Manasseh Ben-Israel has preserved a prophecy of Adam, that the world is to last seven thousand years. He says this secret was handed down from Adam to Enoch, and from Enoch to Noah, and from Noah to Shem.[96]
At Hebron is a cave, “which,” says an old traveller, “Christians and Turks point out as having been the place where Adam and Eve bewailed their sins for a hundred years. This spot is towards the west, in a valley, about a hundred paces from the Damascene field; it is a dark grotto, not very long or broad, very low, in a hard rock, and not apparently artificial, but natural. This valley is called _La valle de’ Lagrime_, the Vale of Tears, as they shed such copious tears over their transgressions.”[97]
Abu Mohammed Mustapha Ben-Alschit Hasen, in his Universal History, says that Adam’s garment of fig-leaves, in which he went out of Eden, was left by him, when he fell, on Adam’s Peak in Ceylon. There it dried to dust, and the dust was scattered by the wind over the island, and from this sprang the odoriferous plants which grow there.[98]
Adam is said to have not gone altogether empty-handed out of Paradise. Hottinger, in his Oriental History, quoting Jewish authorities, says: “Adam having gone into the land of Babel, took with him many wonderful things, amongst others a tree with flowers, leaves and branches of gold, also a stone tree, also the leaves of a tree so strong that they were inconsumable in fire, and so large as to be able to shelter under them ten thousand men of the stature of Adam; and he carried about with him two of these leaves, of which one would shelter two men or clothe them.”[99] Of these trees we read in the Gemara that the Rabbi Canaan asked of the Rabbi Simon, son of Assa, who had gone to see them, whether this was true. He was told in reply that it was so, and that at the time of the Captivity the Jews had seated themselves under these trees, and in their shadow had found consolation.
But Palestine seems also to have possessed some of the trees of Adam’s planting, for Jacob Vitriacus in his Jewish History says: “There are in that land wonderful trees, which for their pre-excellence are called Apples of Paradise, bearing oblong fruit, very sweet and unctuous, having a most delicious savor, bearing in one cluster more than a hundred compressed berries. The leaves of this tree are a cubit long and half a cubit wide. There are three other trees producing beautiful apples or citrons, in which the bite of a man’s teeth is naturally manifest, wherefore they are called Adam’s Apples.”[100] Hottinger says that at Tripoli grows a tree called Almaus, or Adam’s apple, with a green head, and leaves like outspread fingers, no branches, but only leaves, and with a fruit like a bean-pod, of delicious flavor, and an odor of roses. Buntingius, in his Itinerary, describes an Adam’s apple which he tasted at Alexandria, and he said the taste was like pears, and the clusters of prodigious size, with twenty in each cluster, like magnificent bunches of grapes. But the most remarkable fact about them was that, if one of the fruit were cut with a knife, the figure of a crucifix was found to be contained in it.[101] And this tree was supposed to have been the forbidden tree, and the fruit to have thus brought hope as it also brought death to the eater. Nider, “In Formicario,” also relates that this fruit, thus marked with the form of the Crucified, grows in Granada.[102]