every seed-bearingfodder seeding seed which is over all the earth, etc., are not
350 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
What is said about Paradise is reconciled with what is written about the third and sixth days
3, 6. So then, Godplanted Paradise in delights—that, you see, is the meaning of"in Eden"—andput the man there whom he hadfashioned (Gn 2:8). That, you see, is how it was written, because that is how it was done. Next he recapitulates, to show how what he has stated briefly actually was done; that is, just how God planted the paradise and there established the man he had fashioned; this after all is how it goes on: And God still cast upfrom the earth every tree that had a beau tiful look about it, and was goodfor eating (Gn 2:9). He did not say: "And God cast up from the earth another kind of tree" or "the rest of the trees," but he still cast up, it says,from the earth every tree that had a beautiful look about it and was goodfor eating. So then the earth had already produced every tree that was both beautiful to look at and good for eating, that is, on the third day; because on the sixth day he had said: Behold, l have given you every seed-bearingfodder seeding seed which is over all the earth, and everyfruit tree which has in itfruit ofseed-bearing seed, which shall befor you asfood (Gn 1 :29). So did he give them one thing then, and now decide to give them something else? 1 hardly think so. But since these trees laid out in Paradise are of the same varieties as the ones the earth had already produced on the third day, it still went on producing them in their proper time, because what is written about the earth having produced them earlier on refers to what was done causally in the earth; that is, that it had then received the latent power of producing them, the power by which it happens that even now the earth continues to bring forth such things openly and in their own time.
7. So then, the words of God saying on the sixth day, Behold l have given you every seed-bearingfodder seeding seed which is over all the earth, etc., are not words that were uttered audibly in time, butjust as in his Word there is the power of creating1 1—but what God said without any time-measured sounds could only be conveyed to human beings through such sounds in time. lt was, after all, still in the future that the man now formed from mud and animated by God's puff2 would use for food all the things that were going to spring up over the earth from that generative power which the earth had already received. ln setting up the causal formulae of this future in creation, God was speaking as if it had already
1 1 . This clause could be rendered, "but in the way that there is in his Word the power of creating." But 1 do not think he meant that; 1 think he was starting to give an explanatory comparison, and then interrupted himself, feeling that it would not really fit his theory of the causales rationes, the causal formulae written into the original creation in the works of the six days. So he abruptly changes tack.
1 2. Here 1 omit a phrase which is syntactically incoherent, and has to me every appearance of some marginal scribble that subsequently found its way into the text: et quidquid ex illo humani generis extitisset—"and whatever of humankind had come into existence from him."