“Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?” (Job xxxviii. 25, 26, 28, 34).
The Aryans had also described the rain, and their thoughts on the subject coincided with those of the Semitic race, but they were clothed in the grotesque language generally associated with myths.
“The rain is represented in all the primitive mythologies of the Aryan race as the fruit of the embraces of Heaven and Earth.”[120] This is an advance towards the poetical metaphor which Æschylus at a later date thus expressed: “The bright sky loves to fructify the earth; the earth on her part aspires to the heavenly marriage. Rain falling from the loving sky impregnates the earth, and she produces for mortals her fruit.”
It is necessary to possess a somewhat profound knowledge of the morphological characteristics of the Semitic and Aryan languages in order to note accurately the particulars to which I have drawn attention, and to understand the amount of influence they exercise on religious phraseology.
The Genius of Languages
Each linguistic family has special features, just as each race has its own physiognomy; the distinctive feature of the Semitic languages is that the significative elements destined to form appellatives, when once incorporated as roots in the body of a word, suffered no modification, and the original meaning could never be ignored. Thus all Semitic names for the dawn, the sun, the vault of heaven, the rain, and other natural phenomena, preserving their appellative character, could not be used for any other object; thus they could never express an abstract idea, such as that of the Deity. The method followed with regard to the arrangement of words in the greater number of Semitic dictionaries, which are generally arranged according to their roots, attest the truth of this fact. When we wish to find the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Arabic, we first seek for its root, and then look in the dictionary for that root and its derivatives. In similar languages no ambiguity is possible; nothing lends itself to myths.
In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, such an arrangement would have been extremely inconvenient; here the roots were apt to become so completely absorbed by the derivative elements, whether prefixes or suffixes, that often substantives ceased almost immediately to be appellative, and were changed into mere names or proper names; this peculiarity of the language enabled the Hindoos to form such words as Dyaus, Aditi, Varuna, Indra, which at first designate various aspects of nature, and afterwards were applied to different aspects of divinities. The preceding pages have afforded us many examples, and I hope that the comparison I have drawn between the two representations of the same object will suffice to explain why it is that we possess a Grecian and Hindoo mythology, but that there was no Hebrew mythology.
Metaphor
But, on the other hand, the Old Testament is full of metaphor—these pearls of discourse; these expressions so light and effective in the mouths of poets as they skim over the surface of the subject in hand, but which we make so ponderous and ungraceful with our literal interpretations. When David speaks of God as a rock, a fortress, a buckler, we have no difficulty in understanding his meaning, although we might express ourselves differently, and probably speak of the ever-present help of God. Where we allude to a temptation from within or from without, it was more natural for the ancients to speak of a tempter, whether in a human or animal form. What with us is a heavenly message or a godsend was to them a winged messenger.
What is really meant is perhaps the same, and the fault is ours, not theirs, if we persist in understanding their words in their outward and material aspect only; and forget that before language had sanctioned a distinction between the concrete and the abstract, the intention of the speakers comprehended both the concrete and the abstract, both the material and the spiritual, in a manner which has become quite strange to us.[121] I believe it can be proved that more than half the difficulties in the history of religion owe their origin to this constant misinterpretation of ancient language by modern language, of ancient thought by modern thought, particularly whenever the word has become more sacred than the spirit.