
Hexateuchal compilation believed, and meant his readers to
believe, that his words, as they understood them--that is to
say, in their ordinary natural sense--conveyed the "actual
historical truth." When he says that such and such things
happened, I believe him to mean that they actually occurred and
not that he imagined or dreamed them; when he says "day," I
believe he uses the word in the popular sense; when he says
"made" or "created," I believe he means that they came into
being by a process analogous to that which the people whom he
addressed called "making" or "creating"; and I think that,
unless we forget our present knowledge of nature, and, putting
ourselves back into the position of a Phoenician or a Chaldaean
philosopher, start from his conception of the world, we shall
fail to grasp the meaning of the Hebrew writer. We must conceive
the earth to be an immovable, more or less flattened, body, with
the vault of heaven above, the watery abyss below and around.
We must imagine sun, moon, and stars to be "set" in a
"firmament" with, or in, which they move; and above which is yet
another watery mass. We must consider "light" and "darkness" to
be things, the alternation of which constitutes day and night,
independently of the existence of sun, moon, and stars. We must
further suppose that, as in the case of the story of the deluge,
the Hebrew writer was acquainted with a Gentile (probably
Chaldaean or Accadian) account of the origin of things, in which
he substantially believed, but which he stripped of all its
idolatrous associations by substituting "Elohim" for Ea, Anu,
Bel, and the like.