The Trinity is not a composite of several gods, it is the same god tripled; the Jews never heard tell of a god in three persons. By these words "like unto us" it is probible that the Jews meant angels, Eloïm. For this reason various rash men of learning have thought that the book was not written until a time when the Jews had adopted a belief in inferior gods, but this view is condemned.[3]
"The Lord set him outside the garden of delights, that he might dig in the earth." Yet some say that God had put him in the garden, in order that he might cultivate _it._ If gardener Adam merely became laborer Adam, he was not so much the worse off. This solution of the difficulty does not seem to us sufficiently serious. It would be better to say that God punished Adam's disobedience by banishing him from his birthplace.
Certain over-temerarious commentators say that the whole of the story refers to an idea once common to all men, i.e., that past times were better than present. People have always bragged of the past in order to run down the present. Men overburdened with work have imagined that pleasure is idleness, not having had wit enough to conceive that man is never worse off than when he has nothing to do. Men seeing themselves not infrequently miserable forged an idea of a time when all men were happy. It is as if they had said, once upon a time no tree withered, no beast fell sick, no animal devoured another, the spiders did not catch flies. Hence the ideal of the Golden Age, of the egg of Arimana, of the serpent who stole the secret of eternal life from the donkey, of the combat of Typhon and Osiris, of Ophionée and the gods, of Pandora's casket, and all these other old stories, sometimes very ingenious and never, in the least way, instructive. _But_ we should believe that the fables of other nations are imitation of Hebrew history, since we still have the Hebrew history and the history of other savage peoples is for the most part destroyed. Moreover, the witnesses in favor of Genesis are quite irrefutable.
"And he set before the garden of delight a chérubin with a turning and flaming sword to keep guard over the gateway to the tree of life." The word "kerub" means bullock. A bullock with a burning sword is an odd sight at a doorway. But the Jews have represented angels as bulls and as sparrow hawks, despite the prohibition to make graven images. Obviously they got these bulls and hawks from Egyptians who imitated all sorts of things, and who worshipped the bull as the symbol of agriculture and the hawk as the symbol of winds. Probably the tale is an allegory, a Jewish allegory, the kerub means "nature." A symbol made of a bull's body, a man's head and a hawk's wings.