place somewhere or other, or was it called one spring as being a kind of single
288 The Literal Meaning of Genesis
Egypt and then at another time returns to its bed. Or if this stream is thought to collect its annual flood waters from the rains and winter snows of heaven knows what unknown and distant part of the world, what can be said about the alter nating tides of Ocean, what about some shores which are laid bare for a great distance at the ebb, and covered again by the waves at the flood? To say nothing of what we are told about the wonderful variations in the flow of some springs, which every few years at a fixed time overflow and water the whole countryside, for which at other times they scarcely provide enough drinking water from deep wells. So why should it be incredible, if from one outlet of the abyss, alternately pouring out and sucking back its waters, the entire earth was then irrigated?
But scripture may well have wished to call the whole "vasty deep"15 of the abyss itself a spring, not springs, because of its nature as a single entity (in that part of it alone, to be sure, which the earth confines in subterranean caverns, from which all springs and streams distribute themselves through a variety of arteries and channels and burst forth, each in its own place; thus not including that other part called the sea, which spreads far and wide for all to observe, encir cling all lands with its bitter, salt waves,); and to talk of it coming up from the earth through innumerable crannies and underground streams, and on all sides watering the whole face of the earth, as if with its hair blowing and streaming in the wind; so not with a continuous flat surface as of the sea or a marsh, but as we observe water flowing along river beds and between winding banks and then overflowing and flooding neighboring fields when they rise. Who, l ask you, would decline to accept such an explanation, but people laboring under a spirit of contentious obstinacy?
You could also understand its talking of the whole face of the earth being watered, in the same way as one can talk of the whole of a garment16 being colored, even if it is only made so by patchwork, not uniformly; especially since at that time, when the earth was so young, one may believe that most if not all of it was flat plains, over which streams bubbling up could be dispersed and extended far and wide.17
26. To sum up about this spring: did it in fact gush forth from one particular place somewhere or other, or was it called one spring as being a kind of single reservoir in the bowels of the earth for all the water of all springs, great and small, to spread over the earth, and was it coming up from the earth in this way
15. While Augustine was probably not familiar with Shakespeare's Tempest, his translator, happily, is.
1 6. He says, literally, "the whole face ofa garment," to draw the parallel with the disputed phrase in the scriptural text. But one cannot really say that in English, and to substitute another word like "area" would not be any better at drawing this parallel. 17. Does this suggest that Augustine, and some of his learned contemporaries, had a sound geological instinct that mountains are of comparatively recent geophysical formation? Hardly, you may well say; but the modernity of what he implies is rather striking.