We cannot here enter into the question of the geographical position of the ʿÊden of the Bible, nor even inquire whether the original of the idea of Eden is found in the corresponding feature of Iranian tradition; but it may be assumed that the Biblical account of Eden also arose at Babylon. It may indeed be generally presumed that the Biblical accounts of the Cosmogony and the origin of all things had not, like the matter of the old mythology, lived a long life of perhaps many thousand years in the mouths of successive generations, before the first beginnings of literary record were reached. On the contrary, we find in these parts of the Bible so artistic a perfection of description, such a harmonious roundness of narrative, that we are justified in presuming that they were not preceded by the oral concatenations of a long life of tradition, but are rather sublime imaginations which were written down soon after they were conceived in the educated circles of the nation, so as to become the common property of the whole people. There was in this a double stimulus received from the Babylonians: first, to meditate on the earliest things—the origin of the world, man, and other things of a general nature—and secondly, to produce writings on these things. The Prophets of the Hebrews at Babylon unquestionably exercised a great influence on the production of these narratives, and gladly admitted whatever tended to promote the deepening of the idea of Jahveh, as elements in their religions conception of the world. For the Prophet did not occupy a position towards the masses like the member of a corporation which opposes the people; he grew up out of the people, and raised himself above them by his individual power of thought. Yet it is easily intelligible that the Prophet, while gladly appropriating the idea of Jahveh as bôrê ‘Creator,’ would not set much store by the petty details of the cosmogonic imagination. The second Isaiah, the Prophet of Babylon _par excellence_, goes so far as to exhort his people, ‘Record ye not beginnings, and antiquities contemplate ye not’ (Is. XLIII. 18); still he does not go into open opposition to this mental tendency, and sees nothing dangerous in it—the less so, as he has himself unconsciously adopted its conclusions and often employed them in his masterly addresses.