To the brightness of the glitter of thy spear.—Hab. III. 11.
The rays of the moon also are here designated arrows.
Esau is a hairy man, Jacob a smooth man (Gen. XXVII. 11). ‘The first came out red, quite like a hairy mantle’ (XXV. 25). For the present we will put the redness aside, and pay particular attention to the element of hairiness. Long locks of hair and a long beard are mythological attributes of the Sun. The Sun’s rays are compared with locks or hairs on the face or head of the Sun.
Helios is called by the Greeks the yellow-haired; and in Greek poetry χρυσοκόμης or ἀκερσοκόμης is a frequent epithet of solar gods and heroes. A Latin poet also calls the sun’s rays Crines Phoebi.[[381]] In an American legend the Sun-god Bocsika is introduced as an old man with a long beard; the Viracochaya of the Peruvians, the Quetzalcoatl of the Toltecs, the Coxcox of the Chichimecs, solar figures all of them, possess this strongly emphasized characteristic of the long beard.[[382]] Indeed, this feature is sometimes ascribed in popular fancy to historical personages, as e.g. to Julius Caesar, who was imagined to have been born with long hair; and his name was popularly explained from this circumstance—caesaries.
We must here consider a point in the history of Art, which occupied archeologists about the years 1820–30, and especially the meritorious numismatist Ekhel. I refer to the representation of Janus as biceps, vultu uno barbato, altero imberbi, which some regarded as the old traditional conception of Janus, while others thought it comparatively modern; the question of age is, however, not a question of principle at all.[[383]] In any case it may be assumed as probable that this picture of the two-headed ‘Opener,’[[384]] is not an accidental idea, devoid of all mythical import; but that on the contrary, the two bearded and beardless representations of the Sun-god express two points in the Sun’s life; he appears in the morning and evening (as ‘Opener’ and ‘Closer,’ Janus Patulcius and Janus Clusius) with smooth, beardless face, i.e. without powerful rays, but in the middle of the day with a large beard and hairy face.[[385]]
When the Sun sets and leaves his place to the darkness, or when the powerful summer sun is succeeded by the weak rays of the winter sun, then Samson’s long locks,[[386]] in which alone his strength lies, are cut off through the treachery of his deceitful concubine Delilah, the ‘languishing,[[387]] languid,’ according to the meaning of the name (Delîlâ).[[388]] The Beaming Apollo, moreover, is called the Unshaven; and Minos cannot conquer the solar hero Nisos, till the latter loses his golden hair.[[389]]
It is then clear what the description of Esau as a man born hairy in contradistinction to the smooth Jacob denotes—the same as the epithet îsh baʿal sêʿâr ‘hairy man’ (2 Kings I. 8) in the description of Elijah: the rays of the sun, whose mythical representative Esau is. It is a more difficult question whether the solar character of this hero is capable of proof from his name. If, not to have recourse to non-Hebraic languages, we derive ʿÊsâv from the Hebrew verb ʿâsâ ‘to do, accomplish,’ and explain it as the ‘Accomplisher, Worker,’ or the like, then this description of a solar hero is suitable enough for a legend of civilisation, which sees in the sun the power that brings to perfection the corn and fruit, and produces in human society a legally secured condition of social life, in short, the Perfecting Agent. But such a description is less consonant with the sense possible to the ancient myth, in which the ideas and conceptions just mentioned were not yet developed. If then the name ʿÊsâv cannot be etymologically explained in the spirit of the oldest mythical circle of ideas, we are necessarily driven to conjecture that the appellation does not belong to the oldest stratum of the materials of Hebrew legends, but was introduced by a legend of civilisation. This conjecture appears all the more probable when we remember that Jacob’s hostile brother in the Bible itself bears another name besides Esau, much more expressive and suited to the earliest period of the formation of legends; namely, Edôm ‘the Red.’ In later times, when the original signification of the myths was entirely forgotten, these two names Esau and Edom were found in the story of the brothers’ quarrel, as appellations of the brother with whom Jacob fights. Attempts were made to harmonise them; and the name ‘the Red’ was connected with the red pottage (Gen. XXV. 30), as well as with the more characteristic feature belonging to the old mythic stage, that the hostile brother was admônî, ‘of a reddish colour.’ But the name Esau also can be rescued for the old myth, if we connect this name with the Arabic aʿtha ‘hairy,’ which is etymologically related to the name Esau.[[390]] Thus the name Esau would come in contact with the above-discussed mythic characteristic of the Solar hero, that he is an îsh sêʿâr, a hairy man.[[391]] In the Phenician mythology the antagonist of Usov (whom those who do not utterly reject the authenticity of the statements of Sanchuniathon identify with Esau) lives in tents and is called Shâmînrûm ‘the high heaven,’[[392]] i.e. the dark night-sky. The identity of the conceptions Abh-râm and Yaʿakôbh would find further confirmation here. We are led to a different series of solar characteristics by the name Edôm, an unquestionably ancient designation of the Solar hero. We will consider together the names Edôm and Lâbhân, both appellations of hostile brothers of the Night-Sky. But before we begin this, I will mention another contest of Jacob’s, to which the original writer devotes only a few lines: ‘Then Jacob remained behind alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the morning rose. And he saw that he could not do anything to him, so he knocked his thigh-socket, and Jacob’s thigh-socket was dislocated in wrestling with him. And he said, Let me go, for the morning has risen’ (Gen. XXXII. 25–27 [24–26]). Thus Jacob fights with a man who cannot conquer him, but whom he must let off at the rise of the morning. This is the Dawn, who wrestles with the end of the night, and in the end breaks loose, so as to go up to the sky. The Night is a limping figure (ver. 32 [31]). This again is a feature in the myth of the hero of darkness, which we meet with also in classical mythology, e.g. in Hermes, κυλλοποδύων.[[393]] It probably indicates the opposite to the swiftness and the rapid never-ceasing course of the day, the sun and the dawn.
§ 11. Jacob is pursued and made to fight by the Red and by the White. Both words are designations of the same thing, i.e. the Sun. It strikes us as very strange that the myth should call the same object now red, now white. To appreciate this fact, we must think of the various stages which the sense of colour has to pass through in old times, until it is fully developed. Even in much later times we come across extraordinary fluctuations of language on Semitic ground in the designation of colours for solar phenomena. As the demonstration of this fact appears important to our present subject and things in connexion with it, the reader will excuse me for pausing longer than usual at this point and taking some excursions from the centre of our investigations. The names of colours were in ancient times very vague; the primitive man could not elevate himself to make any sharply defined distinction and classification of colours. Red and white are therefore here not exactly red and white, according to our modern distinction of these colours, but rather light or bright-coloured. It is a great merit of the late Lazarus Geiger, too early called home, to have most clearly exhibited this phase of the history of the development of ideas and their expression in language, and illustrated it with the light of psychology and comparative philology.[[394]] His ingenious researches have raised to a certainty the theory that the capacity for distinguishing colours has arisen, both in the individual and in the whole race, in the course of history, through gradual general development; that its beginning follows very late after the beginnings of other intellectual capacities; and that, even after man had grasped the distinction of different classes of colour, the fixing of his conceptions of colour made very slow progress, so that he often attributes first one and then another colour to the same object. The shading-off of colours, when once understood, has yet been fixed in the human mind with such difficulty, that we find in many languages the most helpless wavering in the use of names of colours. As this phenomenon, important in man’s mental development, is no less so in relation to the origin and the understanding of the elements of myths, we will pause over Geiger’s disquisitions, to consider still further the fluctuating nature of the designations of colour in language, and especially to notice how far from clear and unsullied a reflexion impressions of colour cast on language, their natural medium of expression. We will however stay in the neighbourhood of the proper subject of investigation, and bring only Semitic words under consideration. Let us pick out the designations of Gold in this field. We cannot say in general terms of the Semitic languages that in the designation of gold and silver they do not express the optical difference between them, as a scholiast remarks in reference to Homer; for the appellations both of gold as brilliant, shimmering, and of silver as pale, prove that at least the different shine of the two metals was observed at the stage of the formation of language.[[395]] Far less definite, however, than this distinction of the two according to the general impression made on the sight, is the designation of the sensation made by each separately. The appellations of gold in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, zâhâbh, dahabhâ, ḏahab, denote brilliant in general; whereas the Assyrian and Phenician[[396]] word for gold, ḥuraṣu (which is the same as the Hebrew chârûṣ), expresses no optical sensation.[[397]] The former appellations describe an optical sensation; but no definite colour-sensation. Indeed, even a late Arabic poet says of gold: al-ḏahab al-nârî,[[398]] ‘the fire-like gold,’ which, if a description of colour, is a very vague one. Ruʾbâ b. al-ʿAjjâj, an Arabic poet living in the second century of the Hijrâ, says:[[399]]
Hal yanfaʿunî kaḏabun sichtîtu * au fiḍḍatun au dahabun kibrîtu?
Will a great lie save me? * or silver, or sulphur-gold?