Alethia (Genesis in verse, with a prayer)

Contents

Reading pages: 0.1–0.117 · 1.1–1.537 · 2.1–3.25 · 3.49–3.636 · 3.663–3.761

1. 0.1The opening prayer addresses the one God in three, beyond all limit and comprehension, who is mind, reason, power, life and light, and from whom all things came out of nothing.
2. 0.25Nature and its order prove God the Lord, who governs all by number, measure and weight, binds contraries in harmony, and needs nothing he has made.
3. 0.45God created out of goodness alone and gave angels free will so that there might be virtue and reward; the fall of the envious angel who became the author of evil does not impugn God's goodness, since without freedom creatures would have no fruit.
4. 0.70Freedom requires the possibility of falling, which makes life sweeter and merit real; God made man from dust to defeat the enemy, and when man fell, sought him with his own blood and restored him to eternal life.
5. 0.92Adam's fall gave way to Christ's victory over death; the poet prays for understanding as he sets out to teach the young what Moses tells of creation, the spread of error and the return of truth.
6. 0.117The poet asks forgiveness for his sins and for any faults of meter or expression, so that the faith may suffer no harm, and ends his prayer through Christ who reigns with the Father and the Spirit.
7. 1.1Before creation the one God, Father, Word and Spirit, reigned in himself, foreseeing all; he made all things from nothing and set them in order, so that the world arose neither by chance nor from eternity.
8. 1.28Whatever is bodily had a beginning, so the world was made; God made, orders and sustains it and could undo it, and at first the sea covered the earth in darkness.
9. 1.53The Spirit hovers over the waters; on the first day light is divided from darkness, and on the second the firmament is set between the waters; the poet rejects natural explanations in favor of faith in God's power.
10. 1.80On the third day God gathers the waters, reveals the dry land and makes it bear plants with their seed; on the fourth he makes the sun, the moon and the stars.
11. 1.108The heavenly bodies mark the times and the year; on the fifth day the waters bring forth the creatures of the sea and the birds, which rise from the water into the air.
12. 1.134On the sixth day God makes the land animals; the world, made by the Father through the Son and approved by the Spirit, still lacks a beholder and possessor, so God proposes to make man.
13. 1.160God makes man in his image to rule the world and bids him increase; on the seventh day God rests, giving an example of the rest promised to the righteous, and on that day Christ, resting in the tomb, broke open the underworld.
14. 1.184God's rest is also work; the poet offers explanations of why man's bodily making is told after the seventh day, and describes God shaping the clay with his own hand and breathing life into it.
15. 1.211Man's creation from dust guarantees the resurrection of the body; God then plants paradise in the east, a grove of eternal spring and endless fruit.
16. 1.233Paradise gathers every fragrance of the world's spices, and its rustling trees sing a hymn to God; perhaps its plants are the patterns of all things on earth.
17. 1.259Paradise holds the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; its spring, greater than the ocean, divides into four rivers, the first being the Pishon, rich in gold and gems.
18. 1.284The other rivers of paradise are the Gihon, identified with the Nile, the Tigris, which plunges underground and bursts forth again, and the generous Euphrates, which spends itself watering Persia.
19. 1.305Paradise was given to the first man as a free gift, not a wage; the one command not to eat of the tree of knowledge was meant to make man worthy of life by slight obedience.
20. 1.329The command did not lessen man's freedom but gave him power over life and death; God then brings all the animals to Adam, who names them.
21. 1.354No animal was a match for Adam, so God put him to sleep and formed Eve from his rib; she was made from man so that kinship would bind them in mutual love.
22. 1.381Adam recognizes Eve as part of himself, and marriage is established; the two would have lived forever in incorruptible bodies had not the serpent persuaded Eve that the forbidden fruit would make them like gods.
23. 1.407The serpent first spoke of 'gods' and so began idolatry; Eve ate, drew Adam into the same sin, and both at once felt fear and shame at their nakedness, which they had not noticed before.
24. 1.434Now mortal and ashamed, Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves and hide among the trees; but no one can hide from God, and only by fleeing to him can one escape him.
25. 1.457God's question 'Where are you?' shows that the sinner is far from him, yet his mercy, greater than his justice, calls the fallen back; then God pronounces sentence, beginning with the curse on the serpent.
26. 1.483The serpent is sentenced to crawl, eat dust, be hated and have its head trodden by the woman; Eve is sentenced to subjection to her husband and to painful childbearing.
27. 1.508Adam is sentenced to toil on cursed ground until he returns to dust; God clothes the pair in skins and, lest Adam eat of the tree of life and live unredeemed, has the winds carry them out of paradise to the earth from which he was made.
28. 1.537Book 1 ends with Adam and Eve grieving over what they have lost and wondering whether life might return through a tree, as death came through a tree.
29. 2.1Book 2 begins with Adam and Eve as exiles in a wild, harsh land, made more wretched by their memory of paradise.
30. 2.25Hunger drives Adam and Eve to eat wild roots until in their extremity they turn to God, and Adam begins a prayer recalling how in paradise he saw that God cannot be seen.
31. 2.49Adam confesses that the devil overcame Eve by cunning and him through his love for her, and says that he so repented that he accepted his condemnation as a gift and a kind of pardon.
32. 2.72Adam asks not that the sentence be lifted but that God teach them how to till the cursed ground; as they pray, they catch sight of the serpent.
33. 2.95Eve urges Adam to stone the serpent; a missed stone strikes a spark from flint, and the first fire spreads through the forest while they watch in terror and wonder.
34. 2.120The fire melts the earth's veins into streams of gold, silver, copper and iron that harden in the air; Adam and Eve thank God for the gift and first reach for the gold.
35. 2.145Adam and Eve learn to work metals, finding gold too soft and settling at last on iron; the poet turns to the view that chance taught humans agriculture.
36. 2.172The poet rejects the view that chance or imitation taught humans their arts: God gave the human mind, a small world, knowledge of the greater world, and what we seem to learn we really recognize. Adam's first work after the expulsion is to beget children.
37. 2.199Adam and Eve find comfort in their children; Cain tills the ground and Abel keeps sheep; Abel's sacrifice of a lamb is accepted and Cain's is not, and Cain, drinking the serpent's poison, murders his brother.
38. 2.227The poet laments Cain's crime: the first-born brought murder into the world, worse than the serpent who urged death but did not inflict it, and every murder since repeats his fratricide.
39. 2.252God questions Cain, who denies the murder, and punishes him mercifully but fittingly with an unceasing trembling of conscience and body.
40. 2.275Cain's punishment serves justice, warns future generations and protects his life by the sign; his banishment spares his grieving parents and suits the guilty man himself.
41. 2.299God mercifully gives Cain a wife and many descendants, and Cain founds the first city; he perhaps died a violent death in expiation; meanwhile Eve bears another son.
42. 2.322Seth replaces Abel; his descendant Enosh first calls on the name of God; Enoch is taken alive to God; the long lives of the patriarchs are shortened as sin grows.
43. 2.348The godly line intermarried with Cain's descendants and fell into sin; God limited human life to a hundred and twenty years, and giants were born, violent and lawless.
44. 2.373Human wickedness grieves God, who resolves to destroy the world by a flood; he reveals this to righteous Noah.
45. 2.394God promises to make Noah the new father of the human race and tells him to build the ark, giving its measurements, structure and divisions; Noah begins to cut the timber.
46. 2.422The ark is built, but the flood is delayed a hundred years to give the people time to repent; then God tells Noah to enter with his family and the animals, seven of the clean and two of the unclean.
47. 2.445Animals from every part of the world enter the ark; God shuts it, and a worldwide storm begins, while the springs of the deep burst open.
48. 2.468The flood covers the whole earth, rising fifteen cubits above the highest mountains after forty days of rain; after a hundred and fifty days God makes the waters recede gradually.
49. 2.493The ark comes to rest on a mountain; the raven does not return, the dove brings back an olive leaf, and when the dove does not return the third time, those in the ark weep for joy and long to go out.
50. 2.516At God's command Noah leaves the ark with his family and the animals, which scatter over the renewed earth; Noah gazes on the new world but still remembers the terror of the flood.
51. 2.540Noah teaches his family how God sustained them in the ark without food or drink, the God who can make the wicked burn in water and the good cool in fire, and who will make water the means of rebirth.
52. 3.1Book 3 begins with Noah's sacrifice under the open sky; God accepts it and promises never again to destroy the human race by a flood, though he foresees its sins.
53. 3.25God promises the regular seasons, blesses Noah's family to increase, gives them animals for food but forbids eating blood, and declares human blood sacred, to be avenged on man and beast.
54. 3.49God gives the rainbow as the sign of his covenant and a foretaste of judgment by fire; Noah and his sons farm the land, Noah plants a vineyard and falls asleep drunk.
55. 3.75Ham mocks his father's nakedness while Shem and Japheth cover it; Noah curses Ham to serve his brothers and blesses Shem and Japheth, then dies aged nine hundred and fifty.
56. 3.99The first men, filled with God's Spirit, knew all things; when their descendants lost this gift, they preserved the memory of it in writing, and from this the arts arose, including the forbidden search into the future.
57. 3.121The poet considers whether the signs in nature that seem to foretell the future were placed there by God, arise from the motion of the world, or were turned by the devil into astrology so as to blame the stars for his own work.
58. 3.147The devil also invented divination by entrails, birds and lightning, and magic, so as to be worshipped himself; Nimrod led the Persians from the true God to the worship of fire.
59. 3.170The devil also worked through grief: a father who made a marble image of his dead son and worshipped it began idolatry, a crime worse than magic because it looks like piety, and the nations went on to worship their parents and kings.
60. 3.195The Greeks multiplied gods, and the devil spoke through oracles such as Delphi, later moving to Gaul and Germany; returning to his story, the poet tells how Noah's descendants, crowded in Shinar, faced dispersion.
61. 3.216Facing dispersion and shorter lives, the descendants of Noah resolve to build a city and a tower reaching to heaven to win eternal fame, and they make bricks.
62. 3.242As the tower rises, God, speaking to the partners of his kingdom, declares that no one ascends to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, and confounds the builders' language.
63. 3.265Unable to understand one another, the builders abandon the tower and scatter by language into separate nations, like birds flocking by kind at nightfall.
64. 3.285The confusion of tongues was a merciful punishment, keeping the evil of a few from spreading and preventing endless strife; the ancient Hebrew tongue survived among Shem's descendants, though they too were later drawn into idolatry.
65. 3.310Idolatry spread like a plague even among Shem's line, until Terah left Chaldea and settled in Haran, where he died; his son Abram, who had always worshipped the true God, is then called by God.
66. 3.332God calls Abram to leave his idolatrous kin for a better land, promising him a great name and blessing for all nations; Abram goes with Sarai and Lot to Canaan, where he builds altars at Shechem.
67. 3.357Abram moves to a place the poet calls Bethlehem, future birthplace of Christ; driven by famine to Egypt, he passes his wife off as his sister, and when Pharaoh takes her God terrifies him.
68. 3.383Pharaoh returns Sarai unharmed; back in Canaan, quarrels among the herdsmen lead Abram to divide the land, Lot choosing the Jordan plain near Sodom, and God promises Abram the whole land for his descendants forever.
69. 3.408Abram settles at Hebron by the oak of Mamre; foreign kings invade, and the soft men of Sodom flee or are captured, Lot among them.
70. 3.431Abram arms three hundred and eighteen servants, falls upon the sleeping enemy by night, slaughters them and pursues the rest as far as Hobah.
71. 3.457Abram returns the plunder to its owners, gives a tenth to Melchizedek and receives from him the bread and wine that foreshadow the sacrament; God promises him an heir of his own body in place of his servant from Damascus.
72. 3.481God shows Abram the stars as the measure of his offspring; Abram believes and it is reckoned to him as righteousness; Christ, the Father's voice, then orders the sacrifice of a heifer, goat, ram and two birds.
73. 3.506Abram divides the animals, drives off the birds of prey, and at sunset falls into a dread sleep in which, the poet imagines, he sees Israel in Egypt, the Exodus, the crossing of the sea and the conquest of Canaan.
74. 3.531God explains the vision: Abram's descendants will be enslaved four hundred years and then rescued and given the land when the Amorites' sins are full; a flaming furnace passes between the pieces of the sacrifice.
75. 3.556Sarai, barren, gives her Egyptian maid Hagar to Abram; Hagar conceives and despises her mistress, is punished and flees, but an angel sends her back and tells her of her son and his descendants.
76. 3.580Ishmael is born when Abram is eighty-six; at ninety-nine Abram receives the covenant of circumcision on the eighth day, and God changes his name and Sarai's.
77. 3.606God renames Abram and Sarai, promises Sarah a son within the year to be named Isaac and blesses Ishmael with twelve princes; Abraham at once circumcises himself, Ishmael and all his household.
78. 3.636Three shining figures appear to Abraham at Mamre; he adores one Lord though he sees three, entertains them, and in this appearance of God in human form the poet sees a sign of the incarnation of Christ.
79. 3.663God reveals to Abraham the coming destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham bargains him down from fifty righteous to ten; the two angels reach Sodom at evening and Lot welcomes them into his house.
80. 3.691The men of Sodom surround Lot's house demanding his guests; Lot offers his daughters instead, but the mob presses on until the angels pull Lot inside and strike the crowd blind.
81. 3.711The angels reveal their mission; Lot's sons-in-law do not believe, and Lot himself delays until the angels drag his family out and command them not to look back; Lot asks to flee to Segor and so saves the town.
82. 3.733God gathers sulphurous clouds from every volcano into a vault over Sodom; at its thunder Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a statue of salt.
83. 3.761Fire falls on Sodom and its land until the burnt plain sinks into a lake; the poet asks whether the water that quenched the fire, and the Jordan that flows into it, the river of the first baptism, signify an end to punishment.