In the fourth hour, God called to him, and commanded him to give names to the beasts, birds, and fishes.
In the seventh hour, the marriage of our first parents took place.
In the tenth hour, Adam sinned.
In the twelfth hour, the penalty of labor began.
James Salien, a Jesuit of the seventeenth
century, tells us in his Annales Ecclesiastici that, “while man was being created, the divine hands, ambrosial face, and admirable arms of his Creator were visible to him.”
The Arabs have a tradition that Adam, when first created, stretched from one extremity of the earth to the other. But after he had sinned, God pressed him down with his almighty hand, and thus diminished his height to nine hundred cubits. The Creator, it is added, did this at the request of the angels, who regarded the gigantic mortal with strange fear.
According to Moreri, Adam possessed a profound knowledge of all the sciences, especially of astrology, many secrets of which he taught to his children, besides engraving two tables of observations on the movements of the planets. All the learned doctors of the Middle Ages are agreed in ascribing the possession of immense science to Adam. The angels themselves, they say, were inferior to him in knowledge; and they relate as proof of this that God, having heard them speak of man with contempt, determined to confound them by asking them what were the names of certain beasts which he called into his presence at that moment. The angels could not answer; man, summoned to the task, gave each animal its due appellation without hesitation.
Adam, being thus endowed with unlimited knowledge, would have been culpable towards his posterity if he had left none of it behind him. We are accordingly told that he composed two works, one upon the Creation, the other upon the Divinity. Having been present, we may almost say, at the first, and conversed familiarly with the second, he was able to tell us something interesting
about both, and it is our misfortune that the two works have been lost. It is, however, said that they survived the Deluge, for a Mahometan author relates that Abraham, being in the country of the Sabeans, opened Adam’s chest, and found in it not only our progenitor’s writings but also those of Seth.