The Expositor's Bible: The Book of GenesisDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Genesis
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Genesis -- Commentaries
Of his three sons, Jabal--or "Increase"--was "the father of such as
dwell in tents and of such as have cattle." He had originality enough to
step beyond all traditional habits and to invent a new mode of life.
Hitherto men had been tied to one spot by their fixed habitations, or
found shelter when overtaken by storm in caves or trees. To Jabal the
idea first occurs, I can carry my house about with me and regulate its
movements and not it mine. I need not return every night this long weary
way from the pastures, but may go wherever grass is green and streams
run cool. He and his comrades would thus become aware of the vast
resources of other lands, and would unconsciously lay the foundations
both of commerce and of wars of conquest. For both in ancient and more
modern times the most formidable armies have been those vast moving
shepherd races bred outside the borders of civilization and flooding as
with an irresistible tide the territories of more settled and less hardy
tribes.
Jubal again was, as his name denotes, the reputed father of all such as
handle the harp and the organ, stringed and wind instruments. The stops
of the reed or flute and the divisions of the string being once
discovered, all else necessarily followed. The twanging of a bow-string
in a musical ear was enough to give the suggestion to an observant mind;
the varying notes of the birds; the winds expressing at one time
unbridled fury and at another a breathing benediction, could not fail to
move and stir the susceptible spirit. The spontaneous though untuned
singing of children, that follows no mere melody made by another to
express _his_ joy, but is the instinctive expression of their own joy,
could not but give however meagrely the first rudiments of music. But
here was the man who first made a piece of wood help him; who out of the
commonest material of the physical world found for himself a means of
expressing the most impalpable moods of his spirit. Once the idea was
caught that matter inanimate as well as animate was man's servant and
could do his finest work for him, Jabal and his brother Jubal would make
rapid work between them. If the rude matter of the world could _sing_
for them, what might it not do for them? They would see that there was a
precision in machine-work which man's hand could not rival--a regularity
which no nervous throb could throw out and no feeling interrupt, and yet
at the same time when they found how these rude instruments responded to
every finest shade of feeling, and how all external nature seemed able
to express what was in man, must it not have been the birth of poetry as
well as of music? Jubal in short originates what we now compendiously
describe as the Fine Arts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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