Page:Legends of Old Testament Characters.djvu/35

II.] more. The book Sepher Chasidim, however, says, that the angels seeing Adam so great and with his face shining above the brightness of the sun, bowed before him, and said, "Holy, holy, holy!" Whereupon God cast a sleep upon him and cut off great pieces of his flesh to reduce him to smaller proportions. And when Adam woke he saw bits of flesh strewed all round him, like shavings in a carpenter's shop, and he exclaimed "O God! how hast Thou robbed me?" but God answered, "Take these gobbets of flesh and carry them into all lands and drop them everywhere, and strew dust on them; and wherever they are laid, that land will I give to thy posterity to inherit."

Many are the origins attributed to man in the various creeds of ancient and modern heathendom. Sometimes he is spoken of as having been made out of water, but more generally it is of earth that he has been made, or from which he has been spontaneously born. The Peruvians believed that the world was peopled by four men and four women, brothers and sisters, who emerged from the caves near Cuzco. Among the North American Indians the earth is regarded as the universal mother. Men came into existence in her womb, and crept out of it by climbing up the roots of the trees which hung from the vault in which they were conceived and matured; or, mounting a deer, the animal brought them into daylight; or, groping in darkness, they tore their way out with their nails.

The Egyptian philosophers pretended that man was made of the mud of the Nile. In Aristophanes, man is spoken of as. Among some of the Chinese it is believed that man was thus formed:—"The book Fong-zen-tong says: When the earth and heaven were made, there was not as yet man or peoples. Then Niu-hoa moulded yellow earth, and of that made man. That is the true origin of men."

And the ancient Chaldeans supposed man was made by the mixing of the blood of Belus with the soil.