Quite a number of considerations arise out of the curious juxtaposition of ideas in this passage. In the first place, it is very evident that by the word "evil" the writer here means trouble and suffering, not wickedness, because he clearly distinguishes it from the sin the mention of which follows. That sin is a man's own deed, for which he is justly punished. The poet, then, does not attribute the causation of sin to God; he does not speculate at all on the origin of moral evil. As far as he goes in the present instance, he would seem to throw back the authorship of it upon the will of man. How that will came to turn astray he does not say. This awful mystery remains unsolved through the whole course of the revelation of the Old Testament, and even through that of the New also. It cannot be maintained that the story of the Fall in Genesis is a solution of the mystery. To trace temptation back to the serpent is not to account for its existence, nor for the facility with which man was found to yield to it. When, at a later period, Satan appears on the stage, it is not to answer the perplexing question of the origin of evil. In the Old Testament he is nowhere connected with the Fall--his identification with the serpent first occurring in the Book of Wisdom,[200] from which apparently it passed into current language, and so was adopted by St. John in the Apocalypse.[201] At first Satan is the adversary and accuser of man, as in Job[202] and Zechariah;[203] then he is recognised as the tempter, in Chronicles, for example.[204] But in no case is he said to be the primary cause of evil. No plummet can sound the depths of that dark pit in which lurks the source of sin. [200] Wisdom ii. 23 ff. [201] Rev. xii. 9. [202] Job i. 6-12, ii. 1-7. [203] Zech. iii. 1, 2. [204] 1 Chron. xxi. 1.