Jesus Christ, and thus the fifth day is brought to an end; now begins the sixth in
64 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees heaven. What after all more manifestly signifies the splendors of kingship than the majesty of the sun? And the splendor of the moon indicates the people complying with the royal authority like the synagogue itself, and the stars repre sent its leaders, and all of them on the stable foundation of the kingdom, as in the solid structure of heaven. The kind ofevening of this age occurs in the sins of the kings, for which that nation deserved to be taken into captivity and enslaved.
The fifth age
39. And the morning is made with the exile in Babylon, when by that captivity the people was gently set down to have a holiday abroad." And this age reaches as far as the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; being the fifth age, it marks the long slope down from youth to old age;36 not yet old age, but no longer youth; the age of the older man, whom the Greeks call apresbytes; for an old man is called by them a geron, not a presbytes. And in very truth that is how this age sloped down in decline from the muscular vigor of the kingdom, and was enfeebled in the Jewish people, in the way a man grows older from his youth.
And it is suitably compared with that fifth day, on which the animals were made in the waters, and the flying things of heaven, after those people started to live among the Gentile nations as in the sea, and to have an unsettled and unstable residence, like flying birds. But clearly there were also great whales there, that is, those great men who were able to dominate the stormy waves of the world rather than submit to the slavery of that captivity. You see, they were not corrupted by any terror into worshiping idols. Here one should certainly notice that God blessed those animals, saying lncrease and multiply andfill the waters of the sea, and let theflying things multiply upon the earth (Gn 1 :22), because in fact the Jewish nation did multiply very much from the time when it was scat tered among the nations. The kind of evening of this day, that is, of this age, comes with the multiplication of sins among the Jewish people, which so blinded them that they were even unable to recognize the Lord Jesus Christ.
The sixth age
40. Morning though is made from the preaching of the gospel by our Lord Jesus Christ, and thus the fifth day is brought to an end; now begins the sixth in which the age of the old man (Eph 4:22; Col 3:9) becomes evident. In this age, you see, that kingdom of the flesh has been thoroughly worn down, when not only was the temple demolished but the very sacrifices came to an end; and now that nation, as far as the authority of its kingdom goes, is dragging out as it were
35. Set down inperegrino otio in the Latin; literally "in foreign leisure"—which is what holidays abroad, so much the vogue nowadays, are presumably meant to be. 36. Latin had no word or phrase for "middle age," whereas Greek, it seems, was able to make that useful distinction between middle and old age.