Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

§ VIII.

MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS.

With the important exception of reference to the change effected in the Jewish doctrine of spirits, and its resulting influence on Christian theology, by the transformation of the mythical Ahriman of the old Persian religion into the archfiend Satan, but slight allusion has been made in these pages to the myths and legends of the Semitic race. Under this term, borrowed from the current belief in their descent from Shem, are included extant and extinct people, the Assyrians, Chaldeans or Babylonians, Phœnicians, Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Ethiopians.

The mythology of the Aryan nations has had the advantage of the most scholarly criticism, and the light which this has thrown upon the racial connection of peoples between whom all superficial likeness had long disappeared, as well as upon the early condition of their common ancestors, is of the greatest value as aid to our knowledge of the mode of man’s intellectual and spiritual growth. And the comparisons made between the older and cruder forms underlying the elaborated myth and the myths of semi-barbarous races have supported conclusions concerning man’s primitive state identical with those deduced from the material relics of the Ancient and Newer Stone Ages, namely, that the savage races of to-day represent not a degradation to which man has sunk, but a condition out of which all races above the savage have, through much tribulation, emerged. An important exception to this has, however, been claimed on behalf of at least one branch of the Semitic race—namely, the Hebrews or Jews. This claim has rested on their assumed selection by the Deity for a definite purpose in the ordering and directing of human affairs; but no assumption of supernatural origin can screen the documents of disputed authorship and uncertain meaning on which that claim is based from the investigation applied to all ancient records; nor can the materials elude dissection because hitherto regarded as organic parts of revelation. The real difficulties are in the structure of the language and in the scantiness of the material as contrasted with the flexile and copious mythology of the Aryan race. And the investigation has been in some degree checked by the mistaken dicta of authorities such as M. Renan and the late Baron Bunsen; the former contending that “the Semites never had a mythology,” and the latter (although any statement of his carries far less weight) that “it is the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess none.”

But, independently of the refusal of the student of history to admit that exceptional place has been accorded of direct Divine purpose to any particular race, the discoveries of literatures much older than the Hebrew, and in which legends akin to those in the earlier books of the Old Testament are found, together with the proofs of historical connection between the peoples having these common legends, have given the refutation to the distinctive character of the Semitic race claimed by M. Renan. That a people dwelling for centuries, as the Hebrews did, in a land which was the common highway between the great nations of antiquity; a people subject to vicissitudes bringing them, as the pipkin between iron pots, into collision and subject relations to Egyptians, Persians, and other powerful folk, should remain uninfluenced in their intellectual speculations and religious beliefs, would indeed be a greater miracle than that which makes their literature inspired in every word and vowel-point. The remarkable collection of cuneiform inscriptions (so called from their wedge-like shape: Latin, cuneus, a wedge) on the baked clay cylinders and tablets of the vast libraries of Babylon and Nineveh, has brought out one striking fact, namely, that the Semitic civilisation, venerable as that is, was the product of, or at least, greatly influenced by, the culture of a non-Semitic people called the Akkadians, from a word meaning “highlanders.” These more ancient dwellers in the Euphrates valley and uplands were not only non-Semitic but non-Aryan, and probably racially connected with the complex group of peoples embracing the Tatar-Mongolians, the distinguishing features of whose religion are Shamanistic, with belief in magic in its manifold forms. “In Babylonia, under the non-Semitic Akkadian rule, the dominant creed was the fetish worship, with all its ritual of magic and witchcraft; and when the Semites conquered the country, the old learning of the land became the property of the priests and astrologers, and the Akkadian language the Latin of the Empire.”[56]

It was during the memorable period of the Exile that the historical records of the Jews underwent revision, and from that time dates the incorporation into them of legends and traditions which, invested with a purity and majesty distinctively Hebrew, were borrowed from the Babylonians, although primarily Akkadian. They are here, as elsewhere, the product of the childhood of the race, when it speculates and invents, framing its theory of the beginnings, their when and how; when it prattles of the Golden Age, which seems to lie behind, in the fond and not extinct delusion that “the old is better;” when it frames its fairy tales, weird or winsome, in explanation of the uncommon, the unknown, and the bewildering.

The Babylonian origin of the early biblical stories is now generally admitted, although the dogmas based upon certain of them still retard the acceptance of this result of modern inquiry in some quarters. That reluctance is suggestively illustrated in Dr. Wm. Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, where, turning to the heading “Deluge,” the reader is referred to “Flood” and thence to “Noah!”

So much for the legendary; but the analysis of the more strictly mythical, the names of culture-ancestors and heroes, sons of Anak and of God, scattered over the Pentateuch, is not so easy a matter. The most important work in this direction has been attempted by Dr. Goldziher,[57] but even his scholarship has failed to convince sympathetic readers that Abraham and Isaac are sun-myths, and that the twelve sons of Jacob are the zodiacal signs! Under the Professor’s etymological solvent the personality of the patriarchs disappears, and the charming idylls and pastorals of old Eastern life become but phases of the sun and the weather. The Hebrew, like the Aryan myth-maker, speaks of the relations of day and night, of gray morning and sunrise, of red sunset and the darkness of night, as of love and union, or strife and pursuit, or gloomy desire and coy evasion. Abh-râm is the High or Heaven-Father (from râm, “to be high”) with his numberless host of descendants. Yis-châk, commonly called Isaac, denotes “he who laughs,” and so the Laughing one, whom the High Father intends to slay, is the smiling day or the smiling sunset, which gets the worst of the contest with the night sky, and disappears. Sarah signifies princess, or the moon, the queen who rules over the great army glittering amidst the darkness. The expulsion of Hagar (derived from a root hajara, meaning “to fly,” and yielding the word hijrâ or “flight,” whence the Mohammadan Hegira) is the Semitic variant of that inexhaustible theme of all mythology, the battle of Day and Night; Hagar flying before the inconstant sun and the jealous moon. And so on through the whole range of leading characters in Hebrew history; Cain and Abel, in which Dr. Goldziher, to whom they are the sun and dark sky, overlooks the more likely explanation of the story as a quarrel between nomads and tillers of the soil; Jephthah, in which the sun-god kills at mid-day the dawn, his own offspring; Samson, or more correctly Shimshôn, from the Hebrew word for sun, the incidents of whose life, as expounded by Professor Steinthal,[58] are more clearly typical of the labours of the sun; Jonah and the fish, a story long ago connected with the myth of Herakles and Hêsionê; “as on occasion of the storm the dragon or serpent swallows the sun, so when he sets he is swallowed by a mighty fish, waiting for him at the bottom of the sea. Then when he appears again on the horizon, he is spat out on the shore by the sea-monster.”[59]

These bare references must suffice to show that there is in Hebrew literature a large body of material which must undergo the sifting and the criticism already applied with success to Indo-European and non-Aryan myth. This done, the Semitic race will contribute its share of evidence in support of those conditions under which it has been the main purpose of this book to show that myth has its birth and growth.