Chodesh and yarēach are masculine words; lebanah is feminine. But nowhere throughout the Old Testament is the moon personified, and in only one instance is it used figuratively to represent a person. This is in the case of Jacob's reading of Joseph's dream, already referred to, where he said—
"Behold I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me."
And his father quickly rebuked him, saying—
"What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?"
Here Jacob understands that the moon (yarēach) stands for a woman, his wife. But in Mesopotamia, whence his grandfather Abraham had come out, Sin, the moon-god, was held to be a male god, high indeed among the deities at that time, and superior even to Samas, the sun-god. Terah, the father of Abraham, was held by Jewish tradition to have been an especial worshipper of the moon-god, whose great temple was in Haran, where he dwelt.
Wherever the land of Uz may have been, at whatever period Job may have lived, there and then it was an iniquity to worship the moon or the moon-god. In his final defence to his friends, when the "three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes," Job, justifying his life, said—
"If I beheld the sun when it shined,
Or the moon walking in brightness;
And my heart hath been secretly enticed,
And my mouth hath kissed my hand:
This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judges:
For I should have lied to God that is above."
The Hebrews, too, were forbidden to worship the sun, the moon, or the stars, the host of heaven, and disobeyed the commandment both early and late in their history. When Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness in the plain over against the Red Sea, he said to them—
"The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. . . . Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: