Professor James Fergusson, in his celebrated work on "Tree and Serpent Worship," says:
"The two chapters which refer to this (_i. e._, the Garden, the Tree, and the Serpent), as indeed the whole of the first eight of Genesis, are now generally admitted by scholars to be made up of fragments of earlier books or earlier traditions, belonging, properly speaking, to Mesopotamia rather than to Jewish history, the exact meaning of which the writers of the Pentateuch seem hardly to have appreciated when they transcribed them in the form in which they are now found."[99:2]
"The story of the Serpent in Eden is an Aryan story in every particular. The notion of Satan as the author of evil appears only in the later books, _composed after the Jews had come into close contact with Persian ideas_."[99:3]
"In the old legends of dualism, the evil spirit was said to have _sent a serpent to ruin Paradise_. These legends became known to the Jews _during their Babylonian captivity_."[99:4]
Professor Goldziher also shows, in his "Mythology Among the Hebrews,"[99:5] that the story of the creation was borrowed by the Hebrews from the Babylonians. He also informs us that the notion of the _bôrê_ and _yôsêr_, "Creator" (the term used in the cosmogony in Genesis) as an integral part of the idea of God, _are first brought into use by the prophets of the captivity_. "Thus also the story of the _Garden of Eden_, as a supplement to the history of the Creation, _was written down at Babylon_."
Strange as it may appear, after the _Genesis_ account, we may pass through the whole Pentateuch, and other books of the Old Testament, clear to the end, and will find that the story of the "_Garden of Eden_" and "_Fall of Man_," is hardly alluded to, if at all. Lengkerke says: "One single _certain_ trace of the employment of the story of Adam's fall is entirely wanting in the Hebrew Canon (after the Genesis account). Adam, Eve, the Serpent, the woman's seduction of her husband, &c., are all images, _to which the remaining words of the Israelites never again recur_."[100:1]
This circumstance can only be explained by the fact that the first chapters of Genesis were not written until _after_ the other portions had been written.