created from the face of the ground." The Elohist says (vi. 13): "The
earth is filled with violence through them, and behold I will destroy
them with the earth." In the ninth verse of the sixth chapter we read:
"Noah was a righteous man and perfect in his generations; Noah walked
with Elohim." In the first verse of the seventh chapter, we read, "And
Jehovah said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for
thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation." These
repetitions show how the same story is twice told. But the
contradictions are more significant. Here the one narrative represents
Elohim as saying (vi. 19): "And of every living thing of all flesh, two
of every kind shalt thou bring into the ark to keep them alive with
thee; they shall be male and female. Of the fowl after their kind and of
the cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after
its kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee to keep them alive."
But the other narrative represents Jehovah as saying, "Of every clean
beast thou shalt take to thee seven and seven, the male and the female;
and of the beasts that are not clean, two, the male and the female; of
the fowl also of the air seven and seven, male and female, to keep seed
alive upon the face of all the earth." The one story says that of every
kind of living creature one pair should be taken into the ark; the other
says that of _clean_ beasts, seven pairs of each species should be
received, and of unclean beasts only one pair. The harmonists have
wrestled with this passage also; some of them say that perhaps the first
passage only meant that they should _walk in_ two and two; others
say that a good many years had elapsed between the giving of the two
commands (of which there is not a particle of evidence), and we are left
to infer that in the mean time the Almighty either forgot his first
orders, or else changed his mind. It is a pitiful instance of an attempt
to evade a difficulty that cannot be evaded. One of the very
conservative commentators, Dr. Perowne, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary,"