The legend is a Babylonian attempt to explain the existence of death. It is like, and yet unlike, the story in Genesis. The biblical Adam lost the gift of immortality because his desire to become as God, knowing good and evil, had caused him to be driven from the Paradise in which grew the tree of life. Adapa, on the other hand, was already endowed with knowledge by his creator Ea, and his loss of immortality was due, not to his disobedience, but to his obedience to the commands of the god. Adam was banished from the Garden of Eden, “lest he should put forth his hand and take of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”; while in the Babylonian legend it was Anu himself who was reluctant that one who had entered the gate of heaven should remain a mere mortal man. Babylonian polytheism allowed the existence of divided counsels among the gods; the monotheism of Israel made this impossible. There was no second Yahveh to act in contradiction to the first; Yahveh was at once the creator of man and the God of heaven, and there was none to dispute His will. There is no room for Anu in the Book of Genesis; and as Ea, the creator of Adapa, was unwilling that the man he had created should become an immortal god, so Yahveh, the creator of Adam, similarly denied to him the food of immortal life. That there is a connection between the Biblical story and the Babylonian legend is, however, rendered certain by the geography of the Biblical Paradise. It was a garden in the land of Eden, and Edin was the Sumerian name of the “plain” of Babylonia in which Eridu stood. Two of the rivers which watered it were the Tigris and Euphrates, the two streams, in fact, which we are specially told had been created and named by Ea at the beginning of time. Indeed, the name that is given to the Tigris in the Book of Genesis is its old Sumerian title, which survived in later days only in the religious literature. Even the strange statement that “a river went out of Eden,” which “was parted and became into four heads,” is explained by the cuneiform texts. The Persian Gulf was called “the Salt River,” and, thanks to its tides, was regarded as the source of the four streams which flowed into it from their “heads” or springs in the north. On early Babylonian seals, Ea, the god of the sea, is depicted as pouring sometimes the four rivers, sometimes only the Tigris and Euphrates, from a vase that he holds in his hands. Years ago I drew attention to a Sumerian hymn in which reference is made to the garden and sacred tree of Eridu, the Babylonian Paradise in the plain of Eden. Dr. Pinches has since discovered the last line of the hymn, in which the picture is completed by a mention of the rivers which watered the garden on either side. It is thus that the text reads—