Opinions are various concerning the form the tempter assumed to deceive poor Eve. It has been asserted that Sammaël, the prince of devils, came to her mounted on a serpent as large in girth as a camel; and then again it is said that Satan borrowed the form of the serpent, and made it more seductive by the addition of a sweet maiden’s face! This tradition has been adopted by poets and painters.
As the name of the forbidden fruit is not mentioned in the Book of Genesis, conjecture has had full scope. Northern nations believe that it was an apple; southern people that it was a fig or citron. Rabbi Salomon thinks that Moses concealed the name of the fruit purposely, fearing that, if it were known, nobody would ever eat of it.
According to St. Jerome, Adam was buried in Hebron; other learned authors say on Calvary; either assertion is difficult of verification, for both Hebron and Calvary only date from the Deluge. “Barcepha alleges,” says Bayle, “that a highly esteemed Syrian doctor had said that Noe dwelt in Judea; that he planted in the plains of Sodom the cedar-trees with which he afterwards built the ark; and that he carried Adam’s bones into the ark with him. When he came out of the ark, he divided these bones among his three sons; the skull fell to the share of Sem, and when the descendants of Sem took possession of Judea, they
buried it in the very spot where the tomb of Adam had once been situated.” The reader will doubtless feel that Barcepha’s allegation settles the question!
In 1615, a shoemaker of Amiens published a treatise entitled De Calceo Antiquo. In this history of shoes, the writer begins at the beginning of the world, and gravely informs us that Adam made the first pair from the prepared skins of beasts, the secret of tanning having been taught him by God himself!
In the last century, Henrion, a French Orientalist, and a member of the Institute of France, conceived the idea of composing an exhaustive work on the weights and measures of the ancients, and presented a specimen of his labors to the Academy of Inscriptions, to which he belonged. It was a kind of chronological scale of the differences in man’s stature from the epoch of Adam’s creation to the time of our Saviour.
Adam, he stated, measured one hundred and twenty-three feet, nine inches; Eve, one hundred and eighteen feet, nine and three-quarter inches; Noe, one hundred and three feet; Abraham, twenty-seven feet; Moses, thirteen feet; Hercules, ten feet; Alexander, six feet; Julius Cæsar, five feet.
He remarked upon this scale that “though men are no longer measured by their stature, if Providence had not deigned to suspend such an extraordinarily rapid rate of diminution, we, at this day, should scarcely dare to class ourselves, with respect to our size, among the large insects of our globe!”
Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to wrest from Adam the honor of being the first man. Isaac de la
Peyrère pulished a work in 1655, entitled Præadamitæ, seu Exercitatio super versibus 12, 13, 14 Capitis V. Epistolæ B. Pauli ad Romanos, in which he endeavors to prove that there were two creations of men—the first on the sixth day, when God created man, male and female; which, he asserts, means men and women in all parts of the earth, progenitors of the Gentiles. The second creation, he says, did not take place until some time after, when God made Adam to be the father of the Jews. Those who adopted this idea were called Preadamites. La Peyrère lived to abjure his opinions at the feet of Pope Alexander VI.