The story of Lot and his daughters as told in Genesis in one of the Biblical passages most notorious for its obscenity; let us see, however, what appears to have been its original meaning. When the aged Lôṭ and his family were saved from the Divine judgment on Sodom and Gomorrha, which converted those cities into a sea of bitumen, he left his wife behind him, converted into a pillar of salt, at a point of the coast of the Dead Sea, which is still shown to credulous travellers, and lived in a cave with his two unmarried daughters. These made their old father drunk in two successive nights, and perpetrated with him an act of unchastity which is to us almost unmentionable (Gen. XIX. 30–38). But the science of Mythology has often saved the honour and moral worth of primitive humanity by restoring the original mythological meaning of many a story; and so here we shall be able to prove that the Lôṭ-story, in the form in which we have received it, is only the tradition of the myth of the Sun and the Night, the understanding of which was lost in a later unmythological generation. Through the clever succession of ideas suggested by the solar theory, the science of Mythology on Aryan ground at one blow caused the ideal heights of Olympus to tower in their original purity above the endless chain of scandalous acts which mythology misunderstood attributed to the immoral inhabitants of the mountain of the Gods; and the method which guides us in these studies will aim at the same result on the domain of Hebrew mythology.
We return to Lôṭ. This name (formed from the root lûṭ ‘to cover’) denotes ‘he who covers.’ ‘Darkness covers the earth, and clouds the nations’ (Is. LX. 2). ‘For I did not shrink before the Darkness, when thick darkness covered (everything) before my face’ (Job XXIII. 17). ‘Thou hast pressed us down to the dwelling-place of the sea-monsters, and covered us over with deep shadow’ (Ps. XLIV. 20 [19]). The Semitic designations of darkness are mostly formed from roots denoting ‘to cover’: so e.g. ʿalâṭâ in Hebrew, ʿishâ in Arabic;[[523]] and the most prominent Semitic word for Night, layil, laylâ, etymologically means only something that covers.[[524]] In Aryan languages also, the Sanskrit Varuṇa and the Greek οὔρανος, which denote the overclouded sky, are formed from the root var ‘to cover,’ in opposition to the bright day-sky, Mitra.[[525]] Keeping on Semitic ground, we find in Arabic copious illustrations of this conception. The words ġashiya, damasa, ġatha, saja, etc. (compare ġardaḳat al-leyl, taʾaṭṭam al-leyl), combine the notions of Darkness and Covering-up. Accordingly the coming on of night is expressed by janna al-ẓalâm, literally ‘the darkness has covered up’ (e.g. Romance of ʿAntar, V. 80. 3); and for the simple words ‘of an evening,’ or ‘at night,’ the Arabic expression is taḥt al-leyl ‘under the night,’[[526]] or fuller taḥt astâr al-ẓalâm ‘under the veils of the night’ (ʿAntar, X. 70, 1); and the Night is above the day, ‘aleyhâ.’[[527]] The Night is a garment or carpet spread out over the Day. ‘It is he,’ it is said in the Ḳorân (Sûr. XXV. v. 49), ‘who made the Night as a garment or veil for you.’ ‘We have made the Night as a clothing’ (Sûr. LXXVIII. v. 10).[[528]] The Arabic poet Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî uses the most palpable expression for this conception of the darkness of night. Describing his swift camels, on which he traversed great distances at Night, he says (I. 131. v. 4) ‘in their swift course they tore the mantle of night,’ i.e. they ran so quickly that they unrolled the garment which covers the surface of the earth at night. On this conception of the nature of Night I believe a peculiar expression in the Arabic language to be based. In the old classical Arabic, nights which either have no moonshine at all, or have none at the beginning and only a little quite at the end, are called layâlin durʿun; and when a verb is required, adraʿa al-shahr is said. This adraʿa is unquestionably a denominative verb from dirʿ, which signifies a ‘breast-plate,’ or a breast-covering of any sort. The Arabic expressions just quoted are founded on the idea that the breast (al-ṣadr), i.e. the upper side, the first part, of such nights is dark, covered by a garment, so that only the uncovered lower side or end is visible. In the cosmogony of Mohammedan legends, Night is represented as a curtain, ḥijâb.[[529]]
The clothing of the Night is of black colour, leylâ ḥâlikat al-jilbâb, as is said in Arabic,[[530]] (compare μελάμπεπλος νύξ[[531]]), a ‘pitchy mantle,’ as Shakespeare says,
The day begins to break, and night is fled
Whose pitchy mantle overveil’d the earth.
King Henry VI. First Part, II. 2.[[532]]
And in Arabic poetry also we meet with night described as a ‘pitchy mantle.’ For the poet Abû-l-Shibl says in a remarkable elegy[[533]]:
Shamsun kaʾanna-ẓ-ẓalâma albasahâ * thauban min-az-zifti au min-al-ḳîrî
A sun, as if darkness had clothed him
With a garment of resin or pitch.