Another notable point in the myth of Isaac is blindness. ‘And when Isaac was old, his eyes became too dim to see’ (Gen. XXVII. 1). It is an idea peculiarly mythical (which found an echo in poetry), to regard the Sun as an Eye, which looks down with its sharp sight upon the earth. In the Egyptian monuments and in the Book of the Dead the Sun is often represented as an eye, provided with wings and feet. To the same conception are also due the so-called mystic eye which is often met with on Etruscan vessels of clay, and the part played by the eye in the representation of Osiris.[[296]] The sun is called in the Malacassa language masovanru, and in Dayak matasu, both of which expressions denote oculus diei.[[297]] In the Polynesian mythology the sun is the left eye of Tangaloa, the highest god of heaven, hence the Eye of Heaven.[[298]] The sun accordingly possesses also the attributes of the eye. Thus in the Hebrew poetry we meet with the Eyelashes[[299]] (i.e. rays) of the Dawn, ʿaphʿappê shachar (Job III. 9, XLI. 10), as in the Greek with ἁμέρας βλέφαρον (Soph. Ant. 104),[[300]] and in the Arabic with ḥawâjib al-shams. This notion has so completely become an idiom of the Arabic language, where the mythical force of the ‘sun’s eyelashes’ has retired into the background, that we even find the singular: ‘the sun’s eyelash is risen,’ (ṭalaʿa ḥâjib al-shams) or ‘set’ (ġâba ḥâjib al-shams).[[301]]
Among more recent poets Shakespeare is most familiar with the expression eye, eye of heaven, as descriptive of the sun:
Though thy speech doth fail,
One eye thou hast to look to heaven for grace;
The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.
King Henry VI. Pt. I. I. 4.
Or with taper light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish.
King John, IV. 2.
All places that the eye of heaven visits