Page:Legends of Old Testament Characters.djvu/34

12 he was banished from Eden; and at the twelfth, he felt the sweat and pain of toil.

In the Apocryphal Little Genesis, we are told that Adam did not disobey God till the expiration of the seventh year, and that he was not punished till forty-five days after. It adds, that before the Fall, Adam conversed familiarly with the animals, but that by the Fall they lost the faculty of speech.

God, say the Rabbis, made Adam so tall that his head touched the sky; and the tree of life, planted in the midst of the garden of Eden, was so broad at the base that it would take a good walker five years to march round it, and Adam's proportions accorded with those of the tree. The angels murmured, and told God that there were two sovereigns, one in heaven and one on earth. Thereupon God placed His hand on the head of Adam and reduced him to a thousand cubits. To the question, How big was Adam? the Talmud replies, He was made so tall that he stood with his head in heaven, till God pressed him down at the Fall. Rabbi Jehuda says, that as he lay stretched on the earth he covered it completely; but the book Sepher Gilgulim says (fol. 20, col. 4), that when he was made, his head and throat were in Paradise, and his body in the earth. To judge how long he was, says the same book, understand that his body stretched from one end of the earth to the other, and it takes a man five hundred years to walk that distance. And when Adam was created, all the beasts of earth fell down before him and desired to worship him, but he said to them, "You have come to worship me, but come and let us clothe ourselves with power and glory, and let us take Him to be king over us who has created us; for a people chooses a king, but the king does not appoint himself monarch arbitrarily." Therefore Adam chose God to be king of all the world, and the beasts, fowls, and fishes gladly consented thereto. But the sun, seeing Adam, was filled with fear and became dark; and the angels quaked and were dismayed, and prayed to God to remove from them this mighty being whom He had made. Then God cast a deep sleep on Adam, and the sun and the angels looked on him lying helpless in his slumber, and they plucked up courage and feared him no