without number. 1n verse 30 it has "frogs" in the plural; but Augustine's version may well have
Book V 289 through all its outlets and so watering the whole face of the earth? Or else—and this is rather easier to believe—seeing that he did not say, "One spring was coming up from the earth," but simply, A spring was coming upfrom the earth, he just put the singular for the plural, as a kind of collective noun, so that in this way we can understand it as meaning many springs over the whole earth watering their different places and regions. Thus we talk about "the soldiery," meaning soldiers in general, or about "the locust plague"18 or "the frog plague" with which the Egyptians were afflicted, when there was a countless number of locusts and frogs. ln any case let us take up no more time wearing ourselves out over how big it was or how many.
Reiterating the point that the creation of all creatures took place simultaneously, while their management and regulation is conducted over intervals and periods oftime
1 1, 27. But let us come back yet again to that question, whether our considered opinion can stand up in all cases, whereby we were saying that God worked in one way with all creatures at their first establishment, works from which he rested on the seventh day, and in another at their management and regulation, at which he is working until now (Jn 5: 1 7); that is, that he then worked at making all things simultaneously, without any intervals or periods of time between, while now he works through periods of time. Thus we see the constellations being moved through such intervals from their rising to their setting, the sky being changed from summer to winter, plants budding after so many days, growing bigger, turning green, withering; animals also at definite turning points in the course of time being conceived and fully formed and born, and running their course through every age until old age and death; and all other such temporal processes. Who but God, after all, works these things, even without any such movement on his part? Time, I mean, does not happen to him.
So then between those works of God from which he rested on the seventh day, and these which he is working on until now, scripture inserted a kind ofjoint in her narrative, advising us that she had finished unrolling those and was begin ning now to weave these on the loom. The notice that she had finished unrolling those was put like this: This is the book of the creating ofheaven and earth when the day was made God made heaven and earth and all the greenery ofthefield before it was upon the earth, and all the hay ofthefield before it sprang up;for God had not rained upon the earth, and there was no man to till the earth (Gn 2:4-5), while the weaving of these other works began like this: But a spring was
18. Ps 105:34 reads in the Latin Vulgate, He spoke, and the locust came, and the young locust without number. 1n verse 30 it has "frogs" in the plural; but Augustine's version may well have had "the frog" also in the singular here.