The myth views the Sun from the point of view of his rapid course, hastening and continuous motion, or steady march forwards.
Like a bridegroom coming out of the bridal chamber,
Who exults like a hero to run a course.
Ps. XIX. 6 [5].
Hence fiery, rapid horses are attributed to the Sun both in the classical mythology and in Indian and Persian,[[322]] and no less so in the Hebrew. The latter may be inferred from the fact that in the Hebrew worship in Canaan there were horses dedicated to the Sun. King Josiah, the zealot for Jahveh, was the first to abolish this worship (2 Kings XXIII. 11). And Heinrich Heine gives the jesting couplet:—
Phoebus lashed his steeds of fire
In the Sun’s own cab with ire.[[323]]
To the same mythical conception must be referred the Wings assigned to the Sun or the Dawn, which are mentioned very frequently in the classical mythology.[[324]] Just as the Egyptians and the Assyrians[[325]] in their monuments express this aspect of the sun by the picture of a winged solar disc, so the Hebrews, although they did not give expression to their ideas in monuments and imitations which might have been preserved to the present time, have in the extant fragments of their poetical literature left behind them confirmation of the fact that they conceived of the Sun and the Dawn in the same way. As they called the wind ‘winged,’ so that the monotheistic singer imagines Jahveh as ‘flying on the wings of the wind’ (Ps. XVIII. 11 [10]), so he binds wings also to the rapidly increasing light of the Dawn:—
If I take the wings of the Dawn,
And go down at the uttermost parts of the sea.[[326]]