"He created them male and female." If God, of the secondary or inferior gods, created mankind, male and female, after their own likeness, it would seem in that case, as if the Jews believed that God and the gods who so formed them were male and female. It has been a subject of discussion, whether the author means to say that man had originally two sexes, or merely that God made Adam and Eve on the same day. The most natural meaning is that God formed Adam and Eve at the same time; but this interpretation involves an absolute contradiction to the statement of the woman's being made out of the rib of man after the seven days were concluded. "And he rested on the seventh day." The Phœnicians, Chaldæans, and Indians, represented God as having made the world in six periods, which the ancient Zoroaster calls the six "Gahanbars," so celebrated among the Persians. It is beyond all question that these nations possessed a theology before the Jews inhabited the deserts of Horeb and Sinai, and before they could possibly have had any writers. Many writers have considered it probable that the allegory of six days was imitated from that of the six periods. God may have permitted the idea to have prevailed in large and populous empires before he inspired the Jewish people with it. He had undoubtedly permitted other people to invent the arts before the Jews were in possession of any one of them. "From this pleasant place a river went out which watered the garden, and thence it was divided into four rivers. One was called Pison, which compassed the whole land of Havilah, whence cometh gold.... the second was called Gihon and surrounds Ethiopia.... the third is the Tigris, and the fourth the Euphrates." According to this version, the earthly paradise would have contained nearly a third part of Asia and of Africa. The sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris are sixty leagues distant from each other, in frightful mountains, bearing no possible resemblance to a garden. The river which borders Ethiopia, and which can be no other than the Nile, commences its course at the distance of more than a thousand leagues from the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; and, if the Pison means the Phasis, it is not a little surprising that the source of a Scythian river and that of an African one should be situated on the same spot. We must therefore look for some other explanation, and for other rivers. Every commentator has got up a paradise of his own.