[1] Gen. vi. 1, 2, 4.
[2] vi.–xi. pp. 3–6. See Drummond’s ‘Jewish Messiah,’ p. 21.
[3] See [vol. i. p. 255].
[4] Phil. Trans. Ab. from 1700–1720, Part iv. p. 173.
[5] Gen. xxi. 6, 7. The English version has destroyed the sense by supplying ‘him’ after ‘borne.’ Cf. also verses 1, 2. The rabbins were fully aware of the importance of the statement that it was Jehovah who ‘opened the womb of Sara,’ and supplemented it with various traditions. It was related that when Isaac was born, the kings of the earth refused to believe such a prodigy concerning even a beauty of ninety years; whereupon the breasts of all their wives were miraculously dried up, and they all had to bring their children to Sara to be suckled.
[6] Fortieth Parascha, fol. 37, col. 1. The solar—or more correctly, so far as Sara is concerned, lunar—aspects of the legend of Abraham, Sara, and Isaac, however important, do not affect the human nature with which they are associated; nor is the special service to which they are pressed in Jewish theology altered by the theory (should it prove true) which derives these personages from Aryan mythology. There seems to be some reason for supposing that Sara is a semiticised form of Saranyú. The two stand in somewhat the same typical position. Saranyú, daughter of Tvashtar (‘the fashioner’), was mother of the first human pair, Yama and Yami. Sara is the first mother of those born in a new (covenanted) creation. Each is for a time concealed from mortals; each leaves her husband an illegitimate representative. Saranyú gives her lord Savarná (‘substitute’), who by him brings forth Manu,—that is ‘Man,’ but not the original perfect Man. Sara substitutes Hagar (‘the fleeting’), and Ishmael is born, but not within the covenant.
[7] Gen. iii. 14. Zerov. Hummor, fol. 8, col. 3. Parascha Bereschith. It is said that, according to Prov. xxv. 21, if thy enemy hunger thou must feed him; and hence dust must be placed for the serpent when its power over man is weakened by circumcision.
[8] Parascha Bereschith, fol. 12, col. 4. Eisenmenger, Entdeckes Judenthum, ii. 409.