to leave the mystery and attend to this life, casting out
desire to know what God is or what nature is, as well as desire for
particular things in this world which long ago I told men to
disregard.... A flight of doves distracted his attention, and a moment
after the door of the lecture-room opened and Saddoc and Manahem
appeared, carrying somebody dead or who had fainted. As they came across
the domed gallery towards the embrasure Jesus heard Manahem say: he will
return to himself as soon as we get him into the air. And they placed
him where Jesus had been sitting. A little water, Saddoc cried, and
Jesus ran to the well, and returning with a cup of water he stood by
sprinkling the worn, grey face. The heat overcame me, he murmured, but I
shall soon be well and then you will bear me back to hear--The sentence
did not finish, and Jesus said: thou'lt be better here with me, Hazael,
than listening to discourses that fatigue the mind. Mathias is very
insistent, Manahem muttered. He is indeed, Saddoc answered. And while
Jesus sat by Hazael, fearing that his life might go out at any moment,
Manahem reproved Saddoc, saying that whereas duty is the cause of all
good, we have only to look beyond our own doors to see evil everywhere.
Even so, Saddoc answered, what wouldst thou? That the world, Manahem
answered, was created by good and evil angels. Whereupon Saddoc asked
him if he numbered Lilith, Adam's first wife, among the evil angels. A
question Manahem did not answer, and, being eager to tell the story, he
turned to Jesus, who he guessed did not know it, and began at once to
tell it, after warning Jesus that it was among their oldest stories
though not to be found in the Scriptures. She must be numbered among the
evil angels, he said, remembering that Saddoc had put the question to
him, for she rebuked Adam, who took great delight in her hair, combing
it for his pleasure from morn to eve in the garden, and left him, saying
she could abide him no longer. At which words, Jesus, Adam sorrowed, and
his grief was such that God heard his sighs and asked him for what he
was grieving, and he said: I live in great loneliness, for Lilith, O
Lord, has left me, and I beg thee to send messengers who will bring her
back. Whereupon God took pity on his servant Adam and bade his three
angels, Raphael, Gabriel and Michael, to go away at once in search of
Lilith, whom they found flying over the sea, and her answer to them was
that her pleasure