Menahem explains the letters and the words to the king, who exclaims: "This certainly is the Garden of Eden!" The king then cries out: "Who is there upon this gate?" and a voice answers: "This is the gate of the Garden of Eden, and no uncircumcised man may enter it." Accordingly, in the night-time, Alexander circumcises the flesh of his foreskin, and his physicians cure him immediately by means of herbs.
On the morrow the king says unto the gate-keepers: "Give me a token and I shall go on my way." They then give him a box in which was something like a piece of the eye. The king stretches forth his hand to lift it from the ground, but is unable to do so. He then cries out and says: "What have you given me?" They reply: "This is an eye." "What is the use of it to me?" the king says. "This is the sign," say they, "that thine eye is not satisfied with riches, nor will thy desire be satisfied by thy roaming over the earth." "But how," said Alexander, "can I lift it from the earth?" "Place," say they, "some dust upon the eye, and then thou canst do what thou wilt with it, and this is a sign that thine eye will not be satisfied with riches until thou return to the earth from which thou wast taken."
The king does so: he scatters some dust on the eye, and, lifting it from the ground, places it in his treasure-house, to be a remembrance of his having obtained a token from the Garden of Eden.
The substance of the foregoing narrative is identical with that of the Iter ad Paradisum.[1] There are, of course, differences of detail due to the necessity of the translator or adapter conforming to the tastes and ideas of his Western readers.
- ↑ It may also be remarked that the story of the stone is introduced into the Ethiopia and Arabic versions, both of unknown date (Budge, Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great., ii. 1896, p. 271). It comes from the Talmud (Tamid, 32b), which with the Midrash has supplied many episodes to the Jewish Romance (Gaster, loc. cit. p. 489)
