"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations...." It is the deeds done in the past lives of Jeremiah that accompany him on his return to earth; God could not, in an arbitrary fashion, have conferred on him the gift of prophecy had he not acquired it by his efforts in a past life; unless, here too, we altogether abandon reason and go back to a capricious or unjust--consequently altogether impossible--God. THE KABALA. Contact with the Babylonians, during the Captivity, brought about a rapid development in the Hebrews, who were at that time far more advanced souls than those that animated the bodies of their fathers,[156] and taught them many important details of religious instruction. It was then that they learned the doctrine of rebirth and that the Kabala came into being.[157] In it the cycle of rebirths is called Gil'gool'em[158] or the "revolving of the Incorporeal" in search of the "promised land." This promised land, the Christian Paradise, or Buddhist Nirvana, was symbolised by Palestine; the soul in its pilgrimage was brought to this abode of bliss,[159] and, according to the allegory, "the bodies of Hebrews buried in a foreign land contained an animistic principle which only found rest when, by the 'revolving of the Incorporeal,' the immortal fragment had returned to the promised land."[160] There are other aspects from which this "revolution of souls" may be regarded. Certain Kabalists speak of it as a kind of purgatory in which, by means of this "revolving," the purging of the soul is brought about before it enters paradise. In this connection, H. P. Blavatsky states that in the language of the Initiates the words "soul" (_ame_) and "atom" were synonyms, and were frequently used for each other. She says that the "revolution of souls" was in reality only the revolving of the atoms of the bodies which are continually transmigrating from one body to another throughout the various kingdoms of nature. From this point of view, it would seem that "Gil'gool'em" is more especially the cycle of atomic transmigration: _Resurrection_. The doctrine of the reincarnation of the human soul, however, is clearly set forth in the _Zohar_: