Now fortunately this simple form is preserved to us in the name Lêvî, and we may therefore unhesitatingly affirm that Levi means ‘Serpent.’ Mythology speaks of a serpent that devours the sun, of a Storm-Serpent, which the Sun assails with his rays; they are the serpents, dragons and monsters with whom the Solar heroes of the Aryan mythology wage their contests, which Herakles even in his cradle crushes and afterwards overpowers at Lerna and Nemea; the same, which sometimes, on the other hand, keep their ground and come forth victorious from the battle with the Sun, when the Sun, repulsed by a boisterous Storm, is forced to abandon the celestial battle-field.
A serpent on the way,
An adder on the path,
That bites the horse’s heels,
So that the rider falls backwards,
(Gen. XLIX. 17), they are called in the Hebrew hymn of the battle of the Rain-serpent with the Sun-horse.[[515]] It is this same serpent that bears a ‘fiery flying serpent’ (sârâph meʿôphêph, Is. XIV. 29), i.e. the Lightning; that in common with the lightning is called the ‘Flying Serpent’ (nâchâsh bârîach, Is. XXVII. 1), for whose conqueror the Sun, the monotheistic ideas of later times substituted Jahveh ‘who with his might lashes the sea, and who with his intelligence pierces the monster (Rahab); by whose breath the heaven becomes bright, whose hand has stabbed the flying serpent’ (Job XXVI. 12, 13). The hissing of this flying Serpent is said in an American myth to be the Thunder; and the Lightning is called by the Algonquins an immense serpent, which God spat out.[[516]] The Rain itself is regarded in mythology as a serpent; the columns of water which fall in a serpentine course to the earth are called the ‘Crooked Serpent’ (nâchâsh ʿaḳallâthôn). The flying Lightning, the crooked Serpent (both livyâthân), and the great Monster in the sea, which tries to devour the Sun when he sinks into the sea in the evening, are assailed by the Sun, and the monotheistic prophet transfers the attack upon them to Jahveh (Is. XXVII. 1; compare Ps. LXXVI. 4 [3]). It is to be noted that, in speaking of night and storms, even the later poetry uses the expression that they ‘bite, wound,’ because the Serpent of darkness and tempest bites and hurts the Sun. ‘I said, Surely the darkness will bite me (yeshûphênî), and the night [will bite] the light near me’ (Ps. CXXXIX. 11); and so of the storm (Job IX. 17). Everywhere here the verb is used which is employed in Gen. III. 15 to denote that the serpent wounds the heel of the man. In these passages of poetry, therefore, we find an echo of the myth which declares that the Serpent of the storm, when victorious, bites, wounds, or even swallows down the hero of the Sun. We encounter the Rain described still more clearly as a serpent in the sacred literature of the Parsees, in the first chapter of the Vendidâd, verse 2, where it is said that Ahuramazdao created Airyana-vaêjô to be the best of all lands, whilst in opposition to his act the Deadly Aegrô mainyus created the ‘flowing serpent’ (azhim raoidhitem) and the snow. Professor Haug was the discoverer of this explanation of the azhim raoidhitem;[[517]] nevertheless he translates it ‘a powerful serpent,’ as he thinks that the word ‘flowing’ can be only understood of the ejection of the venom, or of the writer’s remembrance of a warm spring which may have existed in the land Airyana-vaêjô. It is a very obvious conjecture that the flowing serpent means the Rain; the more so because it is mentioned in conjunction with Snow.[[518]] The last shoots of this mythological conception are discovered in the system of the Ophites, in which the serpent represents a moist substance.[[519]]
Levi (with Simeon, whose etymological value is no longer determinable), is introduced in the Hebrew myth (Gen. XXXIV.) as the slayer of Chamôr ‘the Ass’ and Shekem (see above, p. 125). Of the same two brothers it is said in the fragments of hymns already quoted, sometimes that ‘for their amusement they destroyed the bull’ (XLIX. 6)—the horned solar animal whose horns (rays) the storm-serpents eradicate (ʿiḳḳerû). It is at the same time perfectly clear in this interpretation that no difficulty at all resides in what is always troubling the expounders of these passages—in the fact, namely, that these brothers are said in the hymn (or Blessing) to have killed a bull (shôr), whilst no mention is made in the narrative of any such act.
§ 15. In the Biblical story of the family of Jacob we have met with a few of those myths of Love which the Aryan mythology developed in such variety and richness. One of the best known myths of this kind is the story of Oedipus and Jokaste. The king of Thebes received a sad oracle, declaring that he would be exposed to serious danger from a son who would be born to him by his wife Jokaste. He therefore exposed Oedipus, his new-born son; and the latter, having been marvellously saved from death and educated at Corinth, travelled to Thebes when grown to manhood, but killed his father on the way. Arrived at Thebes, he delivered the city from the terror of the Sphinx, and was proclaimed king, after which he married his mother Jokaste. When he received information of the two horrible crimes that he had unconsciously committed, the murder of his father and the incest with his mother, in despair he put out his own eyes and came to a tragic end. Everyone knows this celebrated Hellenic story, which in the Oedipus-Tragedy was worked out powerfully in its ethical bearings so as to excite the emotions and touch the heart.
Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and dies, a blind and worn-out old man. The hero of the Sun murders the father who begot him—the Darkness; he shares his bed with his mother—the Evening-glow, from whose womb (in the character of the Morning-glow) he had been born; he dies blind—the Sun sets. We have seen above that the setting sun loses the bright light of its eyes.[[520]]
What a universal act of the human mind, and how little affected by ethnological distinctions, the production of myths is, and what agreement is consequently discovered in the direction taken by this myth-formation among the most dissimilar peoples and races of the earth, will be most strikingly brought home to us by the discovery that this very myth of marriage with a mother occurs among the Hebrews just as much as among the Aryans. We have already seen that Reuben marries his father’s wife Bilhah. We observe that in the Hebrew myth the hero of Darkness occupies the central position, whereas in the Hellenic it is the Solar hero who shares his mother’s bed. But while the myth of Reuben and Bilhah is only mentioned quite shortly in the Old Testament, there is another myth which has grown into a long story in the Biblical narrative—that of Lot’s daughters. But before we pass to this, I wish to call attention to a concurrence which I believe has never yet been noticed, but which may excite to further meditations. The whole story of Oedipus, quite in the form in which we find it among the Hellenes, occurs also as an Arabic tradition, without change except in the persons. One of the many Nimrods which the Arabic legend seized upon (six Namâridâ ‘Nimrods’ are commonly reckoned),[[521]] son of Kenaʿan and Salchâ, is the Oedipus of the Arabic story. In consequence of an intimidating prophecy, he is exposed by his parents, that he may die and not be a source of danger to his father. But he is miraculously suckled by a tigress (whence his name Nimrûd is said to be derived, for nimr is ‘tiger’ in Arabic), and subsequently brought up by the inhabitants of a neighbouring village. When grown to manhood he contrives to bring together a great army, and becomes involved in a war against his father Kenaʿan, whom he slays in the decisive battle. He marches in triumph into his capital, and marries his mother Salchâ. Thus the outlines of the Oedipus-story have been attached to the solar hero of the Semites, Nimrod the hunter. The story is told at full length in the long introduction to the Romance of ʿAntar (I. 13 seq.), and I leave it to readers competent to judge, to decide between two possibilities. Either the Arabs borrowed from the Greeks and simply took to themselves this version of the Oedipus-story; in this case the remarkable fact of such a transference would provoke a searching enquiry into the middle points between Greece and Arabia, which made it possible to borrow mythology, and also into the extent and nature of such borrowings. Or we may assume that the story was independently and gradually formed by the Arabs without external influence, so that the elements of the Arabian as of the Greek story reach back to the primeval age of the creation of myths, and that with the Arabs also it was originally a myth of the war of the Sun with the Night, and his union with the Evening-glow. The latter view is favoured by the circumstance that in the Arabian version the story of Oedipus putting out his eyes is wanting—a feature which would certainly have been taken if the Arabian story were only a borrowed one. But the above-mentioned questions ought to be investigated before any decision in favour of one of these possibilities can be arrived at, however inclined I may be from personal feeling towards the assumption of borrowing.[[522]]