We see the same also in the extant Phenician myth of civilisation, which is narrated by the Sanchuniathon of Philo Herennius. Perverted and spoiled as the stories of the Phenicians may have been by the pen of the Greek author, who contemplated Phenician mythology through the medium of the Greek cosmogony, corrupted and Hellenised as the proper names especially are, yet these pieces of information are undoubtedly based on real stories which were current among the Phenicians. It is a pity to lavish on them so much profound thought and symbolising combination as has been done by Bunsen, Movers and many other scholars; but, on the other hand, it is an equal mistake to condemn the entire mass as a useless forgery and declare it unworthy of attention in investigating Phenician antiquity. The real task is rather to penetrate the bewildering labyrinth of misunderstandings to the simple and original. The confirmation given in the last few years by the cuneiform inscriptions to the Babylonica, which are referred to the reports of Berosus, ought to moderate any extreme scepticism on the subject of the Phenician affairs which are quoted from Sanchuniathon, Mochus and others.
The Phenician Cosmogony of Philo Herennius says that Chrysoros, who as the Opener, Navigator, and Smith has already appeared to us (pp. 98–9) to have a Solar character, was the progenitor of Ἄγρος or Ἀγροτής and Ἀγρύηρος, and says of these, ‘From them are derived the agriculturists and those who hunt with dogs. These latter are also called Ἀλῆται, or Wanderers to and fro. From them are derived Ἄμυνος and Μάγος, who taught men how to found villages and feed herds.’ This is only the Myth of Civilisation of the agriculturist again, which everywhere brings the commencement of agriculture, the foundation of cities and civilisation, into connexion with the Sun. As from Cain is descended Enoch, whose name is attached to the first city in the world, so from Chrysoros, the Phenician Cain, are derived those who first adapted their places of sojourn to the requirements of settled dwellings. In a word, the genealogy only asserts that the Sun occasions the choice of fixed dwellings and consequently of agricultural life. But the fact that the hunting and nomadic life[[577]] is introduced together with the origin of agriculture, and that the first commencement of the one is put into combination with the founders of the other, occasions some difficulty, which cannot be simply denied and put aside. Now it is certainly possible that the Myth of Civilisation among the Phenicians, in whose neighbourhood alongside of agricultural life nomadic life also was in full force—for their view extended over all Palestine and the valley of the Jordan—referred the origin even of the latter mode of life to the Sun, as the founder of all social life. But it is also possible that what Philo asserts on a Phenician authority concerning nomads and hunters is founded on a misunderstanding of the original information. For the sons of Chrysoros, the Sun, were evidently described as hunters and wanderers. Now Hunter and Wanderer are, as we have seen, attributes of the Sun, who shoots his rays at the monster of the storm, and is ‘a fugitive and a vagabond,’ engaged in a migration from east to west. Cain is an exile and wanderer, but not a nomad. But through misunderstanding the Solar hunter and wanderer may have been converted into the founder of the hunting and nomadic life. Even Bunsen, though starting from a different point of view and influenced by other considerations, designated this very passage as a perversion of the Phenician account, perpetrated by Philo and perfectly in accord with the system followed by him.[[578]] The original Phenician account must, no doubt, have been different.
§ 5. Although Cain and Esau cannot possibly have been incorporated with the old Hebrew mythology till the myth of the origin of civilisation was unfolded, yet they retain the mischievous and hostile character which the nomadic myth always assigns to solar figures. This fact illustrates the general observation which I made above (see p. 81) with especial reference to the Hebrews and Arabs—that in many nations the consciousness of an advance in passing on to the agricultural life is never aroused, or only very late, and that they rather regard this advance as retrogression and look back on the nomadic state as a more perfect one. Among the Hebrews, accordingly, the heroes of civilising agriculture, with the exception of Noah, take a position in the myth far less influential than similar heroes in other nations. The sympathetic light in which Noah was regarded is closely connected with his position in the story of the Deluge, which was added at a very late period to the Hebrew series of stories.
To understand this fact, however, we must cast another glance at the oldest stage of Hebrew Religion, at which religion had not yet fully shaken itself free from mythology, but was closely united with it, and only beginning to have a separate form. Whatever be the psychological factors that produce the religious tendency in man—an attitude of the soul which can no longer be treated as congenital,—it must be regarded as established and certain that the psychological process of the origin of religion, a process influenced only in its most advanced stages by ethical and esthetic forces, is in the first instance developed out of the older mental activity which resulted in the creation of myths. After the exhaustion of the mental activity that forms myths, which is equivalent to the disappearance both of mythical productiveness and of vivid understanding of myths, men have no longer any consciousness of what may be called the etymology of the myth. Then the mythical figures begin to be individualised; and parallel with this process runs the linguistic phenomenon that polyonymy disappears and all the phases of meaning previously expressed by separate names are combined in one or a few. The various synonyms for Sun, Darkness, etc., which existed in the myth, lose their significance; the different names for these natural phenomena, in each of which one feature or element of them was expressed in language, succumb to one single name, which then comprises in itself all their features and elements. The names Helios and Shemesh take the place of all other designations created in myths for the phenomenon of the Sun. These other designations, e.g. on Hebrew ground Jephthah, Asher, Edom and others, forfeit the signification which they originally had when myths were formed, and instead thereof are individualised. These names become personal names, and the stories of which they are the subjects become events of society. Thus from physical stories arise stories of gods and heroes; thus the nomenclature of the Sun and the Darkness produces a host of names of gods and heroes. For the personages who are thus imagined are powerful celestials, and the forgotten processes of which the myth spoke preserve for some time their heavenly scene of action.
This process of transformation of myths is inevitable, because bound up with the laws of development of the human mind and human speech; at a certain stage of the development of mind and language, the myth must become theology. But the process is gradual, so that the commencing stages of theological development do not break loose at once from the mythical consciousness, and the latter loses its colour gradually before it disappears altogether. A stage of this kind, at which Myth is turning into Religion, is most clearly exhibited by the Myth of Civilisation. Some bit of divine nature or peculiar personality always cleaves to the hero of civilisation; and some such myths actually live long unimpaired after the greater number have been metamorphosed into theology or religion. Thus, for instance, among the Hebrews the origin of religion is to be traced in its germ as far back as the nomadic age. Even at that stage, though of course towards the end of it, we observe the Hebrew myth of the beneficent sky of night and rain turning into religion. For a searching investigation of the religion of the nomadic Hebrews proves the object of their veneration to have been the dark overcast sky, connected (where it is not distinctly declared) with mythical figures of undoubtedly nocturnal character. I must briefly refer to what was indicated above (pp. 72, 73) of the worship of the night-sky and the rain among the Arabs. The religious stage of the nomadic Hebrews is still to be recognised in the reminiscences, transmitted by theocratic historians, of that age, which was to them a forty years’ wandering in the desert preceding the conquest of Palestine. To the same stock, as sources for the reconstruction of this religious stage, belong also some accounts contained in the Prophetical books; and they cannot but be considered historically credible—of course in the sense in which such reminiscences must be critically estimated as sources of history. For it is certain that such recollections lived on a very long time in the nations of antiquity, and that, if the special tendency of the reporter be stripped off, they may yield objective matter of history.
The most important datum of this kind is the question of the Prophet of Tekoa, which refers to a great expanse of history—a passage which has spurred many learned men to attempt ingenious interpretations.[[579]]
Did ye offer unto me sacrifices and offerings in the desert forty years, O house of Israel? Did ye bear the huts [read Sukkôth] of your king, and Kiyyûn (Chiun) your idol, the star [read kôkhâbh], your god whom ye had made to yourselves? (Amos V. 25, 26.)
It is evident from this important passage that the nomadic Hebrews worshipped their god or gods by huts, and that one among the objects of their worship was a Star, let alone what star Kiyyûn may be, whether identical with the Arabic keyvân, or some other. Thus, so far as we can infer from the Prophet’s word, their divine worship was paid to the night-sky. The nomad looks on the night-sky as a pasture where the herdsman (for the mythical figures of the night-sky are mostly regarded by him as herdsmen) lets his cattle feed; and it is easy to conceive that at the theological stage he venerates in huts the mythical figure now converted into a god, ascribing to him the same dwelling which he occupies on high in the sky. The most important feast of the nomadic Hebrews was the Feast of Sukkôth, or Tabernacles, which probably stands in close connexion with these Sukkôth of a god, and at the agricultural stage became a Harvest-feast. But even at that stage the connexion of the feast with nomadic life and the past nomadism of the nation itself, lived long in its memory (see Lev. XXIII. 43). That which they worshipped in the huts was not the Sun,[[580]] the bright sky of day, but kôkhâbh, a Star, doubtless no particular star, but only the starry heaven in general. For the rain, the most beneficent element to the nomad, was identified with the stars, i.e. with the sky at night. In the view of the ancient Arabs there were also Hyades in the starry heaven; we meet in poetry with the expression marâbîʿ al-nujûm ‘spring rain of the stars’ (Muʿallaḳâ of Lebîd, v. 4). A familiar phrase in the speech of the nomadic Arabs is ‘the stars have brought rain.’[[581]] Moḥammed forbids the Moslims to express their common idea of the origin of the rain by their usual phrase muṭirnâ binauʾ kaḏâ ‘we have received rain from such and such a star,’ though he allows the connexion of the rain with the stars, and only insists on the recognition of Allâh as first cause, while the nauʾ is the immediate origin.[[582]] Similarly the Mohammedan Arabs were forbidden to call the rainbow the bow of the Thunder-god Ḳozaḥ.[[583]] The dew, also, has a connexion with the anwâʾ ‘stars’ (plural of nauʾ). It is not without interest to find this view in a Jewish-Arabic writer of the middle ages.[[584]] The worship of the kôkhâbh ‘star’ by the Hebrew nomads must therefore have a special connexion with the rain. Ancient mankind did not distinguish between the cloudless sky which grows dark at night, and the sky gloomy with clouds and rain by day (see supra, p. [42]). He notices the darkness only, not the various times of day or night at which it occurs. Hence a sunless sky in general is treated as bringing rain. To show what connexion he imagined to subsist between the huts (sukkôth) and the rainy sky, I will quote a verse of a hymn to Jahveh, attributed to David, and said to have been sung on his deliverance from the power of Saul:
He made darkness round about him into huts (Sukkôth), collections of water, clouds of the sky. (2 Sam. XXII. 12.)
The various reading for the expression chashrath mayim ‘collections of water,’ which is preserved in Ps. XVIII. 12, where this hymn is given in a somewhat corrupt and less original form, deserves attention nevertheless. The words are cheshekhath mayim ‘darkness of water’ or ‘rain-bringing darkness.’