Transcriber’s Note:

Minor errors and omissions in punctuation and formatting have been silently corrected. Please see the transcriber’s [note] at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

In this version, there several instances of Arabic or Hebrew words with more than one character. At this time such bidirectional text cannot be reliably rendered. The author provided transliterations; however a separate Hebrew transliteration has been included here based on the scheme provided by the Society of Biblical Literature. These appear in bold as yĕšārĕtû in order to indicate where these characters appear in the text. The same has been done for the few Arabic and Aramaic words.

Footnotes, which appeared at the bottom of each page, have been gathered at the end of the text, and hyperlinks provided for easy access. They have also been renumbered consecutively in order establish the uniqueness required to facilitate searches. Any references to specific notes in the text have been corrected to follow the new numbering.

The cover image has been fabricated and is placed in the public domain.

MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HEBREWS

LONDON: PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

AND PARLIAMENT STREET

MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HEBREWS

AND

ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

BY

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER, Ph.D.

MEMBER OF THE HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, WITH ADDITIONS BY THE AUTHOR

BY

RUSSELL MARTINEAU, M.A.

OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

LONDON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

1877

All rights reserved

TO

PROFESSORS

H.L. FLEISCHER

FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER

H. VÁMBÉRY

THE PIONEERS OF SEMITIC, ARYAN, AND TURCO-TATARIC PHILOLOGY

This Work is Dedicated

By THE AUTHOR and THE TRANSLATOR

Errata.

P. 13 line 5 from below, for ‘with all his advanced ideas’ read ‘notwithstanding the progress of modern ideas.’

P. 209, first line of note, after ‘ball,’ insert ‘that descended from heaven.’ Whether this feather-ball

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Conscious that Comparative Mythology is not very generally studied even in England, where some of the earliest and ablest expositions of its principles have appeared, I foresee that this work is likely to fall into the hands of many who have not the preliminary intellectual training necessary to an appreciation of its principles. If anyone takes up the book with an idea that it will settle anything in the history of the Jews, he will be disappointed. Its aim is not theological nor historical, but mythological; and Mythology precedes History and Theology, and has nothing to do with them, except as a factor that may to a certain extent determine their form. To understand this book fully, some previous knowledge of what has already been done on the field of Comparative Mythology is essential. This is easily obtained by reference to the various works of Prof. Max Müller and Rev. G.W. Cox, which are frequently quoted.[^[1]] Such studies will enable the reader to see how far Dr. Goldziher is merely treading in the footsteps of others, and how far he has struck out a new track. Speaking generally, it may be said that he acknowledges the principles of the science as laid down by Kuhn and Max Müller, but that the application to the Semitic nations is his own. This application was, indeed, first attempted, fifteen years ago, by Professor H. Steinthal of Berlin with reference to one special mythological cycle, in Essays which, on p. xxix of his Introduction, Dr. Goldziher urgently recommends the reader to study as a suitable preparation for this book, since they ‘showed for the first time and on a large scale how the matter of the Hebrew legends yields to mythological analysis,’ and contain matter which is left out here precisely because it is to be had there. Through the obligingness of the publishers I am enabled to present the English reader with a translation of these Essays, whereby he is put in a position of no disadvantage as compared with the German. They will also serve the purpose of showing that the principles of Semitic Mythology were asserted in weighty words by a philosopher of high repute many years ago. But Dr. Goldziher has in the present work for the first time extended the application of the principles of Comparative Mythology to the entire domain of Hebrew Mythology, and laid down a broad foundation of theory, on which the elaboration of special points may be subsequently built up. Both these authors, it will be seen, regard a systematic working out of the results of Psychological science as the fundamental pillar of Mythological studies; and the reader will consequently find some psychological preparation not less necessary to the full understanding of the book than a knowledge of what has been written on Comparative Mythology.

The translation has received so many additions and corrections made expressly for it by the author, that it is far superior to the original German edition; moreover, it has been thoroughly revised by the author in proof.

I have added a few notes, where they seemed to be wanted; they are always distinguished (by ‘Tr.’) from the author’s own. The Index is also compiled by me.

References to the Old Testament are made to the original Hebrew; in the few cases where the chapter or verse bears a different number in the English and other modern versions, the reference to the latter is added in brackets.

I have adopted a few peculiarities of orthography, which I ought to confess to, the more so as I hope others may be convinced of their reasonableness. Nazirite, Hivvite, are corrections of positive blunders in spelling of the English Bible. Hivite was probably written in obedience to an unwritten law of English spelling which forbids the doubling of v; whether there is now any sense in this precept (which must have originated when vv would be confounded with w) or not, at least it ought not to be extended to foreign names. The tendency of the age to dispense with the Latin diphthongs æ, œ (which were a few generations ago used in æra, œconomy, Ægypt, etc.), I have ventured to anticipate in similar words, such as esthetic, Phenicia, Phenix. The anomaly of the French spelling of the Greek word programme, alongside of anagram, diagram, parallelogram, seems to me sufficient condemnation of the form.

In the Hebrew and Arabic quotations the Latin alphabet has been used throughout. The transliteration of the following letters should be noted, as being the only ones about which there could be any doubt:—ا א commencing a syllable in the middle of a word = ʾ. ע‎ ﻊ‎ = ʿ. ﻎ = ġ. ﺝ = j. ﺡ = ḥ ה‎ ﺥ‎ = ch. כ‎ ك = k. ק‎ ق‎ = ḳ. ת‎ ت‎ ۃ‎ = t. ט‎ ط‎ = ṭ. ظ = ẓ. ס‎ שׂ‎ س = s. שׁ‎ ش = sh. ث = th. ذ = ḏ. צ‎ ص = ṣ. ض = ḍ. ו as consonant generally = v, but و = w. י‎ ى as consonant = y. The aspirated תפכב are written bh (to be pronounced v), kh, ph, th. In Hebrew ă ĕ ŏ denote either the ordinary short vowels or the châṭêph vowels; and ĕ also the vocal sheva. In Arabic texts the iʿrâb is omitted in prose, but preserved in verse on account of the metre. These principles of transliteration are the same which the author adopts in the German edition, with a few modifications which seemed desirable for English readers, especially the use of the letters j, th and y with their usual English force.

RUSSELL MARTINEAU.

London: January 1877.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

The following sheets make no claim to present a system of Hebrew Mythology. I have left out much that would necessarily be included in a system, and confined myself to a limited portion of what can be proved to be the matter of the Hebrew myths. Even within the actual domain of my labours, I was not anxious to subject the extant narratives in all their minutest features to mythological analysis. The application of the certain results of the science of Mythology in general to a domain hitherto almost ignored with reference to this subject, could only be accomplished by some self-limitation on the part of the author; and my immediate task was only to show that Semitism in general, and Hebrew in particular, could not be exceptions to the laws of mythological enquiry established on the basis of psychology and the science of language, and that it is possible from Semitism itself, on psychological and philological principles, to construct a scientific Semitic Mythology.

By blindly tracing out copious matters of detail, the investigator of myths is very easily and unconsciously seduced to the slippery ground of improbabilities; and therefore I preferred, in the first instance, to enlarge only on subjects on which I was confident of being able to present what was self-evident, and in these only, so to speak, to reveal the first cellular formations, from which later growths were produced, and to leave the analysis of the entire substance, and of the separate elements which complete the conception of the mythical figures, to a future time, when the science will have gained a firmer footing even on the Semitic domain, and will have less distrust and misunderstanding to contend against. I am myself responsible for this limitation of the subject, in the service of which, encouraged by kind friends, I resolved to publish the following pages. In mythological affairs I acknowledge myself a pupil of the school established on the Aryan domain by Ad. Kuhn and Max Müller. Only in certain points, which, however, occasionally touch upon first principles, I have been compelled to differ from the masters of Comparative Mythology. It may be boldly asserted that, especially through Max Müller’s literary labours, Comparative Mythology and the Science of Religion have been added to those chapters of human knowledge with which certain borderlands of science cannot dispense, and which can claim to have become an essential portion of general culture.[^[2]] This conviction must excuse frequent copiousness of exposition, which I have adopted knowingly and intentionally. I have had in my eye not only the small circle of professional mythologists on the Aryan and other domains, but also the larger circle of educated readers who will be interested in learning how the results of Comparative Mythology shape themselves when applied to Semitic nations. But, on the other hand, I must crave the indulgence of the latter readers, if I have not always succeeded (especially in the fifth chapter) in making my meaning as intelligible as I could wish. For it is a fact that the Semitic still remains further removed from the mind of educated society than the Aryan, which, through the study of classical antiquity, has so ensnared us from our school-days with its irresistible charms, that it can never cease to determine the direction of our thought and action. Therefore I have had resort to foreign examples, sometimes non-Semitic instances from antiquity, sometimes instances from modern poets, for illustrations of particular assertions, which otherwise would appear improbable, but could thus be brought nearer to the understanding. From the figures used by poets the wealth and variety of the mythical apperception of the primeval man is truly elucidated. Here and there I have also permitted myself to make reference to Hungarian idioms, which was very natural, as I originally composed this book in my Hungarian mother-tongue for the purpose of University lectures, and then translated it myself into German. Some parts of these essays have been already published in Hungarian, in a different connexion and with special reference to linguistic results, in the first and second parts of Vol. XII. of the Nyelvtudományi Közlemények (Philological Essays), edited by Paul Hunfalvy for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

In adducing Aryan parallels, I am very far from thinking that where the Hebrew exhibits a striking similarity to something Aryan it has borrowed from the latter, or that, as a recent scholar tried to make out, the Hebrews themselves were originally Aryans, who afterwards took a Semitic language and preserved their Aryan habits of thought. I start from the conviction that the Myth is something universal, that the faculty of forming it cannot a priori be denied to any race as such, and that the coincidence of mythical ideas and modes of expression is the result of the uniformity of the psychological process which is the foundation of the creation of myths in all races; and this very uniformity of mythical ideas may consequently serve to psychologists as an argument for the thesis of the psychological uniformity of all races.[^[3]] ‘Where no historical transference of myths can be proved,’ says Bastian very justly,[^[4]] ‘the uniformity must be referred to the organic law of the growth of the mind, which will everywhere put forth similar products, corresponding and alike, but variously modified by surrounding influences.’ The oldest history of paleography exhibits on the ideographic and figurative stage the most striking similarities in the modes of apperception belonging to nations of the most various races. Lenormant says: ‘Nous pourrions faire voir, si nous voulions nous laisser aller à la tentation d’entreprendre un petit traité de l’écriture symbolique chez les différents peuples, comment certaines métaphores naturelles ont été conçues spontanément par plusieurs races diverses sans communication les unes avec les autres, et comment, par suite, le même symbole se retrouve avec le même sens dans plusieurs systèmes d’origine tout-à-fait indépendante. L’exemple le plus frappant peut-être de ce genre est celui du symbole de l’abeille, qui, ainsi que nous venons de le dire, signifie Roi dans les hiéroglyphes égyptiens, et se reconnaît encore clairement dans le type le plus ancien de l’idéogramme doué du même sens dans le cunéiforme anarien.’[^[5]] The same lesson is taught by Prehistoric Archeology, the comparative study of which among the various races would present very instructive examples. In our museums we see identical implements used by men of the most various races at the same primitive stage of civilisation,[^[6]] yet in this case the idea of one having borrowed from another enters no one’s head. Why should we be surprised at meeting with the very same phenomenon in Comparative Mythology?

The uniformity of the Hebrew myths with those of nations belonging to other races only becomes an obvious fact when we apply the method of modern mythological enquiry to Semitic stories. But, even without the help of this method, the mere outside of the Hebrew stories attracted the attention of many enquirers. It occasionally gave rise to the absurdest aberrations, which even now shoot out into a fresh crop of mischief. One answer, of course, was always at hand—that Greek and Egyptian narratives and ‘theogonies’ were bad translations or ‘diluted’ versions of the Hebrew; or else, as it has often been attempted in recent times to prove, the Egyptian was the original, from which everything else had flowed. The eighteenth century was especially rich in literary productions of the first species, following the lead of Gerhard Johann Voss, Huet,[^[7]] Bochart, and others whose labours had prepared the way. G. Croesius published at Dort, in 1704, ‘Ὅμηρος Ἑβραῖος, sive Historia Hebraeorum ab Homero Hebraicis nominibus ac sententiis conscripta in Odyssea et Iliade,’ and V.G. Herklitz at Leipzig two years later, 1706, ‘Quod Hercules idem sit ac Josua.’ At Amsterdam a book was published in 1721 entitled ‘Parallela τῆς χρονολογίας et Historiae Sacrae,’ having the same object; and in 1730 a book in two volumes, of similar tendency, by Guillaume de Lavaur, an avocat, was published at Paris in French, and translated into German by Johann Daniel Heyden (Leipzig, 1745).[^[8]] But it was reserved for the end of the century to produce the most curious specimen, in the work entitled ‘Histoire véritable des Temps Fabuleux: ouvrage qui, en dévoilant le vrai que les histoires fabuleuses ont travesti et altéré, sert à éclaircir les antiquités des peuples et surtout à venger l’histoire sainte,’ by the Abbé Guérin du Rocher. I have not seen the original edition of this work, but have consulted a later edition prepared by the Abbé Chapelle, an admirer of the author (Paris and Besançon, 1824), in five volumes, of which the first three contain the original work, and the fourth and fifth are taken up by the editor with a recapitulation of principles and a defence against the attacks of antagonists, who count among their number such men as Voltaire, De la Harpe, De Guignes, Du Voisin, Dinouart, and Anquetil du Perron. The author undertook to prove that the entire ancient history of the Egyptians and other nations is only a repetition of Biblical narratives: that thus what is related of Bothyris, Orpheus, Menes, Sesostris, and others, is identical with the Biblical history of Abraham, Jacob, Lot, Noah, and others; even the Egyptian Thebes is not a city, but Noah’s ark. The influence which this sensational book exercised on the learning of the period is very characteristic of the times. Dr. Asselini, vicar of the diocese of Paris, who had to pass judgment on it for the censorship (1779), regards it as a vindication of the Bible. The Sorbonne appropriated Guérin’s theorems, and made them the subject of theses for graduation. The King of Poland read the work through, and sent his compliments to the author. The French government accorded the Abbé an annual pension of 1,200 livres. One reviewer compares Guérin’s discoveries to those of Columbus and Newton; and a poetical panegyrist sees in them a French counterpoise to the superiority in science then possessed by England in virtue of discoveries of the first rank in physical science. He says—

Fière et docte Albion, qui dans un coin des mers

Prétends aux premier rang de la littérature,

Pour avoir à vos yeux dévoilé l’univers

Et le vrai plan de la nature,

De tes discours hautains rabaisse enfin le ton;

La France, ta rivale, va égaler ta gloire.

Ce que pour la physique a fait le grand Newton,

Du Rocher l’a fait pour l’histoire.

But even on the very threshold of the second part of our century, in 1849, a systematic argument was conducted, to show that Livy had read the Bible, and based his description of T. Manlius Torquatus’ battle with the Gauls on that of David and his battle with the Philistine giant; and twenty-two similarities between the respective stories had to do duty as demonstrations.[^[9]] The unscientific mode of regarding these subjects prevailing up to the most recent time has not yet ceased to generate absurdities.

We see old-fashioned absurdities still finding a way to the general reading public by means of encyclopedias, as in a ‘Dictionary of the Mythology of all Nations,’ of which a third edition was recently published.[^[10]] This work in its new form comes before the public with a touching delivery against modern physical science by way of introduction. Here we read under Abraham, ‘Some scholars are inclined to make this celebrated Patriarch of the Jewish nation either the god Brahma himself or a Brahman who was obliged to leave India in the contest between the worshippers of Siva and those of Brahma. In truth, there is much that might lead to such a conjecture. In Sanskrit the word ‘earth’ is often expressed by Brahm or Abrahm. Abraham’s wife was named Sarah; Brahma’s wife was Sara (Sarasvati)’ etc. But sins of a different kind also are committed up to the present day. The Hebrews are said to have borrowed their myths from foreign parts. It is not only by Voltaire and men of his age and spirit that this assumption is made. It is expressed in a recent article by a learned German investigator intended for the widest circulation. Sepp writes, 'No nation has been so clever as the Hebrews in appropriating to themselves the property of others, both intellectual and material. What can we say to the fact that the sun’s standing still at Joshua’s bidding, with the purpose of enabling the Hebrews to complete the slaughter of the Amalekites, is directly borrowed from Homer (Il. ii. 412), where the poetical hyperbole ‘Let not the sun go down, O Zeus,’ etc., is put into the mouth of Agamemnon?... To be brief, the popular hero Samson has had the Twelve Labours of the Lybian Herakles transferred to him, and bears the doors, as Sandon or Melkart the pillars of the world, on his shoulders.'[^[11]] The reader will agree with me in regarding it as superfluous at the present day to attempt a serious refutation of the hypothesis of borrowing, which assails the originality of the most primitive mythological ideas known to the nation under review. But it is impossible to evade the obligation to find an explanation of the manifold coincidences exhibited in the independently produced myths of nations belonging to quite different races. Under the new method of mythological enquiry this obligation is doubly pressing; for the coincidences appear yet more surprising, and occupy a more extensive sphere when the myths are considered analytically by the light of the new method, and from a linguistic point of view. Only then does the identity become psychologically important. And then it can in my view be explained only by the rejection of the prejudice that there are unmythological races, or at least one race incapable of forming any myths—the Semitic. If the Myth is a form of life of the human mind psychologically necessary at a certain stage of growth, then the intellectual life of every individual, nation, and race must pass through it. ‘The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more toward the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere,’ as Tylor maintains.[^[12]] This means, applied to the present question, that if the formation of myths is a natural law of the ψυχή (mind) at a certain stage, it must necessarily occur everywhere where there is a beginning of intellectual life, unless we could speak of whole races or tribes as psychologically pathologic,[^[13]] and make the whole Semitic race thus pathologic on account of its alleged incapacity to form myths—which would, after all, be rather a curious proceeding. No doubt we often read in ethnological works of nations without a trace of Mythology. But we ought not to forget either that such informants understand by Mythology only complicated stories and fables, which in my view represent the more advanced stage of mythic development, or that they identify Mythology with heathen religious ideas, and confound absence of religion or atheism with want of myths. So, e.g., Sir John Lubbock says, quoting Sibree,[^[14]] ‘Even in Madagascar, according to a good authority, “there is nothing corresponding to a Mythology, or any fables of gods or goddesses, amongst the Malagasy;”’ but this want of stories of gods and goddesses is very far from demonstrating the absence of myths of all and every sort.

It would be worth while in this connexion to pursue a thought raised by Schelling, with the aid of the present more advanced ideas on the psychology of nations. According to Schelling,[^[15]] a nation becomes a nation through community of consciousness between the individuals; and this community has its foundation in a common view of the world, and this again in Mythology. Consequently in Schelling’s system absence of Mythology can only occur in circles of men in which nationality is as yet unformed, and the necessary community undeveloped. But to Schelling ‘it appears impossible, because inconceivable, that a Nation should be without Mythology.’ However the question may stand with reference to savage tribes, modern science cannot possibly support the old thesis concerning the Semitic Hebrews of their incapacity for Mythology.

Guided by this conviction, I lay down at starting the necessity of subjecting the material of the Hebrew myths to the same psychological and linguistic analysis which has contributed so much light to the consideration of the beginnings of intellectual life in the Aryan race.

I do not conceal from myself that the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of this method for Semitic things may be exposed to many attacks. For even on Aryan ground the results which the school of Kuhn and Max Müller have brought to light do not enjoy that general acceptation which ought to reward such sound investigations—investigations, moreover, the basis of which is being constantly extended by later writers such as G.W. Cox and De Gubernatis. Both in Germany and in England this school has notable adversaries. I do not speak of Julius Braun, who, in his Naturgeschichte der Sage (Natural History of Legend), thought to undermine the solid substratum of Comparative Mythology by extending to the domain of mythology the consequences of his theory of the history of art and of Röthe’s assumptions, and by fetching from Egypt the foundation-stone on which to construct a Science of Mythology—an attempt which turned out most unfortunate, especially in etymology. But some worthy partisans of the study of classical literature refuse to receive the results of the science of Comparative Mythology. One of these is K. Lehrs;[^[16]] another is the latest German editor of Hesiod, who objects to the modern science of Mythology that it ignores historical and philological criticism and seizes upon every passage of an author that suits its theory, without regard to its value and genuineness.[^[17]] Among the English scholars it is no less a writer than Fergusson who declares, ‘So far as I am capable of understanding it, it appears to me that the ancient Solar Myth of Messrs. Max Müller and Cox is very like mere modern moonshine.’[^[18]] And Mr. George Smith, the renowned pioneer of the ancient Assyrian literature, seems not to have much confidence in the latest method of mythological investigation; for he says in his latest book,[^[19]] ‘The early poems and stories of almost every nation are by some writers resolved into elaborate descriptions of natural phenomena; and in some cases, if that were true, the myth would have taken to create it a genius as great as that of the philosophers who explain it.’ So that the so-called ‘Solar theory’ is far from being generally adopted even on the domain where it was first brought out and has been most firmly established. But the adherents of the school of Max Müller may take comfort from the consideration that the accusations made against them hit only those who have ridden the theory too hard, since, as Tylor says, no allegory, no nursery-rhyme, is safe from the speculations of some fanatical mythological theoriser. ‘Much abused’ is a correct epithet used of the Solar theory by a learned English Assyriologist, himself a friend of it.[^[20]] If, then, on Aryan ground the legitimacy of the new method is not undisputed, how will it be on Semitic, and especially on Hebrew ground, which a prejudice prevalent far and wide has decided to be occupied by a race and a nation with no mythology at all? Nevertheless, I hope I have kept myself free from abuse and extravagance in these essays. I have endeavoured sedulously to avoid whatever, on the Aryan domain, aroused the distrust of the hesitating, by showing no anxiety to gain immediate command of the whole extent of the mythological field. The essential point at the commencement of these matters is not the elucidation of all the minute details, but rather the solution of the general questions that arise, and the accurate laying down of a sound method of investigation. What I have brought forward I wish to be regarded as a collection of examples of the application of the method.

The reader will observe that I have given to the conception of the myth a narrower scope than is usually done. I believe it necessary to separate it strictly from the conception of religion, and especially to exclude from the sphere of primitive mythology the questions of Cosmogony and Ethics (the origin of Evil). The latter point was of especial importance in reference to the Hebrew Myth, since, as I show in the last chapter, the solution of these questions by the Hebrews was produced in the later period of civilisation and from a foreign impulse. There is an immense difference between the ancient mythical view of the origin of nature and that later cosmogonic system. So long as mythical ideas are still living in the mind, though under an altered form, when the times are ripe for cosmogonic speculations, a cosmogony appears as a stage of development of the ancient myth. But when the myth has utterly vanished from consciousness, then the mind is ready to receive foreign cosmogonic ideas, which can be fitted into the frame of its religious thought and accommodated to its religious views. This was the case with the Hebrews; and hence it will be understood why I have not treated as Hebrew mythical matter the Cosmogony of Genesis, which, moreover, according to all appearance, is to be regarded rather as a mere literary creation than as a view of the origin of things emanating directly from the mind of the people.

It appeared desirable to give a few chapters to show what I imagined the course of development of the primitive myths to have been, before they attained the form in which they are presented to us in literature. The mythological question is indeed quite distinct from that concerning the history of literature, and there is only a distant connexion between the two. The purpose of the following pages is, strictly speaking, attained where that of the literary history of the Canon commences; and I would gladly have kept aloof from the literary question, which cannot yet be regarded as even nearly settled. But when I included in my task the description of the further course of development of the myth, it was obviously impossible to stand so entirely aloof. I have on many points deviated from the current views, without being able either to enter into so complete a justification of the deviation as is generally reasonably expected, and the importance and scope of the subject would demand, or to refer to all the suggestive and original works contributed, especially by Germany and Holland, to the elucidation of the problems in question. For this point, which is only accessory to the real subject of my work, would require to be treated in a separate monograph, which it was not my intention to give. On the other hand, it was impossible to leave these questions quite on one side. On the Pentateuch question I start from the principles of Graf, which at first were adopted solely by the learned Professor Kuenen of Leyden, but have recently found zealous promoters also in England[^[21]] and Germany—in the latter country especially in the works of Kayser (Strasburg, 1874), and Duhm (Bonn, 1875).[^[22]] Nevertheless, the section on Jahveism and Prophetism has turned out more lengthy than considerations of symmetry would sanction. I must confess that my personal sympathy with and affection for this portion of the history of religion places me too close to it to allow me, when once brought face to face with it, to impose on my pen a reserve which perhaps is desirable for the sake of equilibrium. All this obliges me to count on the kind indulgence of my readers for the second portion, which may be termed the historical.

It remains to say a few words about previous works of the same character. Some earlier writings there are on Hebrew Mythology. But it needs not to be specially insisted on that Nork’s muddle-headed works, such as his ‘Biblical Mythology of the Old and New Testament,’ his ‘Etymological-symbolical-mythological Cyclopedia for Biblical Students, Archeologists, and Artists,’[^[23]] and other books of his, and similar attempts by others,[^[24]] which have tended to discredit the school of Creuzer rather than to gain lasting adherents to it, do not deserve to be regarded as anything but passing aberrations. Braun’s ‘Natural History of Legend: Reference of all Religious Ideas, Legends, and Systems to their Common Stock and Ultimate Root’[^[25]] maintains a more serious and dignified tone, but is a kind of anachronism built on an antiquated theory, and not happier in its etymological identifications and derivations than Nork’s writings. I think that no branch of the science of History and Civilisation can be advanced to satisfactory results when the following thesis is laid down as an axiom: ‘It is a fundamental law of the nature of the human mind never to invent anything as long as it is possible to copy’—which is the starting-point of Braun's studies. It would be quite as difficult to rest satisfied at the present day with the method which Buttmann follows in treating of Hebrew Mythology.

There are many smaller excursus by Biblical expositors and historians, who set out from the standpoint of the earlier views on the relation of the Myth to the Legend, and more frequently from the exegetical point of view. Among these ought especially to be named Ewald’s section on the subject in the first volume of his ‘History of Israel,’ Tuch’s short treatise ‘Legend and Myth’ in the general introduction to his Commentary on Genesis, as well as several dissertations by the indefatigable Nöldeke in his ‘Untersuchungen’ (Investigations) and elsewhere. It is obvious that these performances, though in every sense noteworthy and of permanent value, could not draw into their sphere of observation those preliminary questions which in the subsequent investigations of Kuhn and Max Müller removed to a greater distance the goal of mythological enquiry. Steinthal, who did so much for the psychological basis of the new tendency of mythological science, was the first to merit the praise of making Comparative Mythology fruitful on Hebrew ground. His dissertations on the Story of Prometheus and the Story of Samson[^[26]] showed for the first time, and on a large scale, how the matter of the Hebrew legends yields to mythological analysis. I would on this occasion beg the reader to have the kindness to read these pioneer-articles of Steinthal’s, to complete the matter left undiscussed in my work, as I considered it superfluous repetition to work up a second time what was sufficiently expounded there. Steinthal must consequently be regarded as the founder of mythological science on Hebrew ground. He has again recently given some suggestive hints on this subject in a short article, in which he again defends the capacity of the Semitic race to form myths.[^[27]] It is only to be regretted that the commencement made by Steinthal in this science has not been followed up for more than fifteen years.[^[28]] Steinthal’s two dissertations gave me the first impulse to the composition of this work; and my purpose was confirmed by the words of the ingenious Italian Angelo de Gubernatis, who, in his ‘Zoological Mythology’ (which appeared at the very time when I was maturing my purpose of putting together into one work this series of essays originally written as lectures), eloquently designates the subject of my researches the next problem of Comparative Mythology.[^[29]] The words in which he recommends the study of Hebrew Mythology in the spirit of the new method seem to me very striking. It is my earnest conviction that not only the interests of learning, but also preeminently the religious life of the present age make it important to gain for this subject an acknowledged position in learned literature. For he who feels the true meaning of religion must welcome these studies as a step in advance towards the highest ideal of religion, towards Monotheism pure and unsullied by anything coarse or pagan, which is independent of legends and traditions of race, and has its centre, its exclusive element of life, and its impulse towards never-resting enquiry and self-perfection, in aspiration after the single living Source of all truth and morality. I am convinced that every step which we take towards a correct appreciation of the Mythical brings us nearer to that centre. The confusion of the Mythical with the Religious makes religious life centrifugal; it is the duty of the progressive tendency on this domain to confirm a centripetal tendency.[^[30]] The recognition of this relation between pure Monotheism and the oldest historical portion of the Biblical literature does not date from yesterday or to-day; the most ideal representative of Hebrew Monotheism, in whom Jahveism as an harmonious conception of the universe attained its climax, the Prophet of the Captivity himself, described this relation in clear terms (Is. LXIII. 16; see infra, p. [229]).

But while, on the one hand, the investigation of Hebrew myths gives a stimulus to religious thought to advance in the direction of a Monotheism purified from all dross; on the other, the employment of the method offered to the Hebrew stories by Comparative Mythology in its latest stage, paves the way for a more serious treatment of the old Biblical stories. It cannot be denied that there is no little frivolity in the idea that those stories were invented at a certain time, no matter whether bona or mala fide, by persons guided by some interest, or affected by some leaning, of their own. It is no more satisfactory to be told that the stories were not invented, but sprang up naturally, and then to find that no answer is forthcoming to the question, How that could be? The modern science of Comparative Mythology has washed the teachers of the human race clean of the suspicion of mystification and deceptive principles. The origination of the stories is, at the outset, claimed for an antiquity higher than even the most orthodox apologists could ever exhibit. Now for the first time we can learn to appreciate them as spontaneous acts of the human mind; we perceive that they arose through the same psychological process which gave us language also; that, like language itself, they were the very oldest manifestation of activity of the mind, and burst forth from it φύσει not θέσει, at the very threshold of its history; and subsequently transformed and developed themselves again quite spontaneously, on the attainment of a higher stage of civilisation, by processes of national psychology, and most certainly not by the cunning ingenuity and the worldly wisdom of certain leading classes.

Last year Dr. Martin Schultze announced a ‘Mythology of the Hebrews in its connexion with those of the Indogermans and of the Egyptians’[^[31]] as about to appear. The method followed by the author in a preliminary specimen[^[32]] was not such as to induce me to delay the publication of my work and wait for his, even though he promised to give a complete system, which was not my intention.[^[33]] My manuscript was already in the publishers’ hands, when the papers announced the publication of a learned book by Dr. Grill, ‘The Patriarchs of Mankind: a contribution towards the establishment of a Science of Hebrew Archeology;’[^[34]] and more than ten sheets were printed before I could gather, from a review of it in the Jenaer Literaturzeitung, in how close a connexion it stood to the subject of my book; for from the title alone I was not likely to suspect anything on Mythology. I cannot pretend to explain in a few lines my opinion of so large a book as Dr. Grill’s. But as he starts with the assumption of the impossibility of a Semitic Mythology, and endeavours to establish the view that the Hebrew Myth is that of an Indogermanic people, that the Hebrews were Indogermans, and that the Hebrew mythological proper names can find an etymology only in Sanskrit, I have great pleasure in referring him to p. [25] and to Chapter [V]. of my book, where he may convince himself that no very daring etymological leaps nor arbitrary assumptions of phonological laws of transformation are necessary to explain the Hebrew mythological figures and their appellations from the Semitic languages themselves. It must, no doubt, be admitted that in some cases—but the minority—the formation of the proper names used in Mythology is not quite in accordance with grammatical analogy. I account for this by the peculiar feature of the Semitic languages, that an appellative on becoming a proper name often takes a peculiar form, differing in some respect from that of the original appellative: ‘al-ʿadl li-l-ʿalamîyyâ,’ as the Arabian grammarians say.[^[35]] There will always be cruces. Is it possible to indicate a satisfactory etymon for every proper name of the Greek mythology? and if not, ought we on that account to explain the Greek out of Semitic, whenever a case occurs which tempts us to do so, as our learned ancestors did?[^[36]] For transformation is always easy to find; since etymology is allowed to be a science in which the consonants go for but little, and the vowels have nothing at all to say for themselves! It certainly seems a pity to waste ingenuity in trying to banish out of the Semitic stock names which sound Semitic and can be recognised as such without the employment of any law of transformation at all, like Yiphtâch (Jephthah), Nôach (Noah), and Debhôrâ (Deborah), and in dissolving by Sanskrit solvents the Hebrew impress of a word like Yehôshûaʿ (Joshua), produced by Jahveism out of the original Hôshêaʿ, and not even mythical at all, in order to make it into a ‘Dog of Heaven,’ instead of ‘He has holpen’ or ‘enlarged [the people’s possessions],’ i.e. ‘The Helper.’[^[37]] Pinechas (Phinehas), no doubt, is a word that might drive the etymologist to despair. But there is far more intrinsic probability in Lauth’s Egyptian interpretation[^[38]] than in Grill’s Sanskrit tour de force, especially considering that Egyptian proper names cannot be explained away out of the Old Testament, and have in history a positive reason for existence. Then why hover in the dream-land of a prehistoric connexion with the Aryans?

When the Arabian traditionary stories are once subjected to etymological treatment, it will appear how far Semitism is from utter deficiency of Mythology. In certain instances I have taken occasion to demonstrate this with reference to Arabian tradition in the course of this work (e.g. p. [182] et seq., p. [334] et seq.). In other cases no reference to the etymological meaning of the proper names is required to recognise true Arabian myths. Instances are found especially in the stories about the constellations. Al-Meydânî informs us that ‘the old Arabs say that the star al-Dabarân wooed the Pleiades, but the latter constellation would have nothing to do with the suitor, turned obstinately away from him, and said to the Moon, ‘What must I do with that poor devil, who has no estate at all?’ Then al-Dabarân gathered together his Ḳilâṣ (a constellation in the neighbourhood of al-Dabarân), and thus gained possession of an estate. And now he is constantly following after the Pleiades, driving the Ḳilâṣ before him as a wedding-present.’[^[39]] ‘The constellation Capricorn killed the Bear (naʿsh), and therefore the daughters of the latter (binât naʿsh) encircle him, seeking vengeance for their slain father.’ ‘Suheyl gave the female star al-Jauzâ a blow; the latter returned it and threw him down where he now lies; but he then took his sword and cut his adversary in pieces.’ ‘The southern Sirius (al-Shiʿra al-yamânîyyâ) was walking with her sister the northern Sirius (al-Shiʿra al-shâmîyyâ); the latter parted company and crossed the Milky Way, whence her name (al-Shiʿra al-ʿabûr). Her sister, seeing this, began to weep for the separation, and her eyes dropped tears; therefore she is called the Wet-eyed (al-ġumeyṣâ).’[^[40]] The existence of similar Hebrew myths may be inferred from the names of constellations in the Book of Job (XXXVIII. 31, 32), especially from the Fool (kesîl, Orion) bound to heaven.[^[41]] Are not these genuine Nomads’ myths, produced through contemplation of the constellations and their relations to one another?

In conclusion, I must observe that in many passages, especially of the later chapters, a fuller citation of literary apparatus would have been desirable. The want of this is to be ascribed in part to the peculiar design of the book, and in part to the deficiency of aid from libraries for the exegetical department in my dwelling-place.

MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HEBREWS.

CHAPTER I.
ON HEBREW MYTHOLOGY.

§ 1. At the very foundation of the investigations to which this book is devoted, we find ourselves in opposition to a wide-spread assumption: that in regard to Mythology nations may be divided into two classes, Mythological and Unmythological, or in other words, those which have had a natural gift for creating Myths, and those whose intellectual capacity never sufficed for this end. It is therefore desirable to lay down clearly our position in regard to this assumption, before we advance to the proper subject of our studies.

The Myth is the result of a purely psychological operation, and is, together with language, the oldest act of the human mind. This has been shown conclusively by the modern school of mythologists who are also psychologists. Assuming then, what can scarcely be called in question, that the same psychological laws rule the intellectual activity of mankind without distinction of race, we cannot a priori assume that the capacity for forming myths can be given or withheld according to ethnological categories. As there is only one physiology, and every race of mankind under the influence of certain conditions produces the same physiological functions in accordance with physiological laws, so it is also with the psychological functions, given the stimulus necessary to their production. And this stimulus acts upon mankind everywhere alike. For it is clearly proved that the Myth tells of the operations of nature, and is the mode of expressing the perception which man at the earliest stage of his intellectual life has of these operations and phenomena. These form the substance of the Myth. Consequently, wherever they act as attractions to the youthful human mind, the external conditions of the rise of Mythology are present. Not unjustly, therefore, it seems to me, has a recent psychologist spoken of the ‘Universal Presence and the Uniformity’ of myths.[^[42]] Undoubtedly the direction of the myth will vary with the relation of natural phenomena to mankind; the myth will take one direction where man greets the sun as a friendly element, and another where the sun meets him as a hostile power; and in the rainless region the rain cannot act the same part in Mythology which it plays in the rainy parts of the earth. The manners and usages of men must also exercise a modifying influence on the subject and the direction of the Myth. As in the course of our further inquiries we shall recur to this point, I will here only refer to one example of the latter. It is well known that in the Aryan mythology, ‘the milking of cows’ is a frequently recurring expression for the shining of the sun, or as some say for the rain. In tribes which do not milk their cows, like some Negro peoples,[^[43]] or the American natives, this mythical expression can of course not arise.

§ 2. There are two points of view, from which the Mythical faculty has been denied to certain sections of the human race—on the one side a linguistic, on the other an ethnological. As to the first, we must especially name Bleek, the distinguished investigator of the South African languages, who, in the introduction to his work on the Story of Reynard the Fox in South Africa, makes the remark that a mythological genius is peculiar to nations in whose languages a distinction of gender in nouns finds expression, whereas those whose languages possess no formal distinction of gender in nouns, have no proper mythology, but their religion stands on that original stage which is the starting-point of all human religion, namely that of the cultus of their ancestors.[^[44]] It is obvious that this learned linguist’s distinction involves a confusion of Myth and Religion, which we shall find in the course of our subsequent investigations to be untenable. At present we will disregard this point, and only refer to the mythologies of the Finnish-Ugrian nations—peoples whose languages do not indicate any distinction of gender in their nouns. Or can it be said that the substance of the epos of Kalevala is not proper mythology? To be sure, in nations whose mind never evolved the category of grammatical gender in their languages, the myth will take such a direction as will give to the sexual idea, so charming a feature in the Aryan mythology, much less prominence. For the mode of conception which is conveyed by the distinction of ‘die Sonne’ and ‘der Mond,’ or ‘hic sol’ and ‘haec luna,’ cannot arise where this distinction is not made. But the figures of a mythology not only vary as to sex and genealogy, but act also; they are busy, they fight and kill, and the story of these actions and fights is quite independent of the gender-idea in language. Stories of them, consequently, which we call Myths, may exist even where the genius of language has opposed the distinction of gender.

§ 3. The second point of view, from which some have denied to a section of the human race the faculty and tendency to form myths, is ethnological. Either the Semites in general or the Hebrews specially fell a sacrifice to this view. The exclusion of the Semites from the domain of Mythology is announced most emphatically by the ingenious member of the French Academy, Ernest Renan, in the words, ‘Les Sémites n'ont jamais eu de mythologie.’[^[45]] This arbitrary assertion is deduced from a scheme of race-psychology invented by Renan himself, which at the first glance seems so natural and sounds so plausible when described with all the elegance of style of which he is master, that it has become an incontestable scientific dogma to a large proportion of the professional world—for even the territory of science is sometimes dominated by mere dogmas—and is treated by learned and cultivated people not specially engaged in this study as an actual axiom in the consideration of race-peculiarities.[^[46]] The foundation of this scheme is the idea that in their views of the world, the Aryans start from multiplicity, the Semites from unity; and not only in their conception of the world, but also in politics and art. On intellectual ground, therefore, the former create mythology, polytheism, science, which is only possible through discursive observation of natural phenomena; the latter create monotheism, (‘the desert is monotheistic,’ says Renan), and have therefore neither mythology nor science. ‘If it is difficult,’ justly observes Waitz, ‘to estimate the capability of single individuals well known to us, it is a far more dubious task to gauge the intellectual gifts of whole nations and races. It seems scarcely possible to find available standards for the purpose, and consequently the judgment is almost always found to be very much founded on personal impressions. The various nations stand at various times on very different stages of development, and if only actual performances permit a safe induction as to the measure of existing capabilities, then this measure itself seems not to remain the same in the same nation through the course of time, but to vary within very wide limits, especially if we are to assume in all cases that a state of original savageness preceded civilisation.’[^[47]] In fact, the words of this cautious psychologist apply admirably to Renan’s scheme of race-psychology; for history is just what that scheme disregards. He does not observe that Polytheism and Monotheism are two stages of development in the history of religious thought, and that the latter does not spring up spontaneously,[^[48]] without being preceded by the former stage, and that Polytheism itself is preceded by a preliminary stage, that of the mythological view of the world, which is in itself not yet a religion, but prepares the way for the rise of religion.

To form some idea of the arbitrariness of schemes founded upon some universal characteristics, we have only to glance over the literature which sprang up as soon as Renan’s dictum was uttered, either to refute it, or to work his hypothesis still further—a regular host of dissertations fighting on this side or on that.[^[49]] On reading these, we see clearly how worthless such clever fancies are, that enable one to embrace with a stroke of the pen a domain which geographically fills more than half of the inhabited world, and chronologically stretches from the highest antiquity down to the most recent time. For even Renan’s antagonists have fallen into his radical error: they have taken one-sided schemes and characteristics, only different ones from Renan’s. How passive and elastic these schemes are, shall be shown by an example of some importance, which will convince us that the inferences drawn from ethnological characteristics are never anything higher than arbitrary sleight-of-hand, which any investigator can manipulate to his own purpose. To this end we will place side by side the inferences which Renan has tacked on to his hypothesis, and a talented German’s conclusions, which also essentially take Renan’s basis as the correct starting-point. We speak of Lange, who also starts from the principle that the Semites grasp natural phenomena in combination, the Aryans in multiplicity, and that therefore the former naturally incline towards Monotheism, and the latter towards Polytheism. But let us see to what windings and deductions this dogma leads on both sides. We hear Renan say: ‘Or la conception de la multiplicité dans l’univers, c’est le polythéisme chez les peuples enfants; c’est la science chez les peuples arrivés à l’âge mûr.’[^[50]] Quite the contrary is affirmed by the German historian of Materialism, who says: ‘When the heathen sees gods everywhere, and has accustomed himself to regard every separate operation of nature as the domain of a special demonic action, he throws in the way of a materialistic explanation difficulties a thousandfold, like the offices in the Divine household.... But Monotheism here stands in a very different relation to science.’ ‘If a uniform mode of work on a large scale is attributed to the one God, the mutual connexion of things in their origin and action becomes not only a possible, but even a necessary consequence of the assumption. For if I saw a thousand and again a thousand wheels in motion, and believed them to be all driven by one agent, then I should have to conclude that it was a piece of machinery, the minutest portion of which had its movement absolutely determined by the plan of the whole.’ [^[51]] ‘The fact that Islâm is the religion in which that advancement of the study of nature, which we attribute to the monotheistic principle, shows itself most clearly, is connected with the peculiar talents of the Arabs, ... but also undoubtedly with the circumstance that Mohammed’s monotheism was the severest of all.’[^[52]] Auguste Comte also draws the same inferences from the tendency of Monotheism to develop a scientific conception of the world, and makes Monotheism and Scientific treatment exert a reciprocal influence on each other.[^[53]] To which of these opposite deductions from the same premisses shall we hold? ‘Which is right?’ every educated man will ask, and immediately infer the inadequacy of such general characterisations, and the wide room thereby opened to arbitrariness and error, in case it should be attempted to erect upon them a history of civilisation or an ethnology.

Now this foundation is exactly that on which Renan’s assumption of the absence of mythology from the Semites rests—an assumption which can by no means be admitted, first, because it is unhistorical; and secondly, because it would necessarily follow from it that race-distinctions differentiate the psychological bases of intellectual activity. ‘The Semites cannot form a myth,’ is a proposition the possibility of which could be allowed only if such an assertion as ‘This or that race has no digestive power, or no generative power,’ could be treated otherwise than as an a priori absurdity. But it is even more remarkable that Renan, notwithstanding his conviction of the ‘uniform psychological constitution of the human race,’ in which he finds the justification of a common story of the Deluge springing up everywhere without borrowing,[^[54]] and although he finds the gaps in the chronology of the antediluvian period of the Biblical history filled up, ‘par des noms d’anciens héros, et peut-être de divinités qu'on retrouve chez les autres peuples sémitiques,’[^[55]] still speaks of the possibility, indeed of the necessity, that the Semitic race should be destitute of myths.

Renan’s hypothesis had to encounter many a hard battle soon after its publication. The theologians were highly pleased at what was said about the monotheistic tendency of Semitism, but thought it blasphemy for Renan to find in Monotheism le minimum de religion and in Polytheism a higher and more civilised stage of religion. And philologists, historians and philosophers assailed the foundations of Renan’s pile. Steinthal subjects the notion introduced by Renan, of a monotheistic instinct, to acute psychological criticism. Max Müller does the same, and points to the history of the Hebrews and the other Semites, to resolve the dreams of Semitic Monotheism into their nullity. Abraham Geiger and Salomon Munk (Renan’s successor in the chair of the Collége de France) wish to limit to the Hebrew nation the assertion of Semitic Monotheism. Yet what is said about Mythology is not much objected to by any of these critics (with the exception of Steinthal). Indeed, one of the pioneers of modern Comparative Mythology, while combating the monotheistic instinct, takes up a position on the mythological question not very far from Renan’s own: ‘What is peculiar to the Aryan race is their mythological phraseology, superadded to their polytheism; what is peculiar to the Semitic race is their belief in a national god—in a god chosen by his people, as his people had been chosen by him.’[^[56]]

Mythological science has at the present day ceased to hold fast to the divisions of race in relation to the formation of myths. At least it has acted so in relation to that class of nations which, though not exhibiting a single race or several closely connected races, has (faute de mieux) been termed the Turanian—a purely negative designation, which only asserts its members to be neither Semites nor Aryans. Max Müller himself wishes to see the Turanian mythology investigated by the same method which is employed in the Aryan; and he is not shaken by the result, which exhibits a striking identity between Aryan and Turanian myths. He is not shaken even by consideration of the psychological force, which must be taken into account in the first instance in the criticism and valuation of myths. ‘If people cannot bring themselves to believe in solar and celestial myths among the Hindûs and Greeks,’ says this leading investigator, ‘let them study the folk-lore of the Semitic and Turanian races. I know there is, on the part of some of our most distinguished scholars, the same objection against comparing Aryan to non-Aryan myths, as there is against any attempt to explain the features of Sanskrit or Greek by a reference to Finnish or Bask. In one sense that objection is well founded, for nothing would create greater confusion than to ignore the genealogical principle as the only safe one in a scientific classification of languages, of myths, and even of customs. We must first classify our myths and legends, as we classify our languages and dialects.... But there is in a comparative study of languages and myths not only a philological, but also a philosophical and more particularly a psychological interest, and though even in this more general study of mankind the frontiers of language and race ought never to disappear, yet they can no longer be allowed to narrow or intercept our view.’[^[57]] Thus Müller also lays especial stress upon the psychological point of view, and, whatever he concedes to race-distinctions, still takes for granted the universality of the formation of myths as a psychological postulate. He exhibits, however, the application of his principle to the Turanian only in concrete examples. The Semitic, which, as we saw above, cannot be excluded in reference to the universality of the formation of myths, is left out altogether. Yet Müller appears in respect of the Semitic to have passed beyond the position on which he stood in 1860, when writing his essay ‘Semitic Monotheism.’[^[58]] Advancing in the footsteps of the master, a recent American mythologist, John Fiske, has drawn the Turanian into the domain of comparative mythology, and worked out a portion of the American stories collected by Brinton,[^[59]] according to the laws of the new method,[^[60]] while the German Schirren, and also Gerland less completely, had already subjected the Polynesian myths to a similar treatment.[^[61]]

This circumstance, that the stories of the so-called Turanian humanity lend themselves to the comparative method of investigation quite as easily as the legendary treasure of the Aryan nations, is a proof how common to all mankind is the mythological capacity, how false it is to follow ethnological categories and assign it to one race and deny it to another; and on the other hand, how the subject-matter, the perception of which forms the ground-work of the oldest mythology, is everywhere the same—the phenomena of nature and the contests of alternating elements. For very many and various races, incapable as yet of linguistic classification, endowed with the most diverse physical constitutions, inhabiting the most differing climates from the highest northern to the furthest southern latitudes, and speaking languages the most incongruous, have taken refuge in the vast unlimited house of Turanism, until legitimate parents are found for them. Turanism is therefore the best test of the controverted universality of mythological capacity. There is then no tenable reason why, for the sake of fair-sounding but meaningless distinctions, we should introduce the Semites into history with the loss of a nose, as it were, and interpret the history of the intellectual development of that race by a principle which essentially proclaims that the Semites were not born into life as infants, and never saw the sunlight till they were men, or even old men.

§ 4. Such reflections may have determined the French Assyriologist François Lenormant quite recently, to claim mythology for the Semitic race also; although in so doing he does not mention the Hebrews at all.[^[62]] For, notwithstanding the alluring mythological subject-matter deposited in the literature of its traditions, the Hebrew nation has always been a stepchild of mythological inquiry, and still awaits an investigator to do full justice to it. It is easy to be understood that a mistaken religious interest, which identified itself with the Biblical literature and warned off mythological inquiry with an energetic Noli me tangere, sharpened, it may be, with a dose of canonical or uncanonical excommunication, blockaded the passage of investigation on this path. I call it a mistaken interest, because the true interests of religion are advanced, not imperilled, by the results of science. Disregarding men of the calibre of Nork and a few other inferior disciples of the school of Creuzer, we can affirm that, with the exception of a few essays, even the freest and most earnest interpreters of the Bible have examined, and do still examine, the Biblical books only as products of literature, bringing to light valuable results as to the times and tendencies of the original composition and subsequent editing of the several parts of the Canon. But on the origin and significance of the persons themselves who figure in the Biblical stories, even the freest interpreters are silent, as if the Hebrews were a people quite apart, and not to be measured by the measure of History and Psychology.

Even those who are willing to know something of Semitic myths in general resist the assumption of Hebrew myths. No one has defined his position on this point so unambiguously as Baron Bunsen, who has thought so much and so profoundly on religious matters. It is really extraordinary that this immortal man, who exerted so stimulating an influence on the studies of his young friend Max Müller, and who welcomed the latter’s pioneer-essay ‘Comparative Mythology’ with ‘especial pleasure’ at the ‘pure popular poetry of the feeling for nature,’ exhibited so little comprehension of the aims of the new direction given to mythological studies by Müller. His view of the connexion of the Aryan mass of mythology is consequently very confused. This is especially to be regretted, because the displacement of the true point of view in mythical speculation, and the continual concessions to Creuzer and Schelling, hindered him from making permanently useful the philosophical labour expended on the understanding of the Egyptian theology. Bunsen did not separate Religion from Myths, and consequently he sees what he calls Consciousness of a God in a genealogised and systematised Mythology. It is therefore not surprising that he advanced no further than his predecessors in relation to the Hebrew myths. He speaks of the ‘spirit of the Jewish people, historically penetrated through and through with aversion to mythology,’[^[63]] and concentrates his thoughts on this theme in the sixth, seventh, and eighth of the theses in which he exhibits the relation of the Egyptian mythology to the Asiatic. According to these, ‘the Bible has no Mythology; it is the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess none.’ As if a myth—which Bunsen himself had called ‘pure popular poetry of the feeling for nature’—were an abomination, a defilement of the human mind, a sinful act voluntarily performed, which the Elect can deny themselves! On the other hand, ‘the national sentiment mirrored in Abraham, Moses, and the primeval history generally from the Creation to the Deluge, and the expression of it, are rooted in the mythological life of the East in the earliest times,’ and ‘in the long period from Joseph to Moses, there have been interwoven with the life and actions of this greatest and most influential of all the men of the first age [Abraham] and the history of his son and grandson, many ancient traditions from the mythology of those tribes from whose savage natural life the Hebrews were extracted, to their own good and that of mankind and for higher ends.’[^[64]] According to this there are Myths belonging to the Hebrews, but not Hebrew Myths—only borrowed ones, obtained from ‘Primeval Asia.’

I have exhibited Bunsen’s position at some length, because, with all his advanced ideas on the essence and significance of Mythology, he still to this day dominates the minds of those who, while admitting the possibility of Semitic Mythology, are up in arms against the existence of Hebrew myths.

§ 5. Nevertheless, I hope it is clear from the above that Hebrew mythology is a priori possible. The following chapters will give occasion to prove in what this existence consists. It will then appear that the Hebrew myths, necessarily owing their existence to the same psychological operation as the Aryan or the so-called Turanian, must consequently have the same original signification as these. Hence the figures of Hebrew mythology denote the very natural phenomena whose appellations lie before us in those figures’ names. These names, however, are not symbolic,[^[65]] but are antiquated appellatives of the natural phenomena denoted by them, just as the words, Sun, Moon, Rain, &c. This must be distinctly proclaimed, as some who misunderstand the modern method of Mythology pervert it in a false and antiquated way by the introduction of symbolism.

We must also beware of confounding the original Myth with Religion or, still worse, with the Consciousness of God. This confusion is the source of most of the erroneous estimates and notions of Mythology, which even the latest methods of investigating myths has not entirely removed. The very earliest activity of the human intellect can only work upon what falls immediately under the cognisance of the senses, and upon what through its frequency and the regularity of its return prompts men most readily to speech. Such things are the daily natural phenomena, the change of light and darkness, of rain and sunshine, and all that accompanies these changes. What primitive man spoke on these things, is the Myth. It is psychologically impossible that the earliest activity of the human mind should have been anything else but this. We cannot speak of a consciousness of God, a sensus numinis, as existing in the earliest Mythological period. Not till later, when some process in the history of language gives the ancient myths a new direction, do they turn into either History or Religion. The latter always arises out of the materials of Mythology, and then finds its historical task to be to work itself upwards into independence. Then, while the mythology out of which it sprang is growing less and less intelligible, and therefore also less and less expressive, Religion must in the progress of its development sever its connexion with Mythology, and unite itself with the scientific consciousness, which now occupies the place of the mythological.

How Mythology becomes Religion is shown most clearly by Dualism. Nothing can be less correct than the belief that the dualistic system of religion had from its very origin an ethical meaning. This, as well as the limitation of Dualism to Irân and Babylon,[^[66]] is refuted by the frequent occurrence of the dualistic conception of the world among the most various savage peoples.[^[67]] The ethical significance of Dualism is decidedly secondary; it is the form of development of the main theme of all mythology, the relation of light to darkness, proper to a higher stage of culture. Many mythological fancies, and especially the Sun’s voyage by ship in the nether world, became religious eschatological ideas when the mythical meaning itself was lost from the mind, and gave rise to new ideas of life in the nether world, resurrection, ascent to heaven, &c.; this was first established in reference to the old Egyptian mythology.[^[68]] So also Dualism as it appears in Irân is a myth that has taken an ethical sense. This is best seen in the facts that the northern Algonquins, with whom Dualism is almost as fixed a principle as in Irân, call the good and evil principles respectively Sun and Moon, and that among the Hurons the Evil principle is the grand-mother of the Good:[^[69]] the Night is the mother or grand-mother, or, in general, the ancestress of the Day. Here religious dualism has not quite put off the character of its origin in Mythology. On the other hand, the Iranic system at a very early age (that of the Avesta) elevated Dualism into the region of pure morals, and yet at a later (the epic period) formed out of the original myth the localised story of the war of Zohak against Ferîdûn.[^[70]]

That Dualism as a religious conception is a further development of the myth, and not first excited by the moral problem of the strife of the good against the evil, becomes evident also from the consideration of a peculiar form of dualistic religion which we find in many Semitic nations. We here frequently find a deity regarded as male, who has a corresponding female to represent, as it were, the reverse side of the same natural force, and then the two forces unite to produce a natural phenomenon. So, for instance, Sun and Earth, Baal and Mylitta, the factors of procreation. This likewise is a dualistic tendency, in which however the two deities are not represented as mutually hostile. We are justified in placing this phenomenon in the chapter on Dualism, because two such deities in the course of history are often joined together into one.[^[71]] Now this side of dualistic religion can be traced back only to Mythology as its source and point of departure. The Hebrew myth of Judah and Tamar, which we shall consider further on (Chap. V., [§ 14]), exhibits a mythical prototype of such dualistic views of religion.

CHAPTER II.
SOURCES OF HEBREW MYTHOLOGY.

§ 1. If it is now established that we are justified in speaking of a Hebrew Mythology, in the same sense as of the mythologies of Indians, Hellenes, Germans, &c., then the question naturally arises, Can we come upon the track of those forms of expression and those figures which generally make up the elements of the Hebrew Myth; and Are these elements when found recognisable as elements of myths, i.e. Are they expressions and stories in which the ancient Hebrew, standing on the myth-creating stage of his intellectual development, spoke of the operations and changes of Nature? That in the abstract he was as capable as the Aryan on the same stage of development of speaking myths, we have admitted in assuming the universality of the formation of myths; and of what those expressions exactly consist, and what are the mythical figures which he formed, it will be the business of a subsequent chapter to exhibit.

In this chapter our task will be limited to the discovery of the sources which we have to estimate by the method of Comparative Mythology, in order to discern the various expressions and figures of the Hebrew myth. Now both the incitement to the formation of myths and the course of development through which they pass before they are noted down in a literary age and then stiffen and undergo no further change, are based on psychological operations, the laws of which are not governed by categories of race and ethnology. It is therefore obvious, that for the understanding of the Hebrew myths we must betake ourselves to the very same class of sources which the mythologist finds fruitful on Aryan territory. Fortunately such sources are open to us on Hebrew ground also. They have, indeed, a less copious stream than those of Aryan mythology, but yet suffice to give us a picture of what the ancient Hebrew on the mythic stage thought and felt, and how he found expression in language for these thoughts and feelings. It is true, this investigation cannot be separated from another closely connected with it—what method we must employ to arrive at the germ of the myth hidden in these sources. But for the present we must still put off this second question, and content ourselves with the search for the sources of mythical matter. It will, however, not be always possible to avoid an indication of the method; and this is the case now with the first of the sources which we have to bring forward.

§ 2. a.) We shall have to speak again further on of the question, What factors in the minds of the Hebrew people produced the conception of those Patriarchs, whose destinies form the most illustrious portion of their national historic writing? It will then become clear that this Patriarchal character represents only a later historical stratum of mythical development, produced by those very factors. Originally the names of the Patriarchs and the actions which are told of them signified nothing historical, but only something on the domain of Nature. The names are appellations of physical phenomena, and the actions are actions of Nature. For surely we must at the outset come to a clear understanding on the question, What is the origin of persons like Abram, Sarah, Jacob and the rest, who fill the Hebrew Patriarchal history? whence, how, and by what psychological law did they enter into the mind of the primitive Hebrews? The facile assumption that these persons and the actions with which they are concerned are mere Fiction with no external foundation, is so cheap and meaningless a way of getting over the difficulties which their existence in poetry presents to the investigator, that it as impossible to adopt it as to admit the opposite equally arbitrary opinion, which makes them historical in the same sense as Goethe or Frederick the Great. Certainly they are fictions, if by that we mean that no historical persons correspond to them as human individuals; but by no means in the sense that their origin, or rather the conception of them, has no other foundation but the fancy of the poet or writer. In this sense they have actual realities corresponding to them—the events and operations of Nature, which are the main-springs of mythical language. And it is not conceivable that the oldest utterances of the human mind should have begun from anything else but from the sensations which the operations of Nature aroused in their breasts. As soon as they perceived these, occasion for myths was present; and the myths show how they became fully conscious of the operations of Nature.

The Patriarchal stories are therefore an important source for the knowledge of myths. If we loosen stratum after stratum which has been formed through the agency of psychological and historical factors over the primitive form of the myth, and have at length penetrated back to the stage at which many of the mythical appellations, through the disuse of multifarious synonymous terms, were individualised and personified, then it is easy to pick the primitive germ, the original mythic elements, out of the shell in which they had been encased. Hence it appears that the most fruitful field for mythological investigation on Hebrew territory is the Book of Genesis, the greater part of which brings together the stories which the Hebrew people connected with the names of the Patriarchs.

§ 3. b.) The Patriarchal legends, in such fulness and artistic finish as the remains of old Hebrew literature have preserved for us, are a distinguishing characteristic of this literature. Other nations have failed to transform their myths into such a wealth of reports about their first progenitors. What meagre accounts the Hellenes give of their national ancestors, in comparison with this rich and varied Patriarchal history! A special peculiarity of the historical development of the Hebrew people was active here, bringing the national idea into the foreground, and exerting its influence in this direction on the transformation of the primitive mythological materials.[^[72]] But instead of this, other nations, among whom our above-named example, the richly endowed Hellenes, are to be reckoned, have chosen rather to transform the figures of their myths into Gods and godborn Heroes.

The figures of Gods, which were developed out of Hebrew myths, very early retired into the background. It was partly the Canaanite influence to which the Hebrew people very early succumbed, and partly the progressing monotheistic tendency, that allowed no theology consistently developed out of mythology to maintain itself for any length of time. Of Heroes, however, there is no want in the memory of the Hebrews. In that region as well as elsewhere, the Heroes had originally borne a different meaning and belonged to mythology; and their heroic character is, on the Hebrew as well as on the Aryan domain, secondary, produced by the psychological and linguistic process which caused the natural meaning of mythological figures to vanish from the mind.

Now although these Heroes are originally gigantic persons bound to no definite place or time, yet they are gradually condensed into individuals and regarded as more and more concrete and definite. What is told of them puts off its generality and indefiniteness. They are conceived as belonging to certain places where their heroic deeds were performed—in other words, the legends of Heroes are localised. Their activity is assigned to a definite time, they are inserted in a chronological frame, in which they take up a definite position as to time. What more natural localisation of the activity of the Heroes could there be than to imagine them living in the same geographical districts as those who tell of them? The localisation of heroic legends is always enlisted in the service of patriotic feeling. Herakles and Theseus are Greek patriots, heroic benefactors of the Grecian people. The determination of the time when they lived was influenced mainly by the endeavour, natural to every civilised nation, to gain a clear, comprehensive, and continuous picture of its own history. But truly historical memory does not generally go far enough back to explain with proper fulness the entire past doings of a nation. The historical beginnings of a people are lost in the mist of indefiniteness and uncertainty. What is easier than to fill up this obscure period of history by telling of the doings of the Heroes? Why, the human temper in its pessimistic mood is always inclined to fancy the very oldest age peopled with men of gigantic proportions of both body and mind, in comparison with whom the enervate present generation is a mere shadow. So we find the stories of Heroes always at the head of the national history. The history of the Greek people begins with their heroic age; and the obscure period of Hebrew history between the first entrance into Canaan and the creation of the Monarchy, the so-called time of the Judges, is likewise the frame which must hold the Hebrew heroic legends. The stories of the Hebrew Heroes group themselves round the history of this period. The second important source of knowledge of the materials of the Hebrew mythology is accordingly the cycle of stories to be found in the canonical Book of Judges. This is the mine of mythology, whose treasures Professor Steinthal has brought to light with such critical acuteness in his dissertation on the story of Samson,[^[73]] which breaks up entirely new ground. Here for the first

time the method and results of the modern science of mythology were independently applied to the domain of Hebrew antiquity. It must be called a happy accident that the mythical character of the Hebrew heroes could be proved by so convincing an example as Shimshôn (Samson); for even the wildest scepticism cannot doubt that this name is equivalent to shemesh, ‘sun,’ and that this fact gives us an undeniable right to maintain the solar significance of the hero, and to see in his battles the contest of the Sun against darkness and storms.

§ 4. c.) But the Old Testament stories do not cease to be a source for mythological investigation exactly where the traditions of Genesis and the Book of Judges are succeeded by really historical accounts. For it is an admitted fact that, as soon as ever the myths have lost their original meaning by the personification of their figures, mythical characteristics are not limited to their proper domain, but often actually attach themselves to historical persons and historical actions. Alexander the Great, for example, is a phenomenon whose historical character could not be shaken by the very boldest criticism. Yet the story even of Alexander’s acts and fortunes has been forced to bear some characteristics of the Solar myth, traits which were originally peculiar to the Sun-hero, as especially the journey into the realm of darkness.[^[74]] Accordingly, not every phenomenon in the traditional characteristics of which we discover solar features is mythical, even though, strictly speaking, it can scarcely be classed with history (as e.g. William Tell). It is highly erroneous to speak, as is often done, of myth and history as two opposites which exclude any third possibility.

However, there are two points to which we ought to attend when considering the attachment of mythic elements to historical phenomena. First, it is usual, as we have just mentioned, to find one or another mythical characteristic attached to historical phenomena, as we may observe (to keep on specifically Hebrew ground) in the portraiture of the character of David or of Elijah (see Chap. V. [§ 8]). The residence of the Hebrews in Egypt, and their exodus thence under the guidance and training of an enthusiast for the freedom of his tribe, form a series of strictly historical facts, which find confirmation even in the documents of ancient Egypt. But the traditional narrative of these events, elaborated by the Hebrew people, was involuntarily associated with characteristics of that Solar myth which forms the oldest mental activity of mankind in general. Thus, for example, the passage through the sea by night is to be compared with the myth of the setting sun, which travels all night through the sea, and rises again in the morning on the opposite side. Similarly, we find attached to the picture of the life of Moses, which the Biblical narrative presents with a theocratic colouring, solar characteristics, indeed more specifically features of the myth of Prometheus. These have been clearly exhibited by Steinthal in his fine Treatise on the Prometheus-story, to which I will here only refer without reproducing its contents.[^[75]] Secondly, we must consider the converse relation—that historical facts, the names of the agents of which have not been preserved in the popular mind, may be attached to mythical names. We can go back to the time of the Judges for an example of this. It is evidently real history that we read of the embittered contests waged by the Hebrews in that age against the Philistines and other tribes of Canaan. Remembrance of these contests, in the absence of historical names, helped itself out by the mythical appellations which, after the individualising of mythical figures, had obtained significance as personal names. In the first case the bearers of the names are historical persons, and the features of the story belong to mythology; in the second, history is wedded to mythical names. In both directions, accordingly, the Hebrew history treated critically is a source for mythological investigation.

§ 5. d.) One of the most reliable, but at the same time most hazardous, sources of Hebrew, as of Aryan, mythological investigation is the language itself, and above all, the appellations to which the myth is attached. These appellations, which in the process of transformation of the original meaning of the myth became personal names, are in their proper original sense appellatives; and we have to find the appellative signification in order to establish the mythological character. In this investigation it is best to follow the method, the use of which in Aryan mythology has brought such brilliant results to light. In many appellations the appellative sense can be found without much difficulty, being explicable from the language itself, in our case from the known treasures of the Hebrew tongue. In others the known material of the Hebrew language refuses its aid, and we must then take refuge in a cautious employment of the group of allied languages, i.e. the Semitic stock. In this connexion we must never leave out of sight the fact that the treasury of Hebrew words which is contained in the books of the Old Testament does not even approximately embrace the wealth of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary which we are enabled to infer from this fraction. In the proper names much ancient linguistic property is preserved which occurs nowhere else. The discovery of the appellative signification of mythological proper names consequently does an important service to mythological investigation, by finding a tangible starting-point for the determination of the mythical sense of the root-word in question. But it does more: it also fills up gaps in the Hebrew lexicon, and rescues many an old component part of that important language, which otherwise would remain utterly unknown.

An example will make this clear, and show that linguistic investigation and mythology have an equal share in the instruction to be derived from such inquiries.

We often meet in Hebrew with the verb hishkîm, denoting ‘to perform some occupation early in the morning’ (the occupation itself being determined by a dependent verb), ὀρθρεύειν. It represents the so-called Hiphʿîl-stem, which has regularly the sense of a factitive, but is not unfrequently used to express the entrance into a certain time or place, the doing of an act in certain conditions of time or place. In this case the Hiphʿîl verb is always derived from the noun which describes this place or time. Here the conditions of time concern us most. We say, for instance, heʿerîbh with the sense ‘to enter on the evening,’ ‘to do something in the evening;’ e.g. ‘the Philistine came near morning and evening,’ hashkêm we-haʿarêbh (I Sam. XVII. 16). The last word is derived from the noun ʿerebh, ‘evening.’ From the word shachar, which denotes ‘the dawn,’ is formed at a late stage of the language hishchîr, ‘to do something at that time;’ and this Hiphʿîl form of shachar can then appear beside that from ʿerebh exactly like hishkîm in an earlier age.[^[76]] Now of course this verb hishkîm must have a noun for its basis, which would denote ‘morning.’ But no such is found in the known Hebrew thesaurus, for the nominal form belonging to this root, shekhem, means ‘neck,’ and etymologists have given themselves much useless labour in trying to find any tolerable connexion between the meaning of this noun and hishkîm. The most bearable which they could give is that one who rises early to go after his business loads his neck with labour.[^[77]] But any one may reply, Does one who does his work after dinner or in the evening load his neck with no labour? Considering the relation in which these Hiphʿîl-forms stand to the nouns from which they are derived, we might almost a priori assert that in the ancient language shekhem must have denoted ‘morning’ also. And in this instance mythological inquiry offers us the safest clue. The name Shekhem [Shechem] figures in the Hebrew myth as the ravisher of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter. Without anticipating the analysis of this myth, which fits into the context of one of the next chapters, we immediately recognise in the mythic name Shekhem the noun from which the verb hishkîm is derived. Thus the mythical appellation refers to the early morning, the red glow, as the ravisher of the sun; and the same amorous connexion is expressed in various ways in the Aryan mythology also.

No one can deny that the consideration of the myth has here enriched the knowledge of the old Hebrew vocabulary; and thus, even on Hebrew ground, mythology and linguistic studies go hand in hand. This makes the investigation of language one of the richest sources for the discovery of the mythical ideas of early humanity.

§ 6. e.) While the circle of thoughts which guide the prose style moves on the level of the general principles current at the time of the writer, poetical language and style, on the other hand, have a tendency to adopt modes of expression produced in a long past age in accordance with the ideas then prevalent. These modes of expression, when they arose, corresponded accurately with the general ideas of the time, and had the signification which the literal sense yields; they were used whenever occasion offered for their employment, and everyone understood what was meant by them, for the thought would in that age never be expressed otherwise. The poetical language of a later time preserves such modes of expression even when their significance in the general conception of things is lost, and the occurrences thereby indicated are imagined in a different way altogether; the language then becomes figurative, as it is called.[^[78]] Thus the language of the Hebrew poetry and of those writers who speak in a lofty style bordering on that of poetry, and are called Prophets, preserves many of the modes of expression derived from the ancient mythological ideas of the world. Mythical material may consequently be found now and then here also.

When e.g. Isaiah says (XIV. 28), ‘I will sweep it with the besom of destruction,’ this is what we call a poetic figure—destruction being pictured as a broom that sweeps away from the surface of the earth those who are to be destroyed. But from another side it is seen to be something more and different from a mere poetical figure, since its origin is due, not to an artistic idea of the speaker, but to an old-world mythical conception here employed figuratively, a conception which occurs in many cycles of mythology. For instance, the Maidens of the Plague are represented with brooms in their hands, with which they sweep before house-doors and bring death into the village.[^[79]] But Isaiah says again (XXVII. 1) that ‘Jahveh with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon (tannîn) that is in the sea;’ and Job (XXVI. 13), in his grand picture of the contest which Jahveh wages against the tempest, and the defeat of the latter by the omnipotence of Jahveh, says ‘By his breath the heavens are brightened; his hand has pierced the flying serpent (nâchâsh bârîach)’; and the prophet living in the Babylonian captivity addresses Jahveh in the following words (Is. LI. 9): ‘Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of Jahveh! awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old! Art thou not it that didst kill the monster (rahabh), and wound the dragon (tannîn?)’ &c.[^[80]] In these expressions we observe that prophets and poets employ the long outgrown and obsolete notions of the myth of the battle of the Sun against the flying serpent (Lightning) and against the recumbent or curved serpent (Rain)—the monsters which want to devour the Sun, but which the Sun shoots down with his arrows (Rays) or wounds with a volley of stones; or else of the myth of the battle of the Sun already set against the monster that lies in wait at the bottom of the sea to devour him (a myth which is also preserved in the story of Jonah), only that the monotheistic mind substituted Jahveh for the Sun. Many prophets frequently speak in a perfectly general way, without reference to a definite historical event, of a passage through the sea. This is by no means a reminiscence of the Passage of the Red Sea, as an event in the primeval history of the Hebrew people, unless a pointed reference is made to that; it is another application of an old mythical notion of the course taken by the Sun-hero after sunset through the sea, so as to shine again on the following morning on the opposite shore. Indeed, that Hebrew story of the Exodus itself, as we have indicated, is only a myth transformed into history by a process which we can follow, step by step, in the history of the evolution of Mythology. This becomes very clear when we examine the sequel of the above-quoted words of the anonymous Prophet of the Captivity (Is. LI. 10): ‘Art not thou it which dryeth the sea, the waters of the great deep; that maketh the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?’ What is pictured in this verse is in the mind of the speaker an event of the same character as that referred to in the preceding verse—the killing of the Rahabh and the wounding of the Tannîn. The description of Canaan, too, as a land ‘flowing with milk and honey,’ points back to the myth of a sun-land; for the myths call the rays of the sun and moon ‘milk and honey,’ regarding the moon as a bee[^[81]] and the sun as a cow. In [Excursus E] we shall speak of the mythological conception of rays of light as fluids. Palestine, which the writer wished to pourtray as possessed of every blessing, thus receives attributes which the myth gave to a place above the earth, whence the blessings of light streamed down to it. It is noteworthy that in the Çatapatha Brâhmaṇa the same mythic conception which is employed poetically in Hebrew meets us tinged already with an eschatological colour. This work (XI. 5. 6. 4) makes milk and honey flow in the abodes of the Blest.[^[82]] We also see from this that the notion of a ‘poetical figure’ requires frequent limitation. Many apparently poetical figures have their origin in an ancient mythical conception. Not everything that has the look of a poetical or rhetorical figure is one. Who would doubt, for instance, on a superficial glance, that such a phrase as nâr al-ḥarb, ‘the fire of war,’ was a figure of poetry or rhetoric? Yet it is not; it is not derived from what only exists in the fancy of the speaker, but from something which has a concrete, objective existence. We learn this from the Arabic commentary on the proverb Nâr al-ḥarb asʿaru, ‘the fire of war is burning.’ The scholiast[^[83]] says ‘When the ancient Arabs began a war, they used to light a fire, to serve as a beacon for those eager for the fight.’ It is also said (of the Jews): ‘As often as they light a fire for war, Allâh extinguishes it.’[^[84]] Thus the fire of war of which the ancient Arabs spoke was only a material or natural one.

§ 7. f.) The Hebrew mythic tradition is not contained exclusively in the Old Testament. This canon, indeed, was very far from receiving all the remains of the old myths that were current among the people in an historical transformation. Much of it is contained in the tradition which was not incorporated with the canon, especially in the so-called Rabbinical Agâdâ, which contains many a treasure of as high an antiquity as the mythological sources which we have named within the canon. In the discovery of such elements in the Agâdâ circumspection and cautious criticism are necessary, because the valuable portion is only an excessively small fraction of the whole, and has to be picked out of a preponderating mass of very different character. Still we must acknowledge the Agâdâ as a source for the discovery of the old Hebrew myths. It has indeed already been employed for this purpose, though not always wisely. The learned Professor F.L.W. Schwartz has referred to this source,[^[85]] and Julius Braun goes even too far in his mythological estimate of the Agâdâ, when he says without limitation,[^[86]] ‘The Rabbinical stories are anything but arbitrary inventions; they are echoes of primeval memories only refused entrance into the Bible by the compilers of the canon. If Rabbinical erudition sometimes makes unfortunate attempts to confirm extrabiblical tradition by a Biblical quotation, and to prove its existence in Biblical times by imagined allusions, this is no proof that the whole tradition is only a speculation derived from misunderstood Bible-words.’ But Braun makes a very bad use of the Rabbinical tradition, and vies with the foolish writer Nork in taking from right and left without selection or judgment whatever he can find, not caring whether it is Veda or Bible, Homer or the Fathers, cuneiform inscriptions or some obscure allegorical writer.

The Agâdâ in many places gives names to persons who are mentioned in the Bible without name; and these names have frequently so antique a stamp, that we cannot suppose them to be due to the capricious invention of the Agadists.[^[87]] I believe that when these names appear justified by internal evidence (i.e. when they show themselves quite fitting to the nature of the myth), they may be ancient and important for mythological inquiry. Of course we must not be ruled by excessive optimism, nor ever forget the freedom with which the Agadic fancy rules in its own sphere.[^[88]] The same may be said also of the identifications, of which the Agadists are very fond, and of the genealogical statements, which, though deserving little attention from the historical point of view, may have their origin in an old myth. So e.g. the Targûm on I Sam. XVII. 4 calls Samson the father of Goliath.[^[89]] Now Goliath is the giant whom ‘the reddish hero with fine face’ overcomes by throwing stones; in other words, the Sun-hero throws stones at the monster of the storm. Thus the myth may very well say that the Sun (Samson) is the father of this hostile giant of the night, just as the Sun in various forms frequently appears in the character of father or mother of the Night.

It is easily intelligible how difficult it must be to determine the mythological value of every such statement; and we have consequently made very scanty use of this source. It might be relatively safer to use them when they speak not merely of names and genealogies, but of actual stories. The Abram-story especially has preserved in its Agadic form much matter from ancient myths, the valuation of which by B. Beer, in a lucid compilation on this very portion of the Agâdâ,[^[90]] is easily accessible. So e.g. the battle of Abram against Nimrod, which the myth-investigator must take as the contest between the Nightly heaven and the Sun, is known only from the Agâdâ; the Scripture says not a word of it. For the solar character of Nimrod, which is however independently clear from the Biblical statements, the Agâdâ has again preserved a valuable datum, viz. that 365 kings (equal to the days of the solar year) appear ministering to him.[^[91]] This is the same conception of the myth as that Enoch, of whom again the solar event of the Ascension is preserved only in tradition, lived 365 years; or that Helios had herds of 350 cattle (7 herds of 50 each); and that in the Veda the Sun-god is blessed with 720 twin children, i.e. 360 days and nights,[^[92]] and that his chariot is drawn by seven horses, i.e. the seven days of the week.[^[93]]

The Agâdâ, again, has preserved the following mythical expression, which Professor Schwartz interprets in this sense:[^[94]] ‘Abraham was in possession of a precious stone which he wore round his neck all his life; when he died, God took the stone and hung it on the Sun.’[^[95]] As has been fully proved with regard to Aryan mythology, especially by Schwartz and Kuhn, the myth calls the sunshine and other luminous bodies stones in general, or more specifically precious stones.[^[96]] By night, as long as Abraham (the nightly heaven) lives, he bears the precious stone himself; when the night dies, God takes this stone (the moonlight) and hangs it on the sun.

How cautiously we must proceed in the mythological application of the Agâdâ, is obvious to all who know the nature and origin of the Agâdâ and the Agadic collections. I will adduce one other example to show how easily one might be led astray by yielding too trustingly and unconditionally to the temptation to employ this source in the interpretation of myths.

In the course of our investigations, it will become certain that Jacob belongs to the series of mythical figures which are connected with the nightly heaven. How easily would this conception be disturbed, if we were to accord to all the Agâdâ an absolute voice among the sources of Hebrew mythical investigation! For there it is said in reference to Gen. XXVIII. 11: ‘He (Jacob) reached that place and passed the night there, for the sun was come (kî bhâ hash-shemesh), i.e. had set.’ On this the Agadist Chaggî of Sephoris remarks, 'This sentence indicates that Jacob, when he was in Bethel, heard the welcoming voices of the angels: "The Sun is come, the Sun is come," i.e. Jacob himself. Many years later, when Jacob’s son Joseph told his father the dream in which an allusion is made to Jacob as if he were the Sun (XXXVII. 9, 10), Jacob thought to himself, ‘Who has informed my son that my name is Sun?’[^[97]]

I must point out one other peculiarity in this part of the subject. Sometimes the Agadists utilise mythological elements, by supplementing the old mythic tradition with something added by themselves, based on some one of their hermeneutic principles, but which could not possibly be also a portion of the old myth. An example will elucidate this. We will not lay down dogmatically, nor on the other hand dispute the possibility, that the name Bileʿâm Balaam is mythical. It signifies ‘the Devourer,’ and has consequently been identified for centuries with the Arabic Loḳmân, which has the same meaning.[^[98]] Accordingly Balaam would originally have been a name of the monster which devours the sun. It is not uncommon in mythology to find wisdom, cunning and prudence attributed to the powers hostile to the sun. Hence the serpent appears in the myth endowed with wisdom. This justifies Balaam’s character as sage and prophet; the serpent delivers oracles, or is οἰωνός.[^[99]] Balaam is son of Beʿôr, or ‘the Shining’—a mythical expression which often occurs when the darkness is described as springing from the daylight; and the Agâdâ may be using mythic elements in identifying this Beʿôr with Lâbhân ‘the White.’[^[100]] So this myth, like many others, would then have been nationalised by the influence of factors, which will be fully described in the Seventh Chapter. The Devourer of the Sun became a Devourer of the Hebrew people, just as the Sun-hero became the Hebrew national hero. Personations of the storms are often exhibited in mythology as lame and limping.[^[101]] This feature, which is not ascribed to Balaam in the Bible, is found in the Agâdâ, which says, Bileʿâm chiggêr beraglô achath hâyâ, ‘Balaam was lame of one foot.’ So far all is regular. But then follows, Shimshôn chiggêr bishtê raglâw hâyâ, ‘Samson was lame of both feet’[^[102]]—a feature which does not suit the Sun-hero. We must consider that this latter is an inference drawn by the Agâdâ in virtue of one of its hermeneutic principles, thus: Balaam’s lameness is attached to the word shephî, ‘hill, high place,’ Num. XXIII. 3; the word shephîphôn, ‘serpent,’ Gen. XLIX. 17 (in the declaration concerning Dan, which the Agadists take as referring to Samson the Danite), must according to the Agadists’ hermeneutics express by its form a doubling of the notion conveyed by shephî.[^[103]]

Thus only what is said about Balaam could possibly belong to the old myth; what is said about Samson is late Agadic induction, which has no importance whatever for mythology.

CHAPTER III.
THE METHOD OF INVESTIGATING HEBREW MYTHS.

§ 1. The method of investigation is intended to discover—how the original myth is to be reached through the sources described in the preceding chapter, how the primitive germ of the myth is to be freed from the husk which in the course of its growth has been formed around it, and further how the progress and lapse of this growth itself are to be recognised. Then we shall be enabled to determine how stratum upon stratum has fastened itself round the original myth until it reached that configuration which is the concrete material of our investigation. The development of the myth in any nation is mainly determined by two factors, which give to this development the direction actually taken. One group of these factors is psychological, the other belongs to the history of civilisation.[^[104]] The psychological factors in the development of all myths are the same, not changing with the special character of the people whose myths form the subject of our consideration. For the same general laws everywhere determine the life of the soul; no difference in them is introduced by the ethnological life and the peculiarity of race of the people in question. There is a psychology of mankind, or as it was called when Lazarus introduced the science, a Psychology of Nations (Völkerpsychologie). This is not a contemplation of the modes in which the intellectual life of various nations exhibits itself as acting in opposite directions, but of the modes in which the same laws find their expression and validity in the intellectual life of the most various nations. But there is no special psychology of races. On the other hand, the factors belonging to the history of civilisation are not everywhere alike, but are as various as the historical fates of the nations among themselves are various. We shall subsequently come back to the subject to show more fully that myths share in the historical vicissitudes of their nation, that they are always transformed in accordance with the stages of civilisation which the nation itself passes through in its historical development, and that accordingly the configuration of the myth is a faithful mirror of the stage of civilisation at which it has taken this particular configuration. Obviously therefore, we can duly estimate the myth through all its stages of development only in connexion with a comprehensive view over the historical development of the civilisation of the nation itself. And to gain this view we must especially attend to those phenomena which might produce an altered direction of the mind, and thus impress a new form on the myth also. But as in the methodical observation of the intellectual development of a nation in the course of its history psychological points of view must again occupy the foreground, we may assert that psychological observation must take up a prominent position in the method of mythological investigation; for the question will always be, What transformation does this or that historical vicissitude produce in that which makes up the sum of the human mind? The answer will however evidently turn out different according to the nature of these historical vicissitudes. But there is one special step of transformation which stands earlier than and in no connexion with the separate history of the nation, and is produced by a purely psychological operation. This transformation is therefore common to all myths—so much so that most inquirers, and especially Max Müller, make the life of the myth to begin only at this stage.

It is the stage of mental development which is signalised by a remarkable fact in the history of language: viz., that an endless multitude of names, bestowed upon the phenomena and processes of nature, in virtue of various features of which there is a preponderating consciousness at the moment of perception, gradually lose their meaning; while some few features of the total phenomenon are retained, to represent all those particular factors and supply comprehensive general terms for their sum total. For example, the Sun has at first a countless number of designations. It is not merely that, in its various aspects, the Sun is treated as the subject of detached observation unrelated in thought to that of other aspects of the same Sun; but the very same aspect, on repeated notice, is regarded as something different every time, and is accordingly denoted by other names. In other words, borrowed from the terminology of modern psychology, no fusion (Verflechtung) has yet been effected. Long-continued observation of the same aspects gives consciousness of their identity under repetition, and makes possible the fusion of their ideas. Next, by a further advance in development, the psychological change emerges, through which the various features of the same phenomenon cease to be essential difference-marks in the idea, and, dropping into the background, give place to a general conception gained by their fusion, an aggregate of fusion (Verflechtungsmasse), the product of often-repeated fusion.[^[105]] The effect on language of this psychological change is that, through its gradual operation, the meaning is lost from the great majority of those expressions which arose merely because the particular observations of the same aspect of a phenomenon, or the various features of the same phenomenal aggregate had not yet been brought into unity by the process of fusion or blending.

By the abandonment of the difference-marks, the sum total of all the aspects, now regarded as forming one unity, is given over to one single word, and a vast number of old designations, which stood in connexion with one particular aspect or one particular condition of observation, lose in the mind of the speaker all connexion with the physical phenomenon in question. The multiplicity of names becomes objectless, loses all psychological basis, and vanishes.[^[106]] What vanishes, however, is only the consciousness of the connexion of the multifarious names with the physical phenomenon; in other words, the names cease in great part to be designations of the phenomena, yet remain in existence. But they have a very different value to the mind from their original one. They become Proper Names; and what the sentences in which these names figured as subjects and objects originally predicated of physical phenomena, they now say of persons and individuals. The transition is facilitated by the fact that the physical phenomena themselves, whose names they were in an earlier stage of intelligence, are conceived under the figure of human actions, as loving, fighting, persecuting, &c. We must here observe emphatically that from this process in the history of language the Semitic area was not excluded. In the course of the following expositions we shall have occasion to convince ourselves that mythological appellatives forfeited their appellative character just like those of the Aryan myths. The Hebrew said ‘he laughs,’ ‘he hides,’ ‘he trips up,’ ‘he increases,’ &c. in a strictly mythical sense; in later times the meaning of these assertions was forgotten, and a proper name took the place of each. What Max Müller says of Semitic speech, that ‘those who used the word were unable to forget its predicative meaning, and retained in most cases a distinct consciousness of its appellative power,’[^[107]] is not true, at least of this portion of Semitism.

Now this is the very earliest step in the transformation of the myth. As we have seen, this transformation is conditioned only by a psychological operation, and is therefore common to every mythology. Some scholars are inclined to draw nothing that precedes this transformation into the domain of myths at all, and to say that these begin only when, as Max Müller says, the language (i.e. the living consciousness of the original signification of the multifarious names) dies. But we hold that there is every reason to regard the stage at which those expressions lived in the human mind with their original appellative sense, as one of the proper mythic stages. That event which Max Müller treats as the commencement of the development of the myth, indicates the first link in the long chain of transformations which make up the history of the myth. It is not a characteristic of the myth, that the speaker is no longer conscious of speaking of physical phenomena. As soon as ever he perceives physical phenomena as events in human life, he has at once made a myth; and every name by which he designates a physical phenomenon forms a myth. For if unintelligibility or obsoleteness of language were a condition of a myth’s existence, then there could be no myth when the Greek calls Hêlios the brother of Selênê, since both these names have been retained in their original sense, and the Greek knew that the former name meant Sun and the latter Moon, though of Hêraklês and Helenê he had no similar consciousness left. Similarly, it could not be a myth when the Roman said that Aurora opens the gates of the Sun and strews roses on his way, since every Roman knew that the name Aurora denoted the Dawn.

§ 2. It is easy to see that the first step in the formation of myths could not be a short and quickly passing stage. If it were so, the appellations of physical phenomena could not have become so firmly established as to prolong their existence even after a great majority of them had become linguistically meaningless, and to become objects of mythical transformation. The psychological process which brought about the identification of an object with itself must therefore have taken place late in the development of the human mind. Men had already expressed most various notions of the phenomena of nature and observed them in many phases, long before they attained to the power of identifying one such repeatedly occurring phenomenon with itself, notwithstanding the regularity of its appearance.

One other psychological consideration, however, demands our attention here—one among many; for a systematic presentation of all the psychological forces with which we have to reckon in investigating myths and the history of their growth belongs to a Philosophy of Mythology, which it is not our intention to give here.

Among the various categories, that of Space is the earliest to become an object of consciousness to the human soul, both in the genetic development of the individual mind and in that of the human race. The attachment of a notion to space is the earliest developed; indeed the notion of a thing without the notion of space is impossible. Even beasts distinguish things by their space. Hence L. Geiger correctly said that Language, the origin of which also marks the first phase of the power of thought, ‘springs from’ the organ of the discrimination of space, ‘the Eye and Light.’ With the category of Time it is otherwise. The discrimination of things in time is unfolded relatively later; it postulates a more delicate degree of observation. The notion of Space emanates from that sense, the use of which man acquires the earliest and the most easily of all except that of touch—the sense of Sight; the excitement of which also gives the first impulse to the formation of language. But the notion of Time demands more than a mere sensuous perception. We need not therefore be surprised if the notion of Space, both in the individual and in history, is older than that of Time, nor that, as language teaches, all the finer distinctions of opposite terms emanate from the notion of Space,[^[108]] and the very distinctions of Time itself were originally conceived from the point of view of Space. To verify this, we only need to observe the expressions still in daily use, which can be applied to time, such as, before, after, thereafter, space of time, short or long time. The Semitic is very instructive on this point. The Hebrew shâm, originally used of place (there) is found applied to time (then); in Arabic these two significations are divided between thumma ‘then’ and thamma ‘there.’ Hebrew words, such as liphenê ‘before’ and acharê ‘after,’ ḳedem, ḳadmôn, ‘old, olden time,’ bring before our eyes a very clear view of the transition from local to temporal distinctions, when we take into consideration their original significations. The Arabic beyna yedeyy, or beyna eydî, is also especially instructive. This phrase signifies ‘between the hands,’ and is used very commonly for ‘before,’ of space. But even in early classical texts (e.g. in the Ḳorân) it passes over into the ‘before’ of time. ‘Between the hands of the Prophet,’ thus means either standing before him as to place, or preceding him in time. Now that which we meet thus at every step in the Semitic and Aryan, is found also in the third great stock of languages. The time-particles of the Anaric languages often go back to relations of space; and what the German Zeitraum ‘space of time,’ and the Arabic muddâ (properly ‘extension,’ but generally in the sense of a ‘period of time’) exemplify to us, we see also e.g. in the Finnish kausi, which is used to express a piece of time. It properly signifies a direction or way, in a local sense; and the related Esthonian word kaude is still used exclusively to denote local relations.[^[109]]

In myths also we find the conception of Space and of motion in space predominant. A large group of names of the Dawn in the Aryan mythology is formed by composition of adjectives with εὐρυ and its etymological relatives, and yields variations on the notion ‘shining afar,’[^[110]] always bearing witness to local extension and motion. And in the Hebrew myths a number of solar names designate the solar figures, as going, moving, &c.[^[111]] Even in cases where rapid motion is spoken of, a great result of such motion is not treated as attained in a short time; but described rather by the space that has been passed through.

On the other hand, when we consider the notion of Time, and the question how far it is acknowledged in myths, we observe that at the earliest mythical stage the distinction of Time is only very feebly presented. We must demonstrate this at this place while treating of the method of mythology. The myth makes a distinction between the bright radiant sunny heaven and the dark heaven. Now as to this darkness, it is indifferent whether it is the darkness of night or that of the overclouded heaven by day. The myth notices only the phenomenon of the dark sky, darkness as a physical fact or state, considers only What is there? but does not distinguish the When?—the time in which this darkness occurs. Hence in the myth the nightly heaven and the stormy or cloudy heaven are synonymous, since it does not distinguish day and night as alternate periods of time, but only brightness and darkness as phenomena. Hence it comes that even in later poetry and language the notions of Rain and Night are so closely connected, that rain is more naturally thought of in union with night than with day; therefore it is said in Arabic, ‘more liberal than the rainy night’ (anda min al-leylâ al-mâṭirâ).[^[112]] Not only the rain, but the Wind also, in contrast to the merry laughing sunshine, is conceived as closely connected with the night.[^[113]] In the Mohammedan cosmogonic legend it is said that the rough Wind lives on the curtain of the Darkness.[^[114]] Hence also we see that the myth does not distinguish between the Morning Glow and the Evening Glow, but denotes the phenomenon by itself, without caring whether it precedes or follows the night. In connexion with this stands the fact that, as Steinthal has recently briefly noted,[^[115]] mythic thought did not attain to the category of Causality; for this category presupposes a clear consciousness of succession, or of one event following another in time. Only thus can we explain myths which speak of the Dawn now as the daughter, now as the mother of the Day. On the domain of language some phenomena in the semasiology of Arabic words can be explained from this fact of the development of conceptions, as e.g. when the lexicographers translate the verb safar II. IV. to ‘pasture early or late’: IV. V. ‘to come at the morning or evening glow’.[^[116]] Except by the operation of the above-named psychological fact, the express combination of these two definitions of time in one word would seem to be impossible.

But the very fact just mentioned, that it is characteristic of mythical ideas to put one phenomenon into a family relation towards another, and to speak of mother, brother, son, daughter, &c., furnishes the first elements of and impulses towards the discrimination of Succession in time, though the discrimination itself may at the mythic stage not yet break forth into life. Phenomena occurring one after another or simultaneously are conceived in the light of the most primitive relations of the family; and when the myth-forming man speaks of father and child, the very use of these terms rouses and encourages in his mind a new category, that of Succession in time, or more definitely Causality.

Another point follows naturally from this, enabling us to fix the chronological position occupied by certain myths in relation to others. If in a myth we find the fact of the temporal succession of a phenomenon treated as important, or see that a following event is in its very name described as such in relation to what preceded it, then we can justly draw the conclusion that a myth of this form belongs to an advanced stage of development, and that in determining the time of its origin we must choose a later period than we should for myths in which no conscious notion of time is visible. We shall have occasion to insist on this inference when we come into the presence of such mythic expressions as Yiphtâch Jephthah, i.e. the ‘Opener,’ and Yaʿaḳobh Jacob, i.e. the ‘Follower.’

§ 3. What has to be said on the historical aspect of the method of mythical investigation follows from the mode in which the myth grows under the influence of historical factors. If, after the first transformation of the myth occasioned by a purely psychological process, there are factors which immediately cause its further development, it is of course the business of mythic investigation to find out those transformative forces which have fastened themselves on a previous stage of development. Beginning therefore from the latest aspect of the myth, we have to follow it further and further up, to arrive by help of the thread of historical research at a knowledge of the process of historical development which operated on the myth and caused the transformation. Thus we ascend step by step to the point at which the above-described psychological process caused the individualising of the mythic figures. From this point it is only a step to the original formation of the myth, at which the appellations proper to the mythic figures are not proper names but appellative nouns. It is easy to see that, while investigation takes a retrograde course, beginning with the latest form of the myth and going back to arrive at its original form, exposition will take the contrary direction and pourtray its historical transformation in the natural order of growth, beginning with the primitive form discovered by analysis, and demonstrating successive transformations by the aid of history.

It is advisable, before we proceed to the materials of Hebrew mythic investigation, to elucidate the course of this historical method by a well-known example.

Let us take the story which is presented in Genesis, chap. XXII. Abraham, the forefather of the Hebrew people, at the behest of Elôhîm, is about to offer his only son Isaac as a sacrifice, but is prevented by an angel of Jahveh, who shows him a ram entangled in the thicket, which he may offer as a sacrifice to Jahveh instead of his son. The various religious tendencies connected with the two Divine names, Elôhîm and Jahveh are scarcely so prominent in any part of the Pentateuch as in the small passage under consideration. We see here the divergence of the religious ideas on both sides in reference to the value of human sacrifice. Not yet fully released from the Canaanitish system, the early Elohistic religious tendency as yet regards it as an unobjectionable performance. Jahveism abominates it, and is satisfied with the temper which is ready to sacrifice—the intentio; though this may very well be brought to express itself in the substituted sacrifice of a beast or something else. Hence our story makes Elôhîm demand the human offering, and Jahveh recommend the substitution.[^[117]] The present form of the legend is accordingly the product of the religious polemic waged by the Prophets against the popular view of religion which still clung to the Canaanitish system; and the apologists of the Jahveistic idea intend to show by it the advance which their own religious views had taken beyond those of earlier times.[^[118]] The divergent ideas held by these two Hebrew religious parties on human sacrifice are also to be seen in the legislative portions of the Bible. In these we can distinguish passages in which the sacrifice of the first-born of beasts is not clearly discriminated from the sanctification of the first-born child, from others in which the latter has already gained a merely theocratic meaning and is put in connexion with the deliverance of the people out of Egypt. Therefore, what is deeply impressed on these passages of legislation, viz. the battle between the Canaanitish religious tendency and the national Hebrew idea of Jahveh according to the Prophets, finds a memento in the conformation of the existing very late myth of the sacrifice of Isaac. It has the same purpose as the passage of Deuteronomy (XII. 31), in which the polemic against human sacrifice as a religious institution of the Canaanites comes most prominently forward: ‘Thou shalt not do so unto Jahveh thy God; for every abomination to Jahveh which he hateth have they done unto their Elôhîm; for even their sons and their daughters they have burned in the fire to their Elôhîm.’ This polemic tendency in the service of the Jahveh-idea, and the religious views attached to it, gave the myth in question the form in which it is known to us. But that cannot be the original form. Stripped of its Jahveistic coating, the myth remains in the following form: ‘Elôhîm demanded from Abraham the sacrifice of his only son, and Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac for Elôhîm.’ But again, the myth could take this form only in a time when the religious idea of Elôhîm had already gained such full life in the Hebrew people as to impel them to sacrifice what was dearest to them. When the myth had this form, accordingly, there was in Canaan already a monotheistic religion, the centre of which was Elôhîm the object of adoration, while the ancestors of the Hebrew people were his pious servants and favourites. This coating also must be stripped off, if we wish to trace the myth analytically to its primitive form. When we have stripped off the religious coating, we have still not yet penetrated to the central germ; for, independently of any religious tendency, Abraham remains as Patriarch, as a national figure; and this brings us into the historical epoch when the Hebrew people, attaining to a consciousness of national peculiarity and opposition to the surrounding Canaanitish peoples, constructed their own early history. Accordingly, the national coating has now to be thrown off; and then Abraham meets us as a (so to say) cosmopolitan figure—not yet transformed into the likeness of one nation, but still as a person, an individual. This stage of mythic development brings us to the psychological process which caused the mythological persons to come forth at the beginning; and behind this stage we find the original form of the myth: ‘Abram kills his son Isaac’ At that primitive stage these expressions naturally signified no more than the words imply. ‘אַבְרָםʾabrām Abh Râm, the Lofty Father, kills his son יִצְחָקyiṣḥāq Yiṣchâḳ, the Laugher.’ The Nightly Heaven and the Sun, or the Sunset, child of the Night,[^[119]] fell into a strife in the evening, the result of which is that the Lofty Father kills his child; the day must give way to night.

In the above example we have endeavoured to give a short sketch, less of the progress of development of the Hebrew myth, than of the method by which, observing the most prominent forces in the historical development of the intellectual life of the Hebrews, we can rise by analysis from the latest form of the myths to the original. Having reached this, we must confide ourselves to the guidance of the Science of Language; for that particular source for mythic inquiry which was treated in [§ 5] of the preceding chapter has chiefly to do with the primitive form of the myth. The myth is accompanied through all its stages of development by the same constant terms of language: these are, accordingly, the oldest matter for investigation on the mythological field.

Thus, taking it all together, the Method of mythic investigation turns on three hinges: 1. Psychology, 2. History, 3. Science of Language.

CHAPTER IV.
NOMADISM AND AGRICULTURE.

The basis of all modern Comparative Mythology, and the principle from which we start on the present studies, is that the Myth is only the expression in language of the impression made on the men of ancient time by the physical events and changes under the immediate influence of which they lived. If this is true, it cannot be questioned that the tendency and quality of the Myth must change, independently of the matter and contents which remain the same, in obedience to the advancing civilisation of men. For all progress in civilisation is marked, speaking generally, by continual development of the relation in which man stands to external nature. When a nation emerges from the stage of Nomadism and advances to an agricultural life, its relation to external nature is changed. The same thing happens when a people that lived exclusively by the chase and fishing advances to Nomadism. Since a new epoch in the development of human civilisation has commenced in our own times through the progress made in physical science, our relation to nature has again entered on a new phase. The spirit of modern civilisation has been characterised by the common-place, that reason has subdued nature.

The Myth accompanied mankind from the first germ to the highest stage of mental culture, always adapting itself to man’s intellectual field of view and changing with the measure of this field of view. It is therefore a faithful mirror of the ideas of the world held by the men of each age; and these ideas are nowhere so clearly reflected as in myths. The configuration and tendency of the myths is always dependent on the ideas of men at that particular stage of civilisation which gave the myth its form and guided it to its special tendency. The traces of these historical transformations of the myths are scarcely distinguishable for small chronological divisions; but when the larger epochs of civilisation are under consideration, they cannot fail to be noted by the explorer’s eye. And the discovery and demonstration of these transformations of the tendency of the myths in their relation to the great epochs of civilisation is one of the special problems of Comparative Mythology.

The solution of this problem has an intimate connexion with the answer to the question, ‘When does the life of the Myth begin, and when does it end? what is its terminus a quo, and what its terminus ad quem?’ This question is obviously closely bound up with the results of the psychological inquiry into the essence and conditions of production of the myth. The myth lives from the moment that man begins to interpret physical phenomena through processes brought before his eyes by his own every-day life and action; and as soon as the human mind uses in the interpretation of the phenomena of nature utterly different means from those prevalent in all myths, i.e. as soon as the phenomena of nature are not interpreted from human conditions, the myth has ended its life, and yields up its elements for other combinations. It is self-evident that the commencing point of the creation of myths cannot be later than the first beginnings of language; for Myth and Language are two modes of utterance of the same intellectual activity, and the oldest declarations of the human mind. Even in the Miocene age we find man—the so-called fossil man—in possession of fire: so that even then the conditions were already present for the first growth of the elements of a Prometheus-myth. In the Postpliocene age we find him already endowed with the first breath of religious feeling, if, as is generally done, we can allow the careful graveyards found at Aurillac, Cro-Magnon and Menton, to pass as historical data.[^[120]] The end of the life of the myth coincides with the moment at which is formed out of the elements of the myth a religious conception of the world peopled with gods. The living and conscious existence of the myth is finished when the mythical figures become gods. Theology hurls the myth from its throne. But this is the end only of the living existence of the primitive myth; the myth transfigured and newly interpreted in a religious sense lives on, and only now begins to pass through a rich and various series of stages of development, each marked by a corresponding stage of the religion and civilisation of the men who possess it. There then spring from mythic elements, sagas, fables, tales, legends. And as religion in its primal origin appears in history not in opposition to myths, but as a higher development of them, the life of religion does not absolutely exclude that of myths. There remain, beside the myth which has been transformed into religion, other portions of the mythic matter which religion has not yet touched, and these live on as myths, so long as the process of religious transformation has not drawn them into its domain. Pure and free Monotheism in its highest development is the first force that comes forward as a denial of the mythic elements in religion. The religious history of the Hebrews reached this stage when Jahveism was fully developed.

We will for the present not trouble ourselves with these scions of the transformed myth. We will first study it only at the early stages when it still lives an unclouded, young, fresh life, untroubled by misunderstanding—the life that precedes the origin of religion from mythic elements. There are two successive stages in the historical development of mankind, which have to be considered in the course of the expositions to which this chapter is devoted, the Nomadic and the Agricultural. In the former commences the chain of development, which is closed by the formation of perfect, true Society. First are formed communities which, though still standing only on the base of the Family, yet represent a broadening of this base insofar as the notion of the family is first enlarged into the institution of a Tribe, and then this institution cannot always refuse to take in foreign elements (prisoners of war, or clients claiming protection). The nomadic stage is in its element in constant wandering from pasture to pasture, in unceasing change of residence; and is accordingly completed, whether with regard to its intrinsic character or to the experience of history, by passing over to the stage of the stationary agriculturist. The gathering of wild fruits, by which huntsmen and primitive nomads find some vegetable nourishment, forms the first impulse to pass over to an agricultural life, as Waitz observes.[^[121]] It must be noticed that a pastoral life is frequently combined with tillage. The Nomad’s relation to nature is a very different one from the Agriculturist’s. But the consciousness of union among men—of their belonging to one another—was first excited at the nomadic stage; and it is therefore not surprising if a large proportion of the names of nations point back to that age.

A nation calls itself by a common name when the consciousness of the union of its members first arises. Names in which the nation confesses itself to be a wandering, restless society, point back to the nomadic stage of civilisation. That the contemplation of their own wandering mode of life, is with the nomadic peoples one motive for the national appellation, is shown in many instances which Bergmann has correctly explained in this sense.[^[122]] The Kurdic nomadic tribes still call themselves Kötsher, i.e. ‘wandering,’ and despise and persecute their settled brethren.[^[123]] The national appellation of the Zulus denotes the ‘homeless,’ ‘roaming.’[^[124]] According to the etymological explanation given by an old Hebraist, Clericus, the name of one of the peoples which are mentioned as aborigines of Canaan, the Zûzîm, is to be referred to this notion; it is so if we can cite for its explanation the late Hebrew zûz, ‘to move from place to place.’[^[125]] Another Canaanite national name, Perizzî, also according to many expositors points to nomadic life.[^[126]] The name Pûṭ, by which the Egyptians called many nomadic tribes that came into their country, and which is also given in the list of nations in Gen. X. as the name of a son of Ham, likewise belongs to the same class. From their wandering life they were called by the Egyptians the ‘Runners,’ and the graphical power of the name is shown in the hieroglyphs by the picture of the quickfooted hare.[^[127]] The name of the Hebrews also, ʿIbhrîm, belongs to the same series; it denotes ‘those who wander here and there,’ the Nomads. For the word ʿâbhar, from which the national name ʿIbhrîm or Hebrews is derived, denotes not merely transire, ‘to pass through a land, or to cross a river,’ but rather ‘to wander about’ in general; for which sense many Hebrew texts might be quoted. The Assyrian is instructive on the point; there the phonetically corresponding verb is used of the sun, which i-bar-ru-u kib-ra-a-ti ‘marches, wanders through the lands.’[^[128]] A similar wandering through various lands is the foundation of the appellation ʿIbhrîm ‘Hebrews,’ so that it denotes ‘the Wanderers here and there,’ the Nomad-people.[^[129]] In opposition to these national names others are formed, which speak of the sedentary mode of life; a name of this kind is that of the South Arabian people Joḳṭân, which, as Freytag conjectured,[^[130]] comes from ḳaṭana ‘to take up a fixed abode.’[^[131]]

We must not overlook the fact that such national names as these, derived from and referring to a certain stage of life and civilisation, are preserved by the same nation, even when that stage has been long passed. We see this most clearly in the case of the Philistines, who lived chiefly in towns, and preserved not even a tradition to remind them of a former nomadic life. Yet their name Pelishtim is itself a reminiscence of this kind. Whether the name is to be combined with the Semitic (Ethiopic) palasha ‘to wander,’ as most of the Semitic philologists say,[^[132]] or is to be explained from the Aryan, as others say; in either case it is a living witness and reminiscence of the nomadic stage of the Philistine people, at which they gave themselves this name. Similarly the Accadians still called themselves by that name, which means ‘Highlanders,’ long after they had chosen a new habitation in the plains.[^[133]]

The herdsman finds his happiness in the well-being of his herds; his wealth depends on the quality of the pasture which he can get for them; to seek this is the constant object of his endless wanderings. Good, fresh, sound pasture is the sum of his modest wishes: ‘green pastures beside still waters,’ as a Hebrew Psalmist (Ps. XXIII. 2) expresses it. The cloudy heaven, which sends rain to his fields, is in his eyes a most friendly element, to which he gladly gives the victory over the scorching glow of the sun, which dries up his pastures. The nomad calls himself ‘Son of the water of heaven,’ i.e. the rain. ‘By banû mâ al-samâ (Sons of Rain),’ says an Arabic commentator on Muslim’s collection of traditions, ‘the Arabs are to be understood.... For as the greater part of them are owners of herds, they supported themselves mainly by the goodness of the pastures.’[^[134]] Thus this appellation ‘Sons of the water of heaven’ could then come to have the general meaning ‘rich people,’ as e.g. in a sensible verse of ʿAnbar b. Samâk:[^[135]]

falâ tathiḳan min-an-nauka bishayʾin

walau kânû banî mâʿi-s-samâʿi:

‘Confide thou not in anything in fools,

E'en were they sons of water of the heaven,’

i.e. however rich they might be. The Bedawî of Somali, Isa, call their Ogas, i.e. chief, by the name Roblai, which, according to Burton, denotes Prince of the Rain.[^[136]]

The nomad must be constantly wandering and seeking good pasture, if he is to gain a comfortable position. The glowing heat of the sun is in this respect his terrible enemy and continual adversary.

The starry heaven by night and the moon he recognises as his friends and protectors; and he gladly welcomes the moment when these guardians overcome the enemy, and drive off the beaming sun, when noon is followed by afternoon, and the evening comes on with its cool breeze, on the track of the departed solar heat. Then he is delivered from the tiresome ḳail, ‘midday sleep,’ which the noon-day heat had brought on. He therefore likes best to begin his journey in the afternoon, and continues it till night or during the night.[^[137]] ‘In their journeys and expeditions with caravans or for plunder,’ says Sprenger of the Arabs, ‘they generally travel during the night. When one rides on a camel at a slow pace through the monotonous desert, the nights seem very long. But the heart is filled with quiet delight by the stillness of the night and the enjoyment of the fresh air, and the eye involuntarily looks upwards. Hence we find even in the Ḳorân and in the poetry of the Bedawî frequent allusion to the starry heaven and its motion.’[^[138]] The caravan-songs (ḥidâh) accordingly refer mainly to night-travelling, as e.g. one quoted by Wetzstein:

O how journey we, while dew is scattered out

And desert-dust bedecks the lips of sumpter beasts.

O how journey we, while townsmen sleep

With limbs involved in coverlets;[^[139]]

and when he travels by day he follows the course of the clouds, seeking coolness and shade. The Arabic poet Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî, who, like all the later writers of ḳaṣîdâs,[^[140]] makes the horizon of Beduin life the background of his poetry, says somewhere of his beloved,

As though the cloud were her lover, she always turns her saddle

To the quarter where the cloud is moving;

and the scholiast observes on the passage, ‘that is, she is a Beduin, and the Bedawî always follow the rain and the places where raindrops fall from heaven.’[^[141]] The old Arabian poet wishes for rain also on the grave of his friend; he cannot bear to see it scorched by the sun’s heat. ‘Drench, O clouds, the earth of that grave!’ is a frequently recurring formula in the old Arabic poetry; and the later poetry, with its imitation of old forms, has received this phrase into its inventory.[^[142]] It is connected with this preference of the nomads for the heavens by night, that Hind, daughter of ʿOtbâ, says on the day of the battle of Oḥod to the Koreyshites, the opponents of Islâm: ‘We are the daughters of the Star,’ (naḥnu binât Ṭâriḳ),[^[143]] thereby claiming descent for herself also from the nightly heaven. We put this exclamation of the brave Arab woman in the same category with the above-mentioned reference of the origin of the Arabs to the Rain, and consider ourselves justified in rejecting the explanation given by al-Jauharî, who finds in it a simile, with the sense, ‘Our father excels others in nobility of birth, as that brilliant star excels the other stars.’[^[144]] It is then quite indifferent which star Ṭâriḳ is, whether the morning star, according to most lexicographers, or Zoḥal, (Saturn, or another of the five Chunnas-stars),[^[145]] as al-Baiḍâwî explains it.[^[146]] The point lies only in the fact that the Arab woman calls herself ‘Star’s daughter;’ and this designation falls into the same category with Banû Badr ‘Sons of the Full Moon,’ Banû Hilâl ‘Sons of the New Moon,’ adopted by some Arabian tribes, and compared even by Bochart[^[147]] with the name of the people Jerah.[^[148]] Thus also several clans of Arabian tribes, especially the Banû Temîm, Banû Ḍabbâ, and Banû Azd called themselves ‘Sons of Night,’ (Banû Ṣarîm).[^[149]] On the other hand, the townsman of Mecca called himself ‘Child of the Sun,’—a name which has survived to the present time, as is to be seen from an interesting communication of Kremer.[^[150]]

The relation of the Agriculturist to the two warring elements of the sky is very different. Storm, wind, and excessive rain are the declared enemies of his life, whereas the warm sun’s rays, which heat and bring to perfection the fruits of the field, are gladly welcomed by him, and their victory over the dark gloomy sky gives him joy. An old Hellenic name of the sun is Zeus Talaios, or Tallaios, or simply Talos, which denotes ‘encouraging growth,’ as has been proved long ago.[^[151]] It is Zeus who watches the cornfields and sends bountiful harvests;[^[152]] and even clouds and rain are connected with him, insofar as their powers are beneficial to the agriculturist. For this reason Zeus himself becomes the νεφεληγερέτα, the Thunderer and Rain-giver.[^[153]] This variety of relation to nature will be found reflected in the myths formed at these two stages respectively. The altered relation to external nature works a change even in the old and already fully formed myths, and lays down for them a new tendency in accordance with the altered conception of nature. Thus the myth which was already formed at an earlier stage of civilisation frequently still possesses enough power of resistance to preserve, in spite of adaptation to new views, much of the character formerly impressed on it by a past stage of civilisation. But the new myth must bear only the impress of the new stage at which its existence begins. For as the capacity for creating language does not exhaust all its force at once, but still continues to form new modes of speech whenever an alteration of circumstances demands them, so it is with myths. As the agriculturist creates new words for his new circumstances and ideas, so also he creates new myths.

§ 2. What therefore especially distinguishes the Nomad’s myth from the Agriculturist’s is mainly referable to the different position occupied at these two stages by the dark night-sky on the one hand and the brilliant, warm, sunny sky on the other. The myth is not a merely objective[^[154]] expression for the phenomena of nature. For what is ordinarily and in common life called purely objective description, is almost an impossibility, seeing that no one with all possible exertion, restraint and self-abnegation can put off all his individuality; and this is true, in a much higher degree, of the myth. It is incorrect to speak of objective reporters or historians. For how would it be possible for me, giving a report on an event, whether as eye-witness or as critical sifter of the statements of others, to speak of it without being myself the Speaker? And the single fact that I am the speaker, impresses on my report a different stamp from that which the report of another would have borne. Compare so-called objective historical narratives from different decads—not to speak of hundreds or thousands of years. How much more must the subjectivity of the myth-creators be impressed on the myths of different periods of civilisation! Now it is undoubtedly true that the special, sharply characteristic intellectual individuality of persons is only developed in direct proportion with the advance of the culture of the mind. The more education a man has, the more can he give expression to his inner self and make its influence felt; and with the advance of education, the just claims of Individuality will also receive more and more attention, both in society and in law. This process can be traced upwards from animals of low organisation to man, and within the human race can be confirmed through its various stages of development, geographical and historical. At the myth-creating stage, intellectual uniformity prevails almost universally, in all individuals. Consequently here only the sum total of the men who are creating language and myth has any power; the individual could not effect anything of his own, different from the work of others. There is no such thing as either language or myth of a single individual;[^[155]] and what Steinthal says in reference to national songs, is equally true of both of them, that the mind which produces them, ‘is the mind of a multitude of persons without individuality, held together by physical and mental relationship; and whatever is mentally produced by this multitude is a creation of the common mind, i.e. of the nation.’[^[156]] And just for this reason the common mind in each of the various epochs of civilisation has its own characteristic impress, a tendency and fundamental conception, which distinguish it from those of the preceding epoch.

Among the Nomads, then, the dark, cloudy heaven of night is the sympathetic mythical figure; they imagine it conquering, or if it is overcome, give to its fall a tragic character, so that it falls lamented and worthy rather of victory than of ruin; and the Nomad’s grief for the defeated power is propagated from age to age far beyond the mythical period. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter is still lamented from time to time by the daughters of Israel. It is just the reverse with the myth of the Agriculturist. He makes the brilliant heaven of day-time conquer, and the gloomy cloudy heaven or the dark night fall; he accompanies the victory of the warm heaven of the day with cries of triumph and applause, and his hymns immortalise what he felt and thought on this victory. Here it is the defeat of the sunny heaven that attunes him to lamentation. The fallen Samson is a tragical figure. Every reader will be able himself to supply the application of these general propositions to the myth of the Hebrews, if he pays attention to the chapter in which the chief figures of the Hebrew mythology were brought forward, with the chief traits by which they are accompanied in Mythology. I should deem it superfluous to prosecute this application further, as it is to be found in every case in the nature of the myth itself.

But it is not only from a feeling of sympathy towards the heaven of night and clouds that the Nomad puts it in the foreground. This aspect of heaven is to him also the datum, the prius, the natural, which the heaven of day afterwards opposes as foe and persecutor. With the nature of Nomadism, and especially of the night-wanderings, is also connected the Reckoning of time by Nights. This has been best preserved by the Arabs, who count by nights, instead of days, as we do. It is especially marked in the determination of the distance between two places and of the length of a journey: e.g. ‘His face perspires with desire for the payment held back for long nights (i.e. for a long time);’[^[157]] ‘Between Damascus and the place where Walîd b. Yazîd lived in the desert are four nights;’[^[158]] ‘I will give him five hundred dînârs and a camel, on which he can travel for twelve nights;’[^[159]] in a poem of Abû Zeyd al-ʿAbshamî, ‘When the tribe travels for sixteen nights’ (iḏa-l-ḳaumu sârat sittat ʿashrata leylatan).[^[160]] This Arabic idiom is so firmly established that in the opposite case, when a period is for once to be expressed in days, the equivalent expressed in nights is added as a more exact definition; e.g. ‘So that there lay between them and their home a distance of two days or three nights.’[^[161]] With the reckoning of time by nights two other practices are connected. First, the Night has priority before the Day; therefore among the Arabs and the Hebrews (as also among the later Jews), the two peoples which, as we shall see, preserved the feeling of nomadism longer than the Aryans, the day begins with the evening. ‘There was evening, there was morning—one day.’ A residuum of the old nomadic conception is found in the Egyptian myth that Thum, the form of the sun’s nocturnal existence, was born before Ra, the sun’s form by day. Secondly, chronology is thereby connected chiefly with the nocturnal heaven and the moon. It is to be observed on this subject that in nations which begin to count the day from the evening, the moon is the central figure and the starting point in the chronology of greater periods.[^[162]] Seyffarth, in an essay entitled, ‘Did the Hebrews before the Destruction of Jerusalem reckon by lunar months?’ (published in 1848 in the Zeitschrift der D.M.G., II. 347 sqq.), endeavoured to defend the thesis that the Hebrew chronology was originally founded on solar months, which were not supplanted by lunar months till between the second and fourth century after Christ; but he supports this theory by arguments which cannot stand against profounder criticism. It must rather be assumed that the original lunar year at the beginning of agricultural life was united with the observation of the solar periods (see Knobel, Commentary on Exodus, p.95), so as to produce very early compensation of the difference between them; but that in the various attempts at compensation, which ended with the fixing of the calendar and the arrangement of the intercalary month, the reckoning by moons remained in the foreground, as is evident in the mode of compensation. In reference to the Arabs also, Sprenger has fully proved in the essay to which we have already referred in this chapter, that the solar element of chronology was subordinate, and that in the old times before Moḥammed the lunar reckoning was in force.

As on another occasion we shall recur to the fact that among the Aryans the Indians retained a certain degree of nomadic sentiment more distinctly than any other Aryans, and that this is impressed on their literature and on many of their institutions, so here we may observe the same in reference to their chronology. In the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Sanskrit people, we find the lunar year of twelve months, with the occasional addition of a thirteenth or intercalary month.[^[163]] It is remarkable that on this subject we find still more reminiscences of the nomadic life among the Persians. In the whole book of Avesta, in passages where the shining heavenly bodies are enumerated, they appear in this invariable order: Stars, Moon, and Sun, the sun always occupying the last place. And we even find also the reckoning of time by nights exactly as it is among the Arabs; which enables Spiegel to draw the just inference that the ancient Persians reckoned by lunar years.[^[164]] According to Bunsen[^[165]] the Delphic myth of the purification of Apollo likewise points to the conclusion that the Hellenes in later times substituted the solar for the old lunar chronology.

The Solar chronology belongs to the Agriculturist, in opposition to the Nomad. As the night and the nocturnal sky forms the foreground to the nomad, so the agricultural stage of civilisation leads the sun to victory, and the sun becomes the measure and the starting point of its chronology. With the advance to agriculture the lunar year is superseded by the Magnus Annus, or ἡλιακόν, which was also called ὁ θεοῦ ἐνιαυτός. Yet very curiously, as the remains of nomadism in general may be long visible and be unconsciously perpetuated in the ideas of the agriculturist, it is the mode of calculating time that echoes the nomadic ideas the longest, and even survives in ages of more advanced culture. Of the Gauls, e.g., Julius Caesar reports that they counted by nights, not by days.[^[166]] Tacitus says the same of the ancient Germans.[^[167]] In one case, namely in the English word ‘fortnight,’[^[168]] which is a speaking proof that the ancestors of those who now use the word reckoned time by nights, one of the most advanced nations of the present time has not yet left off counting by nights. Other languages also, spoken by nations which have long accepted the solar reckoning, preserve memorials of the old nomadic lunar reckoning. In Hungarian and other languages of the Ugric stock the expression ‘hopping year’ (szökő év) for leap-year,[^[169]] in connexion with other similar phenomena, points to a chronology of lunar years, as the Hungarian Academician Paul Hunfalvy has very fully demonstrated, with important documents.[^[170]] The residuum of the lunar chronology which has stood the longest, and which, despite the generally preponderating solar character of our reckoning of time, and despite the love of a decimal system inherent in the first French Revolution, is now fixed firmly for a long future period, is the Week—a notion specifically connected with the Moon. Yet it has long been made evident that even this division of the month into four weeks was in antiquity sometimes exchanged for a solar division into three decads. This was due to the influence of the agricultural stage of civilisation giving prominence to the Sun. We know this, e.g., of the Egyptians, and it was therefore long doubted whether they knew the division into weeks at all. But Sir Gardner Wilkinson collected a series of proofs that among the Egyptians the later system of decads was historically preceded by the division of the months into four weeks of seven days each.[^[171]] It is also tolerably certain of the Mexicans, that of their two methods of reckoning time, which in later times were in force side by side, the Tonulpohualli or ‘solar reckoning’ and the Metzlapohualli or ‘lunar reckoning,’ the latter was historically the earlier, but was retained in the time of the solar chronology, as is so frequently the case in computations of time.[^[172]] We ought, moreover, also to consider the computation of longer periods of time by Masika, i.e. rainy seasons, which prevails among the Unyamwesi in Africa.[^[173]] How powerful is the posthumous influence even on later times of the nomadic lunar division into weeks,—an influence which again and again obtained validity, even after it had been once supplanted by the solar reckoning by decads, we see best among the Romans. They had originally a consistent lunar computation; even their year consisted of ten months, the sun’s cycle of twelve months being ignored; and they divided the month into four weeks.[^[174]] Later, this fourfold division gave way to a threefold division into three decads, nonae, kalendae, idus; but yet they returned at last to the week again, and called its seven days by the names of the sun, the moon and the five planets. However, the division of the month into three decads is not always connected with solar chronology; it is also found in combination with lunar reckoning, when three phases of the moon are acknowledged (as in the three-headed forms of the moon in the Greek mythology).[^[175]]

A five-days’ period has been proved to exist in many nations as the equivalent of our week (among the Chinese, Mongol tribes, Azteks, and Mexicans.)[^[176]] But this division into pentads must be connected with an original quinary system of numeration, to the linguistic importance of which Pott has devoted a special treatise.[^[177]] In Old Calabar on the west coast of Africa a week of eight days occurs; most curiously, as the people cannot count beyond five.[^[178]] A priori this would seem impossible; but it is vouched for by an observer so accurate as Bastian.

§ 3. As the Nomadic stage of civilisation of necessity historically precedes the Agricultural, so also that stage of the myths at which the nocturnal, dark or cloudy heaven has precedence of the bright heaven of day comes before the stage at which the latter occupies the foreground and plays the part of a beloved figure or favourite. Moreover, it cannot be assumed that this second stage of the formation of myths has grown up without being preceded by the first stage; for it is simply impossible that any portion of mankind should have lived through the stage of Nomadism, which perhaps lasted for thousands of years, without having thrown its conceptions of the world into mythic forms. Everyone knows, and no one now doubts, that the most prominent figure in the mythology of the Aryans, which later at the theological stage took the rank of a supreme god, was the brilliant sunny heaven, Dyu (Dyaus, nom.), Θεός, Zeus, on whom the powerful sympathy of the Aryan was concentrated, and to whom he turned with admiring devotion as soon as he began to pray and compose hymns. On the other hand, it could not escape the notice of the inquirer on the domain of Aryan mythology and history of religion, that the very oldest and most genuine representative of the Aryan mind seems itself to form a sort of exception to this universal idea. The Indians, namely, among whom Dyu certainly was elevated to theological importance,[^[179]] do not make him their supreme god, but Indra, who, as his very name shows, (indu = ‘a drop’) is identical with the rainy sky (Jupiter pluvius),[^[180]] and Varuṇa, who, in contrast to the shining Mitra, was the gloomy night-sky (from var = ‘to cover’).[^[181]] Max Müller, whose merit it mainly is to have raised the Aryan Dyu to the high throne which he now occupies in the history of Aryan religion, explains this strange fact by supposing that Indra drove Dyu, the oldest of the gods, from the place which he had formerly held even among the Indians. ‘If in India,’ he thinks, ‘Dyu did not grow to the same proportions as Zeus in Greece, the reason is simply that dyu retained throughout too much of its appellative power,[^[182]] and that Indra, the new name and the new god, absorbed all the channels that could have supported the life of Dyu,’[^[183]] so that he died away.

From what has been explained above, it is evident that the subject might present itself in a different light. It is well known that the people of India represents, both in its language and in its mythology, the oldest stage of the Aryan mind attainable by us, and after it follows the people of Iran. The ancient literature of these two nations, but that of the Indians more than that of the Persians, stands much nearer in its ideas to the nomadic life than any other documents of the Aryan mind which have been preserved to us. It is then no wonder if (it being a rule in all physical as well as intellectual development, that at a later stage of progress residua of a previous one remain behind unnoticed) these nations, which at the time of their oldest known intellectual productions were not far removed from nomadism, exhibit more traces of nomadism than others, even if they be found to have then fully passed out of the nomadic stage. We have already referred to this in treating of the nomadic elements in chronology, and now return again to the same point. In some things the Iranians preserved the traditions of nomadism more firmly and persistently than the Indians, who generally stood nearer to the original forms. This is to be explained from the fact that in Persia nomadism itself lived longer as an actual stage of civilisation, and was more fostered, than in India; for indeed it even now maintains its position there. For just as in the time of Herodotus (I. 125) the Persians were partly migratory nomads (νομάδες), partly settled agriculturists (ἀροτῆρες), so now a proportion, varying from a quarter to a half, of the population of modern Persia still leads a nomadic life.[^[184]] One characteristic of the nomadic period is a social and political division into tribes, which in many civilised nations is retained into the time of fixed dwellings as a residuum of nomadism. Without pausing over the Thracians, who according to the account of Herodotus,[^[185]] found it impossible to throw off all reference to tribe-differences and bring their power to bear through national unity, we will refer to the Ionians as an example, whose divisions into φρατρίαι, γένη, and γεννῆται, have been accurately traced.[^[186]] Now among the Indians we find no trace of tribal divisions worth mentioning, but very soon come across the Caste—an hereditary division according to modes of occupation, which cannot be formed at any earlier stage than that of fixed dwellings, since this gave the first impulse to the practice of arts and trades, which is not conceivable at the nomadic stage. Among the Iranians, on the other hand, the tribal division maintained itself for a long time parallel with that according to occupation, which was better suited to the time of transition to a fixed life.[^[187]] Even on the Caste system of the Parsees the tribal division still exerts a definite influence. The sacerdotal caste is a distinct tribe, a family, just like the Levites among the Hebrews;[^[188]] and in ancient times many sacerdotal functions, ‘the smaller and less important religious duties, were assigned to the heads of the various subdivisions of the tribe.’ The name of the priests, môbed (which Spiegel explains as umâna-païti = ‘chief head of the tribe or family,’ perhaps equivalent to the Hebrew rôsh bêth âbh), in itself indicates the original universality of the bestowal of the sacerdotal functions on the head of the tribe.[^[189]]

As in Iran a fundamental social institution, so among the Sanskrit people a prominent mythological fact is the notable residuum of nomadism: viz. the fact that by them the first seat and highest rank among the figures of the myth and subsequently among the gods is assigned not to Dyu, but to Varuṇa and Indra. It is not to the field-guarding, harvest-sending, shining sunny heaven, but to Varuṇa the coverer and Indra the rain-sender, that the nomad directs his admiration and sympathy, his veneration and devotion. This relation towards Indra was preserved by the Indian from the nomadic period—from a time before that remarkable people had chosen a permanent abode on the banks of the Ganges and Indus. With this agrees very well the idea which Roth worked out in an essay on ‘the highest gods of the Aryan peoples,’ that Varuṇa is as old as the Aryan period, and is the common property of all members of the race; even the conception of Indra being later than that of Varuṇa, and specially Indian.[^[190]] But it is not only among the Indians that we find this memory of nomadic life impressed on the mythology; its traces may be found also in the Hellenic mythology, not however as a positive, actual existence, as in India, but still as an historical reminiscence. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the dominion of Zeus was preceded by that of Uranus; i.e. before the Hellenic people, choosing a settled agricultural life, brought Zeus, the bright sunny heaven, into the foreground, the centre of their world was Uranus (Varuṇa), the gloomy overclouded sky. There is scarcely any serious reason for regarding, as Bunsen[^[191]] and some writers on the history of religion do, the kingdom of Zeus alone as an original intellectual product of the Hellenic people, and putting aside Uranus as merely a result of Theogonic speculation, or for even seeing in Uranus a figure borrowed from a Semitic source. The succession—Uranus, Zeus—rather corresponds perfectly with the successive stages of civilisation, nomadism and agriculture, and all that Hesiod did was to clothe an historical, natural and true tradition of the Hellenic people in the form of a theogonic story. With this, other points of the Theogony seem to be clearly and unmistakably connected, namely those in which we perceive the idea of the priority of the Night. Among the powers preceding the rule of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos is named—a word signifying according to its original sense ‘darkness’—and Tartarus. We well know the theological meaning of the latter word—the subterranean place to which the souls of the dead go; but there is no doubt that it originally denoted ‘a gloomy pit, never lighted by the sun,’ or ‘darkness’ in general. Therefore Tartarus figures in Mythology as father of Typhon and Echidna, and therefore Nyx is his daughter. Then it agrees well with nomadic ideas that Tartarus is called ‘father of waters and springs,’ and that he bears the epithet ‘the first born’ (πρωτόγονος). On Hebrew ground also we meet a similar transition. In Job XXXVI. 20, the word laylâ ‘night’ is used quite in the sense of ‘nether world;’ which is true also of ṣalmâweth, denoting ‘darkness’ in general, and used only secondarily with special reference to Orcus.

§ 4. We have above just touched the confines of religious history, though it was strictly speaking, only a border territory of Mythology, which ought not to be confounded with religious history. But we must here allow ourselves an excursion into the neighbouring territory. For it ought not to pass unnoticed that, as the myth which has the night-sky in its foreground always precedes that which has the bright sky of day in its centre, the former corresponding to the nomadic, the latter to the settled agricultural life, the same sequence can also be observed in the history of religion. There are nations, which, when already standing at the nomadic stage, work out for themselves a theistic religion. As theistic religion always grows up out of the elements of myths, the religion of Nomadism must be essentially a worship of the night-heaven. Then, when the progress to the agricultural stage works the revolution in man’s ideas of the world, and in the relation of his mind to external nature, of which I spoke above, when he cleaves more to the Sun and pays his reverence to him, then the worship of the nocturnal starry or overclouded rainy heaven is naturally supplanted by one of the diurnal heaven and the sun, and only residua of the ancient ideas and the ancient objects of worship are propagated into the new epoch, sometimes continuing and remaining in force unmodified, and sometimes interpreted anew in the sense of the new system. The religion and the worship of the nomad stand to those of the agriculturist in the same relation of historical succession as the two similar stages of mythology to each other. At the later stage, the elements of solar religion can undoubtedly stand peacefully side by side with the residua of the earlier stage of religion. Similarly, when nomads have relations with townsmen who have a solar religion already powerfully developed, many elements of the solar worship may find their way into the nomadic religion; of which the well-known accounts of the religion of some Arabic Beduin tribes furnish plenty of examples. To this an outside observer may probably reduce the report brought by William Gifford Palgrave, the daring explorer of Central Arabia, of the adoration of the Sun among the Bedawî.[^[192]] But in the order of genesis the worship of the night-sky, inclusive of that of the moon, precedes that of the day-sky and the sun. It was observed long ago that wherever sun-worship exists, moon-worship also is always to be found, being a residuum of the earlier stage of religion; but not in the reverse order.[^[193]] We shall have to revert in a subsequent chapter to this fact, in speaking of the religion of the nomadic Hebrews, and will therefore only refer to a few points in the ancient Arabic religion. If Blau is right in interpreting the old Arabic proper name ʿAbd Duhmân as ‘Servant of the Darkness of Night,’[^[194]] the theological importance of the night-sky to the ancient Arabs in general is proved; for it is well known that in Arabic proper names compounded with ʿAbd ‘servant’ the second member of the compound is a god’s name, or at least a name of theological meaning.[^[195]] To the same class belongs the Moon-worship of the ancient Arabs, which is sufficiently attested.[^[196]] The clearest evidence of a worship of the rainy sky and the storm among the Arabs is furnished by the name Ḳuzaḥ, to which storms and rainbows were attributed (see the following chapter [§ 12]). Arabian etymologists, among whom may be mentioned the author of the Ḳâmûs and the author of the Supercommentary on that dictionary, publishing at Bûlâḳ, have tried many combinations in order to find a suitable explanation of this Ḳuzaḥ, with especial reference to the meaning ‘rainbow;’ all the derivative significations of the root ḳzḥ, embellishment, variety of colour, lifting oneself, are brought forward to yield a sufficient ground for the appellation. This proves how little the Mohammedan now knows of his heathen antiquity; the use of the name Ḳuzaḥ must have been interdicted. Al-Damîrî, in his work Almasâ ʾil al-manthûrâ, finds a deep-seated error in the word itself, instead of which he wishes to read kazaʿ with ʿayn, with the meaning ‘cloud.’[^[197]] But it is probable that this name Ḳuzaḥ is derived from the signification ‘mingere,’ which belongs to the corresponding verb (used specially of beasts), and that it is due to a mythological conception of the Rain. This circumstance tempts us to connect the Hebrew word bûl ‘rain, rainy month’ with the Arabic bâla, yabûlu ‘mingere.’ If so, the combination of this word with the name of the God Baʿal, which certainly does occur in Himyaric in the form Bûl, must have been made later, from a misunderstanding of the mythological relations.[^[198]] The theological power of Ḳuzaḥ among the ancient Arabs is evident as well from its being explained by Moslem interpreters as the name of a devil or angel, as also from the fact that geographical appellations which are in force in the ritual of the old religion are connected with it.[^[199]] These elements of the worship of the night and the cloudy and stormy sky must have priority before those of the solar worship which are found subsisting beside them. F. Spiegel states this succession to be a law in the history of religion. ‘It is not the sun,’ he says,[^[200]] ‘that first attracted the attention of the savage by its light.... On the other hand, the night-sky, whose lights form a contrast to the darkness of the earth, is much more calculated to attract the gaze of the savage to itself. And among the heavenly lights it is the moon that first absorbs the sight, as well from its size as from its readily discernible changes; and after it a group of particularly brilliant stars.... We find moon-worship among almost utterly savage tribes in Africa and America; and it is noteworthy that there the moon is always treated as a man, the sun as a woman; not till later are these relations inverted. From this we may infer that the lunar worship is older than the solar.’ We cannot, however, agree with Spiegel when he gives as the reason why darkness attracted the special attention of man, that the sun was to him a matter of course. We see the same story of the lunar religion repeat itself again in the history of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion. Hur-ki (Assyrian Sin) is historically the older and earliest prominent object of worship of the ancient Accadian kingdom; and the further we advance towards the beginnings of the history, the more does the worship of the moon preponderate. The monarchs of the first dynasties regard her as their protector, and the name of the moon often enters into composition to form their proper names.[^[201]] In the later empire, that of Assyria, this prevailing pre-eminence of the moon gradually ceases. She is supplanted by the sun, under whom she descends to be a deity of the second rank, the ‘Lord of the thirty days of the month,’ and ‘Illuminator of the earth.’[^[202]] That Samas, the sun, is called in the Assyrian epic of Istar the son of Sin, the moon-god (IV. 2), ‘points,’ as the learned German interpreter of the cuneiform inscriptions observes, ‘to a veneration of the moon-god in Babylonia earlier than that of the sun-god,’[^[203]] or else to the conception of the night preceding the day. Among the Egyptians, too, it is a later period at which the dominion of the sun is recognised. The older historical epoch—whether permeated, as Bunsen expresses it somewhat obscurely,[^[204]] by a ‘cosmogonic-astral’ idea, or, as Lenormant describes it in a few bold strokes,[^[205]] possessing very little positive religion at all—knows as yet nothing of solar worship. The solar worship of the Egyptians is undoubtedly the product of a later development of high culture.

This phenomenon, the priority of the lunar to the solar worship, is asserted also by the adherents of a theory of the history of civilisation usually called the Gynaecocratic, which was founded and worked out by the Swiss savant Bachofen in a large book entitled ‘The Gynaecocracy of Antiquity.’ To the adherents of this theory, who suppose the lordship of man to have been preceded by a long period in which the female sex bore rule, the lunar worship is closely allied to the importance of woman, while the solar worship is connected with the rule of man. I do not, of course, deem it a part of my present task to criticise the Gynaecocratic theory, which has certainly had but small success in the learned world, or to take up a position either for or against it. Yet it is satisfactory that the phenomenon in the history of religion which we have brought into prominence may find confirmation in another quarter, where the premisses are utterly different.

§ 5. The first founder of Comparative Mythology, Professor A. Kuhn, starting from the truth ‘that every stage of social and political growth has a more or less peculiar mythological character of its own, and that the fact of these, so to speak, mythological strata lying side by side or crossing one another often renders the solution of mythological enigmas more difficult,’ insisted, primarily with reference to Aryan mythology, that the mythological products of each of the great epochs of civilisation ought to be sifted with reference to the cycles of myths peculiar to each epoch.[^[206]] He himself ventured on the first beginnings or elements of such a sifting in a very interesting and instructive academical treatise ‘On stages of development in the formation of Myths.’[^[207]] Kuhn finds the criterion of a myth’s belonging to one or another period of civilisation mainly in the notions and objects with which the myth has to do. Sun’s hunts were spoken of in the hunting period, the sun’s cattle in the nomadic, &c.; and the formation of myths which employed these notions commenced ‘as soon as the following period had lost the understanding of the language of the preceding’ (p. 137).

I do not think that a definition of the periods of myth-formation which starts with the Material of the myth can always afford a strictly reliable rule for judging a mythic stratum and assigning it to this or that period of civilisation. For it must not be left unnoticed that, when once the notion of hunting or of herds has come into existence, it does not vanish from the mental inventory of man as soon as ever the stage of civilisation is passed on which that portion of mankind occupies itself with hunting or keeping herds. On the other hand, the entrance of a more advanced stage of civilisation does not imply the utter banishment out of human society of everything connected with the preceding, though, speaking generally, this was now passed and gone. Otherwise, how could we at the present day, when the hunting age is left so many thousand years behind us, still have our hunting adventures and enjoy all the pleasures belonging to the sportsman’s life? And must there not be shepherds even in agricultural countries, although the agriculturist has long passed the stage of nomadism? Consequently, from the phraseological material employed in the myth it is only possible to infer the terminus a quo referring to its origin, but not the terminus ad quem. Else we should be entangled in the same mistakes into which the earlier Danish antiquaries fell, when from the occurrence of stone, bronze, or iron instruments in a tumulus or avenue, they inferred that the tumulus or avenue was so and so old; not considering that the material of a completed period is propagated into the next epoch, as is shown in all those prehistorical finds in which instruments of all possible materials appear promiscuously, as James Fergusson has convincingly proved.[^[208]] We are in the same case with the phraseology of the Myth. On the ascent out of each of the great periods, the ideas connected with it, which began with the entrance into it, cannot disappear. The idea, having once been grasped by man, remains always present to him, and can be conveniently used to give names to natural phenomena connected with the same circle of ideas; and he does not cease to take notice of natural phenomena while forming myths. Thus even the agriculturist may have spoken of the Sun’s hunts; and even at the agricultural stage myths may still have arisen which spoke of the Sun as a sportsman armed with arrows with which he slays the dragon. It is accordingly not the mythic material that is of the highest moment in sketching the chief stages of development in the formation of myths, but rather the Tendency of the myth—the position occupied by man in relation to external nature, so far as appears from the myths in question. How, according to this scale of development, the stages of the myth among the Aryans are reflected in their mythology, I do not presume to judge, being on Aryan ground only a dilettante. I will, however, quote some examples from the special ground of these studies, to illustrate what has been expounded. Looking at the myth of Jacob, observing the centre of the cycle, whose name—as is demonstrated at the proper place—is an appellation of the starry heaven, how he strives against the Red, ‘Edôm,’ and the White, ‘Lâbhân,’ and seeing that the myth-maker’s sympathy always inclines to Jacob, that his over-reaching of his enemies always appears in a light favourable to him, and that his defeats always wear a tragic colour, I can conclude that this cycle of myths belongs to Nomadism. The same inference must be drawn from an examination of the myth of Joseph. But if I look at the hymn to Judah, or consider the myth of Samson and what the Hebrew told of the Sun-giant with his long locks, of his being blinded, and of his fall, then I know that I have to do with myths of agricultural people. With regard to the antipathy felt towards the scorching sun, I will finally call attention to the ideas held by the tribe of Atarantes in Herod. IV. 184, where it is said: οὕτοι τῷ ἡλίῳ ὑπερβάλλοντι καταρέονται, καὶ πρὸς τούτοισι πάντα τὰ αἰσχρὰ λοιδορέονται, ὅτι σφέας καίων ἐπιτρίβει, αὐτούς τε τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ τὴν χώρην αὐτῶν.[^[209]]

§ 6. It is a remarkable fact in the history of the human mind that many nations which made the advance from the nomadic to the agricultural life under the condition that either Nomadism still continues to vegetate in the nation as an isolated residuum of the previous stage, or that the advance affects only a part, though an influential one, of the nation, whilst another equally considerable portion remains at the old stage of civilisation, not only have no consciousness that the transition is an advance, but even hold to a conviction that they have taken a step towards what is worse, and have sunk lower by exchanging pasture for crops. The nomad cherishes the proud feeling of high nobility and looks haughtily down on the agriculturist bound to the clod. Even the half-savage Dinka in Central Africa, who leads a nomadic life, calls the agriculturist Dyoor ‘a man of the woods,’ or ‘wild man,’ and considers himself more privileged and nobler.[^[210]] Everyone who knows anything of the nature and history of Arabic civilisation knows the pride of the Bedawî and the ironical contempt with which they look down upon the Ḥaḍarî. For the Semites are especially characterised by this tendency.[^[211]] The Hellenic mind is totally different. To the Hellene the agricultural life only is a morally perfect condition; his poet has given expression to this feeling in the beautiful words:—

Τῆς πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποισιν εἰρήνης φίλης

πιστὴ τροφὸς ταμία συνεργὸς ἐπίτροπος

θυγατὴρ ἀδελφὴ πάντα ταῦτ’ ἐχρῆτό μοι

σοι δ’ ὄνομα δὴ τί ἔστιν; ὅτι γεωργία...[^[212]]

And to the Roman poet of a period troubled by wars peaceful agriculture is not only the most ideal condition of human life, but also the happy state of innocence of primeval mankind:—

Ut prisca gens mortalium

Paterna rura bobus exercet suis,

says Horace in his celebrated epode ‘Beatus ille’; and of any more ancient period he had never heard.[^[213]] George Rawlinson very oddly says, ‘It was a fashion among the Greeks to praise the simplicity and honesty of the nomade races, who were less civilised than themselves;[^[214]] for the passages of literature quoted by him in confirmation of this assertion lay no stress on the nomadic element. But the case is very different among the Semites. Let us first consider from this point of view the territory, richest among all those of the Semites, which yields the most copious evidence of the thoughts and feelings of its inhabitants—the Arabic. 'The Divine Glory’ (al-sakînat=shekhînâ) it is said, in a speech of Moḥammed’s, ‘is among the shepherds; vanity and impudence among the agriculturists’ (al-faddâdûn).[^[215]] Another traditional sentence, which the propagators of Moḥammed’s sayings—certainly not Bedâwî themselves—put in the mouth of the Prophet, is that every prophet must have been a shepherd for a long time.[^[216]] How greatly Moḥammed approved the proud self-consciousness of the nomad, as opposed to the agricultural character, is evident from the following narrative belonging to the Islamite Tradition. ‘The Prophet once told this story to one of his companions in the presence of an Arab of the desert. An inhabitant of Paradise asked Allâh for permission to sow, and Allâh replied, “You have already all that you can want.” “Yes,” answered the other, “but yet I should like also to scatter some seed.” So (when Allâh had given him permission), he scattered seeds; and in the very moment that he was looking at them, he saw them grow up, stand high and become ripe for harvest; and they were like regular hills. Then Allâh said to him “Away from here, son of men; you are an insatiable creature!” When the Prophet had finished this story, the Arab of the desert said, “By Allâh! this man can only have been a Kureyshite or an Anṣârî, for they employ themselves with sowing seed, but we Desert-Arabs are not engaged in sowing.” Then the Prophet smiled’—with manifest approbation.[^[217]] The accredited collections of traditions tell also the following of Abû Umâmâ al-Bâhilî:—‘Once on seeing a ploughshare and another agricultural implement, he said: I heard the Prophet say, “These implements do not enter into the house of a nation, unless that Allâh causes low-mindedness to enter in there at the same time.”’[^[218]] So also, in his political testament the Chalîf ʿOmar when dying recommended the Bedâwî to his successor, ‘for they are the root of the Arabs and the germ of Islâm;’[^[219]] and how little this Arabian politician could appreciate the importance of agriculture is evident from the edict in which he most strictly forbade the Arabs to acquire landed possessions and practise agriculture in the conquered districts. The only mode of life equally privileged with the roving nomad life was held to be the equally roving military profession, or life of nomads without herds and with arms. Even in Egypt, a specially agricultural country, this principle was acknowledged and strictly carried out.[^[220]] He was likewise hostile to permanent buildings and houses such as are erected in towns. Once, passing by the brick house of one of his governors, he obliged him to refund the money that had enabled him to enjoy such luxury; and when Saʿd b. Abî Waḳḳâṣ asked his permission to build a house, the Chalîf thought it was enough to possess a place that gave protection from the sun’s heat and the rain.[^[221]] And this same Chalîf, who may pass for a still better type of the true Semite than Moḥammed himself, extends his preference for nomadism even to the mode of giving names. The nomad calls himself by the name of the tribe to which he belongs; the townsman, in whom all memory of tribal life is already extinct, receives a name from his birth-place, or that of his ancestors, or from his occupation. ‘Learn your genealogies,’ said ʿOmar, ‘and be not as the Nabateans of al-Sawâd; if you ask one of them where he comes from, he says he is from this or that town.’ This trait of glorification of the old-fashioned Beduin-life, to the disparagement of the free urbanity of the townsmen, runs through a considerable section of Arabic literature, which gladly encircled the rough manners of the sons of the desert with a romantic nimbus of transfiguration. In this connexion a passage in a work falsely ascribed to Wâḳidî[^[222]] should be noticed, which describes the Bedâwî Rifâʿa b. Zuheir at the court of Byzantium, and after putting a satire against nomadism in the mouth of the emperor, gives a brilliant victory over this attack to the ‘mouse-eating’[^[223]] Bedâwî. This preference for nomadism, and the view that, although, having fewer wants, it be a simpler and more uniform stage of human development than city-life, it nevertheless surpasses the latter in nobility and purity, still live on in the system of the talented Arabian historian Ibn Chaldûn. He devotes several sections of his historical ‘Introduction’ to the glorification of the Bedâwî against the townsmen.[^[224]] What was thus established theoretically is presented in real life down to the present day. Still, as twelve centuries ago, the Bedâwî alone are quite strictly entitled to the name al-ʿArab or al-ʿOrbân (Arabs), and the Arabic poetry of the townsmen is found to have its locality still in the desert. The old Arabic poet in forming his poetical figures always likes best to carry the camel in his thoughts. With the camel the great majority of his best similes are connected. In one verse the poet compares himself to a strong sumpter camel; and in the very same line he, the camel, milks the breast of Death, which again is regarded as a camel. Time is a camel sinking to earth, which crushes with its thick hide him on whom it falls; a thirsty camel, which in its eagerness for water (here men) swallows everything.[^[225]] War and calamity also are camels. The poet Ḳabîḏa b. Jâbir cries to his adversaries in praise of the valour of his own tribe: ‘We are not sons of young camels with breasts cut off, but we are sons of fierce battle,’ where, according to the interpretation of the native commentator, the ‘young camels with breasts cut off’ are meant to denote ‘weak kings, who provoke the ardour of battle in a very slight degree.’[^[226]] How frequently, too, has the comparison of men with camels both in a good and in a bad sense been employed! Even in the nomenclature of places and wells in the Arabian peninsula the camel often comes in, probably often as the result of comparisons of which the details have not been preserved.[^[227]] The host of stars is to the nomad a flock, which feeds by night on the heavenly pastures, and in the morning is led back to the fold by the shepherd. A poet describing the length of a night, exclaims: ‘A night when the stars move slowly onwards, and which extends to such a length that I say to myself “It has no end, and the shepherd of the stars will not come back to-day.”’[^[228]] Hartwig Derenbourg finds the same view expressed also in Ps. CXLVII. 4, ‘Counting to the stars a number, calling them all [by] names;’[^[229]] it is, however, doubtful whether this poetical passage is based on the conception of the starry heaven as a flock.[^[230]] But also poems of non-nomadic poets have been written from a Beduin point of view. The Ḳasîdâs of the Andalusian Arabic poets are written as from the camel’s back, and move in the scenery of the desert; and when a modern Arab writes a Ḳasîdâ for an English lady, as has been done, the circle in which he moves is the circle of Imrulḳais and ʿAntarâ.[^[231]] This is not the effect of the traditional canon of the Ḳasîdâ only, but of the Arab’s belief that true nobility is only to be found in the desert. Therefore his national enthusiasm transports him into the desert, for only there is life noble and free, the life of towns being a degradation. ‘Even the town-life of the Arabs,’ says the celebrated African traveller George Schweinfurth,[^[232]] ‘is essentially half a camp life. As a collateral illustration of this, I may remark that to this day Malta, where an Arab colony has reached as high a degree of civilisation as ever yet it has attained, the small towns, which are inhabited by this active little community, are called by the very same designations as elsewhere belong to the nomad encampments in the desert.’ We must add, that even the so-called Moorish architecture is said by many art critics to point to nomadic life, and the onion-shaped domes, the thin columns, the horse shoe-arches and the double pointed arches to be transferred from the construction of the tent to stone. The wandering habits of the Arabs are also preserved to the present day. ‘Even now,’ says Gerhard Rohlfs,[^[233]] ‘this volatile people is engaged in constant wandering; the slightest reason is sufficient to make them pack up their little tents and seek another abode.’ Yet this experienced traveller appears somewhat to overdo it when he adds: ‘Their pleasure in roving has its root in the essence of the Mohammedan religion; wherever the Arab can carry his Islâm, he finds a home &c.’ But Islâm has, on the contrary, rather contributed to give the Arab a stable, political, state-building character. Certainly it has rather hindered than promoted the development of the feeling of nationality—it has this in common with every religion of catholic nature; but it has not had the influence ascribed to it by Rohlfs for the maintenance of the nomadic tendency. Why, it is the Bedâwî himself who is the worst Mohammedan! With this tendency of the Arabian mind, finally, is connected the fact that the Central Arabian sect of the Wahhabites, the very branch of the Mohammedans which stands nearest to the old Patriarchal ways in faith and ideas of the world, and protests energetically against all novelties introduced by foreign civilisation and historical advancement, has a particular dislike to agriculture.[^[234]]

The Hebrew conception of the world, like the Arabic, inclines to a glorification of the Nomadic life. In the last stage of their national development the Hebrews refer the origin of agriculture to a curse imposed by God on fallen humanity. What a charm tent-life had for them, is proved by the fact that the fair shepherdess of the Song of Songs (I. 5) compares her beauty with oholê Ḳêdâr, ‘the tents of the Arabs.’ Even the Hellenised Jew Philo, quite in opposition to Greek ideas, glorifies the shepherds as ideals of morality in contrast to the agriculturists.[^[235]] Such a view could not but exert an influence on the figures of the myth. The persons of the myth who have our sympathy are generally presented as shepherds: Abel, Jacob, Moses, and David, are shepherds; whereas Cain is an agriculturist.

Moreover, the idea that the fall of the human race is connected with agriculture is found, besides the analogous cases commonly adduced by commentators, to be also often represented in the legends of the East African negroes, especially in the Calabar legend of the Creation communicated by Bastian,[^[236]] which presents many interesting points of comparison with the Biblical story of the Fall. The first human pair is called by a bell at meal-times to Abasi (the Calabar God) in heaven; and in place of the forbidden tree of Genesis are put agriculture and propagation, which Abasi strictly denies to the first pair. The fall is denoted by the transgression of both these commands, especially through the use of implements of tillage, to which the woman is tempted by a female friend who is given to her. From that moment man fell and became mortal, so that, as the Bible story has it, he can ‘eat bread only in the sweat of his face.’ There agriculture is a curse, a fall from a more perfect stage to a lower and imperfect one. This view of the agricultural life is, however, not the conception of nomads only; it is proper also to nations which have not even reached the stage of nomadism, but stand a step lower—the hunters. To them their own condition appears the happiest, and that of the agriculturist condemned by a curse. ‘The countries inhabited by savages,’ as Montesquieu makes his Persian Usbek write,[^[237]] ‘are generally sparsely peopled, through the distaste which almost all of them have for labour and the tillage of the soil. This unfortunate aversion is so strong that when they make an imprecation against one of their enemies, they wish him nothing worse than that he may be reduced to field-labour,[^[238]] deeming no exercise noble and worthy of them except hunting and fishing.’ This contempt of a sedentary life and its usage is by the Bedâwî directed also especially against the practice of arts and manufactures. Hence it comes that such peoples as the Arabs, which even in a sedentary condition regard nomadic life as a nobler stage of manners than the agricultural life to which they have fallen, neglect manufactures and seldom attain to any perfection in them. This is especially true of the inhabitants of the holy cities of the Arabian peninsula, who give a practical proof of their preference for Beduinism by the fact that the Sherîf-families let their sons pass their childhood in the tents of the desert for the sake of a nobler education. ‘I am inclined to think,’ says the credible traveller Burckhardt in his description of the inhabitants of Medina,[^[239]] ‘that the want of artisans here is to be attributed to the very low estimation in which they are held by the Arabians, whose pride often proves stronger than their cupidity, and prevents a father from educating his sons in any craft. This aversion they probably inherit from the ancient inhabitants, the Bedouins, who, as I have remarked, exclude to this day all handicraftsmen from their tribes, and consider those who settle in their encampment as of an inferior caste, with whom they neither associate nor intermarry.’[^[240]] Burton compares the Arabs of the desert in this respect with the North American Indians of a former generation: ‘Both recognising no other occupation but war and the chase, despise artificers and the effeminate people of cities, as the game-cock spurns the vulgar roosters of the poultry-yard.’[^[241]] The same is true of the relation of the Bedâwî towards the townsmen in the Somali country.[^[242]] Kant, who casually notices this remarkable trait of human ideas in a small tract, refers the peculiarity to the fact that not only the natural laziness, but also the vanity (a misunderstood freedom) of man cause those who have merely to live—whether profusely or parsimoniously—to consider themselves Magnates in comparison with those who have to labour in order to live.[^[243]]

Thus is explained the conception which forms the basis of the Story of the Fall, and at the same time everything else in the older strata of Hebrew mythology in which the sympathy of the myth-forming people is given to the shepherds, to the prejudice of personages introduced as agriculturists. And now we will consider the most prominent of the figures forming the elements of the ancient Hebrew mythology.

CHAPTER V.
THE MOST PROMINENT FIGURES IN HEBREW MYTHOLOGY.

Battle and bloodshed, pursuit and suppression on the one side, love and union, glowing desire and coy evasion on the other, are the points of view from which the Myth regards the relations of day and night, of the grey morning and the sunrise, of the red sunset and the darkness of night, and their recurring changes. And this point of view is made yet more definite by the mythical idea that when forces are either engaged in mutual conflict, or seeking and pursuing one another in mutual love, as one follows the other, so one must have sprung from the other, as the child from the father or the mother; or else, being conceived as existing side by side in the moment of battle or of heavenly love, must be brothers or sisters, children of the same father or of the same mother, i.e. of the phenomenon that precedes both of them alike—as the bright day precedes the twilight and the night—or must be the parents of the child that follows them.

Therefore, still more definitely, murders of parents or children or brothers, battles between brothers, sexual love and union between children and parents, between brother and sister, form the chief plots of all myths, and by their manifold shades have produced that variety in our race’s earliest observations of nature, which we encounter in the thousand colours of the Myth.

The talented founders of Aryan Comparative Mythology, especially Max Müller in the first rank, have set these themes of the myth on so firm and unquestioned a foundation both in relation to psychology and to philology, and have so completely introduced them to the mind of the educated class, that I may safely omit a new exposition of this axiom of all Mythology. I content myself with pointing once more to what was shown in the preceding chapters, that these fundamental mythical themes are not something specially Aryan, but lie at the bottom of the Myth of all mankind without distinction of race, and consequently must form a starting-point when we are about to investigate Semitic or Hebrew myths.

The task of the following chapter will therefore be to find a place in the category of what is common to the whole of human kind for the myth of the Hebrews; in other words, to prove the existence of the myth-plots on Hebrew ground. As it is not my object to exhaust all the materials, to present a system already perfectly worked out on every side, or to erect a building with all its rooms and stories stuffed full, I shall confine myself to that which, after competent and sober philological criticism, can be acknowledged as certain and indubitable. I hope that other investigators, who will gain from the method pursued here a rich treasury of material, will then follow up these safe results by gleanings of their own.

§ 1. In the designation of the Heaven the Semite starts from the sensuous impression of height, and therefore forms the names denoting it from the roots samâ (shama) and râm, both of which express the idea of ‘being high.’ To the latter group belongs e.g. the Ethiopic rayam,[^[244]] which denotes heaven. Both roots are combined in the Phenician Shâmîn-rûm. One of the most prominent figures of Hebrew mythology belongs to this category: Abh-râm the High Father, with his innumerable host of descendants.[^[245]] We have seen above that in his view of nature the nomad begins with the sky at night. The sky by itself is the dark, nightly, or clouded heaven; the sunshine on the sky is an accessory. Hence it comes that in Arabic the word Sky (samâ) is very often used even for ‘Rain;’ and the notions of rain and sky are so closely interwoven that even the traces of rain on the earth are called sky.[^[246]] In the language of the Bongo people there is only one word for sky and rain, hetōrro.[^[247]] On Semitic ground the Assyrian divine name Rammanu or Raman must be mentioned here. If this name has any etymological connexion with the root râm ‘to be high,’ as Hesychius and some modern scholars say, though others derive it from raʿam ‘thunder,’ Raʿamân ‘the Thunderer,’[^[248]] then we find here again the primitive mythological idea that the intrinsically High is the dark stormy sky, or, personified, the God of Storms. So also in the old Hebrew myth the ‘High’ is the nightly or rainy sky. The best known myth that the Hebrews told of their Abh-râm is the story of the intended sacrifice of his only son Yiṣchâḳ, commonly called Isaac. But what is Yiṣchâḳ? Literally translated, the word denotes ‘he laughs,’ or ‘the Laughing.’ In the Semitic languages, especially in proper names and epithets, the use of the aorist[^[249]] (even in the second person, e.g. in the Arabic name Tazîd) is very frequent where we should employ a participle.[^[250]] So here. Now who is the ‘He laughs,’ the ‘Smiling one'? No other but 'He who sits in heaven and laughs’ (Ps. II. 4), whom the mythology of almost all nations and their later poetry too likes to call the Laughing or Smiling one. When, as Plutarch tells in his Life of Lycurgus, that legislator consecrated a statue to Laughter (γέλως) and Laughter enjoyed divine honours at Sparta, we are certainly not to understand it of the laughter that plays round the lips of mortals, but of the celestial smile with which Mythology endows the Sun, as when the Indian singer calls Ushas (the Sun[^[251]]) the Smiling (Rigveda, VI. 64. 10). With regard to the Sun’s laughing in the Aryan mythology, we can refer to the learned work of Angelo de Gubernatis, ‘Zoological Mythology’ (vol. I. i. 1).

But there is a primitive connexion between the ideas ‘to laugh’ and ‘to shine,’ which is not, as might be thought, brought about figuratively by a mere poetical view, but rather, at least on the Semitic field, established at the very beginning of the formation of speech. An extraordinary number of the verbs which describe a loud expression of joyousness (to shout, bellow, laugh &c.), originally denoted to shine, dazzle, be visible, and the like; affording another confirmation of Geiger’s thesis, that language owes its origin more to optic than to acoustic impressions (see supra p. [40]). I give a series of linguistic facts as examples to prove this assertion. The Hebrew ṣâhal signifies both ‘to shine bright’ and ‘to cry aloud,’ and its phonetic connexion with ṣâhar, zâhar &c., proves the priority of the optical meaning. Similarly hillêl, which means ‘to cry out, to triumph,’ was originally ‘to be brilliant,’ as is proved by the derivative nouns hilâl (Ar.) ‘new moon’ and hêlêl (Heb.) ‘morning star,’ and the employment of the verb itself in Hebrew. Ṣârach, ṣerach, ṣaraḥa, denotes ‘to cry’ in the chief representatives of Semitism; but the Arabic has also preserved the original sense ‘clarus, manifestus fuit,’ which appears in the Hebrew noun ṣerîach ‘a conspicuous eminence,’ or ‘a high tower.’[^[252]] The roots yâphaʿ (in Hiphʿîl) ‘to be bright’ and pâʿâ ‘to cry,’ are through their etymological connexion brought into this group. The root of the Hebrew hêdâd ‘cry of joy’ is the same from which Hadad, the name of the Syrian god of the shining sun, can be etymologically derived. This root undoubtedly represents a reduplicated form of the radical of the solar name Yehûdâ ‘Judah’ (see [§ 14] of this chapter). The verbal root from which nahâr (Ar.) nehârâ (Heb.) ‘daylight,’ is derived has in one Arabic derivative form the meaning ‘to cry.’ So also ṣâchaḳ ‘to laugh aloud’ (compare ṣâʿaḳ ‘to cry’) must have originally expressed the idea of ‘being bright, clear,’ which is proper to the primitive Semitic root ṣaḥ, ṣach. If this be admitted, it follows that the name Yiṣchaḳ as a solar epithet was not formed by mere figurative or poetical metaphor, but is based on the original signification of the group of roots to which it belongs. Poetical phraseology then brought into general use what was based on etymology.

There is nothing more universal and more generally pervading all nature-poetry than the idea ‘Like one laughing gaily the world shone,’ as the Tatar poet says of the sunrise;[^[253]] and in Arabic poetry, which has to be especially considered on these subjects, it is met with at every step. In the charming Romance of ʿAntar, the cessation of night and the break of day is dozens of times expressed by the words ‘until the black night went off and the laughing morning (al-ṣabâḥ al-ḍaḥik) arose;’ or ‘the morning arose and smiled (ibtasama) out of dazzling teeth.’[^[254]] The old poet al-Aʿsha says of a blooming meadow that it rivals the sun in laughter (yuḍâḥik al-shams);[^[255]] and in the last maḳâmâ of Ḥarîrî (de Sacy, 2nd ed. p. 673. 2,) it is even said that ‘the tooth of the daybreak laughs’ (ibtasama thaġr al-fajr), i.e. becomes visible, as the teeth of a person laughing become visible. This mythic view has become so incorporated in the Arabic language that the word bazaġa, denoting that the teeth are prominent, is also used of the rising of the sun. In a small Arabic tract[^[256]] by the Sheikh ʿUlwân b. ʿAṭîyyâ of Ḥamâ, which brings forward the contest between Day and Night, a subject not infrequent[^[257]] in Oriental literature, in which the two champions engage in a battle of respective excellence in prose and poetry, there also occurs a passage suitable for quotation here. The Night says in the course of her dispute: ‘To the string of these thy blameworthy qualities this must yet be added—that thou art changeable and many-coloured in thy various conditions, and not stedfast; thy beginning contradicts thy end, and thy interior is different from thy exterior. O what an utterly culpable quality is this, which scratches out the face of every merit! Thou laughest at thy rising, when thou rememberest weeping and mourning; and at thy extinction thou clothest thyself in thy most gorgeous of raiments, instead of putting on mourning garments.’ And the Day replies, in his own defence to his black antagonist: ‘What rank takest thou in comparison with me? What is thy gloominess and thy sombre seriousness in comparison with my gay smiles (ḍaḥikî wabtisâmî)?’[^[258]]

It is not only the clear shining sunny sky that is called by the Arab poet ‘the Smiling;’ this attribute is applied also to other luminous things, e.g. to the glittering Stars (not to the night-sky itself),[^[259]] and to the Lightning, which is even called al-ḍâḥik, ‘the Laughing.’ In the Romance of ʿAntar there frequently occurs the expression ‘the Lightning laughed’ (al-barḳ yaḍḥak, e.g. XXIV. 65. 6).[^[260]] Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî, an excellent Arabic poet, says in an elegy on the death of his father:

I disapprove of merriment even in the laughing (i.e. lightning) cloud,

And let no cloud bring me rain, except a gloomy, dark one.[^[261]]

We have in passing treated the words ‘He who sits in heaven laughs’ in the second Psalm as a mythical reminiscence, which originally referred to the Sun, but then, like similar instances which we shall see, was employed by the poet in another sense. But there is nothing to exclude the possibility that the Laughter of him who sits in heaven may refer in this passage not to the sweet smile of the bright sunny sky, but to the wild raging of the Thunderer, pictured in the myths as scornful laughter, as F.L.W. Schwartz[^[262]] shows by many examples from classical antiquity. This conception would also be more suitable to the context of the passage in question in the second Psalm, where mention is made of derisive laughter. However this be, the ‘Smiling one’ whom the ‘High Father’ intends to slay, is the smiling day, or more closely defined the smiling sunset, which gets the worst of the contest with the night-sky and disappears.

§ 2. The same myth is also given as follows: ‘Jephthah sacrifices or kills his daughter.’ In its later ethical or religious transformation given in Judges XI. 29–40, it is known to everyone. This story is especially worthy of consideration in connexion with the science of Mythology, because a Hebrew custom similar to the mourning for Osiris or Adonis and Tammûz was fastened on to it, as appears in v. 40; and it is well known that these latter rites stand in a very close connexion with physical phenomena, and with the myth which speaks of these phenomena.

What means Jephthah (Yiphtâch)? We have again an aorist form[^[263]] exactly similar to Yiṣchâḳ; it denotes literally ‘he opens, he begins,’ thence ‘the opener or beginner.’ For the understanding of this mythical person we must note by anticipation that this Opener has a correlative in the After-follower Jacob (Yaʿaḳôbh), ‘he follows his heels.’[^[264]] Both these expressions belong to one group of mythic conceptions; and it is remarkable that in these designations we find mythology already advanced to the stage which we characterised in the previous chapter as belonging to the ideas of the Agriculturist. For these two names and the cycle of myths coupled with them presuppose the view that in the order of time the Day is the earlier and is followed by the Night; and the very circumstance that the idea of time is impressed on these myths with something of precision (see above, p. 44), also indicates a relatively late formation of these designations and of the views that led to them. The Opener is the Sun, which first opens the womb (see Gen. XXX. 22; Ex. XIII. 2, 12), while the Night is called the After-follower; just as in the Rigveda (II. 38. 6) the Night follows on the heel of Sâvitri. To establish more certainly the meaning of the name Yaʿaḳôbh it may also be mentioned that in Arabic the participial form of the same verb, ‘ʿÂḳib,’ is exceedingly frequent in the same signification. According to Mohammedan tradition one of the many names of the Arabian Prophet is Al-ʿâḳib, with the sense that Moḥammed, the last of the prophets, followed after and concluded their line.[^[265]] We will now first return to Jephthah, the Opening Sun. This conception of the Sun as Opener receives a remarkable illustration in a passage of the Persian national epic by Firdûsî, in which occurs an expressive echo of this mythical view. The sun is there actually a golden key, which is lost during the night.[^[266]] As the lighting up of the sun is conceived as an unlocking, so the darkness is a locking up. ‘Who commandeth the sun and it riseth not, and who locketh up the stars,’ is said in Job IX. 7, of the God who brings on darkness. The solar character of Jephthah receives confirmation from another side, but likewise on Semitic ground. In the version of the Phenician Cosmogony furnished by Damascius[^[267]] it is related, on the authority of Mochus, that the spiritual God Ulômos begot Chrysoros τὸν ἀνοιγέα, ‘the Opener.’ The Sanchuniathon of Philo Herennius identifies this Opener with Hephaestus, who was the first inventor of iron implements (Tûbhal-Ḳayin of the Hebrews). Now, although in its latest development this cosmogony does not pretend to mean anything else than the opening of the Egg of the world,[^[268]] there can be no doubt that this version belongs to a very late, perhaps the last phase of development of the myth which lies hidden in the background—a stage at which all that makes the myth a myth is quite washed out and changed by the prevalence of theological ideas into an artfully systematised cosmogony. But originally nothing else can have been understood by the Opener than the firstborn brother of the pair, Sun and Night. Another mythic trait which we know of this Opener testifies to his solar signification in the myths on which the Phenician cosmogony was based. Philo Herennius’ authority, who calls the opener Chrysôr, says of him: ‘He was the first man who fared in ships.’ This trait, which is far from fitting into the frame of the portrait of Hephaestus presents a very attractive and simple conception held by the men of the myth-forming age. We generally find in myths of the rising and setting of the sun, that the view which lives longest and conforms most naturally to the nature of the phenomenon is that the rising sun ascends out of the river or the sea, and that the setting sun sinks into the water.

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day

Is crept into the bosom of the sea,

as Shakespeare says,[^[269]] or as a German poet, feeling an echo of the meaning of the old myth, speaks still more expressively:

‘—that the sun was only

A lovely woman, who the old sea-god

Out of convenience married;

All the day long she joyously wander’d

In the high heavens, deck’d out with purple

And glitt’ring diamonds,

And all-beloved and all-admired

By every mortal creature,

And every mortal creature rejoicing

With her sweet glance’s light and warmth;

But in the evening, impell’d, all-disconsolate,

Once more returneth she home

To the moist house and desert arms

Of her grey-headed spouse.’[^[270]]

In a Swedish popular song, a King of England has two daughters, the elder black as night (Night itself); the other, younger, beautiful and brilliant like the day (Day itself). The latter goes forward followed by the other, who comes and throws her into the sea.[^[271]] In this popular story, also, the sunset is viewed as a fall into the sea; but one new feature is here added, viz., that the two sisters fight, and the black one, the dark Night, throws the brilliant Sun into the sea. In the morning the Sun that had fallen into the sea rises up again out of her night’s quarters. The Roman poet expresses the idea ‘Never did a fairer lady see the sun arise,’ by the words:

Ne qua femina pulchrior

Clarum ab Oceano diem

Viderit venientem;[^[272]]

and because the sun rises out of the water, a Persian poet[^[273]] calls water in general ‘the Source of Light (tsheshmei nûr).’ Connected with these ideas is that of the so-called Pools of the Sun,[^[274]] which are assigned to the rising and setting sun alike.[^[275]] But the morning sun is also made to come forth out of mud and morass (as in Homer from the λίμνη), as is described amongst others in the Arabic tradition.[^[276]] It is obvious that this conception must have first arisen in countries whose horizon was not bounded by the sea. The same assumption must be made with regard to another conception also, found in the African nation of the Yorubas. These regard the town Ife as a sort of abode of gods, where the Sun and Moon always issue forth again from the earth in which they were buried.[^[277]] No doubt this notion was formed among the portion of the nation that lived at a distance from the sea. A considerable part of the elements of the animal-worship which refers to water animals may be traced back to mythological conceptions which we have exhibited above.[^[278]]

When in ancient times men dwelling by the sea-shore saw the heavenly fire-ball in the evening dip into the sea, and the next morning issue shining at the opposite point of the sea-line, what other idea could he conceive of this but that down in the sea the sun was swallowed by a monster which spat out its prey again on the shore (see p. 28)?—or else that the sun undertook a voyage, starting over night?—or, as is so beautifully expressed in the Hellenic myth, that he took a bath, so as to shine on the sea-shore in the morning with new brightness and purified from all dinginess?

Navigation is the explanation of this daily phenomenon which prevails in the myth. It became so general that later among the Egyptians it was divested of its original associations and brought into connexion with the sun of day. In the Egyptian view the Sun’s bark sails over the ocean of heaven:[^[279]] Ἥλιον δὲ καὶ σελήνεν οὐχ ἅρμασιν ἁλλὰ πλοίοις ὀχήμασι χρωμένους περιπλεῖν ἀεί, says Plutarch of the Egyptian view,[^[280]] and adduces Homeric parallels.[^[281]] The Jewish Midrâsh compares the course of the sun to that of a ship—and curiously enough to a ship coming from Britain,[^[282]] which has 365 ropes (the number of the days of the solar year), and to a ship coming from Alexandria, which has 354 ropes (the number of the days of the lunar year).[^[283]] The solar figures, then, are everywhere brought into connexion with the invention and employment of navigation. The sinking Apollo is with the Greeks the founder of navigation. Herakles receives from Helios the present of a golden bowl, which he used to employ as a bark when he sailed across the Okeanos. The voyage of the shining (φαί-νω) Phaeacians and Argonauts originally signified only the same sea-passage, which the sun makes every evening. Of Charon himself, the subterranean ferryman (whose name, Schwartz thinks, indicates his solar significance, χαραπός) it has also been proved that his subterranean navigation is only an eschatological development of the solar myth.[^[284]] Indeed, eschatology and conceptions of the things after death and resurrection have their essential origin in the Sun’s voyage under the sea and reappearance on the other side.[^[285]] The Roman Sun-god Janus is also brought into connexion with navigation; this idea is unmistakably expressed on coins which bear the image of the two-headed god,[^[286]] and is especially important here because Janus himself, as the etymology of his name declares, likewise belongs to the series of ‘Openers.’ ‘This name was given him,’ says Hartung, ‘because the door represents in space exactly what formed the basis of his essence with regard to the relations of time and force. For every beginning resembles an entrance.’[^[287]] The most prominent figure of the lately discovered Babylonian epos, Izdubar, and Ûr-Bêl (the Light of Bêl, i.e. the Sun), both of them purely solar figures, are provided with ships.[^[288]] We cannot justly doubt, it is true, the historical character of the Biblical prophet Jonah. But, from what was discussed in the Second Chapter, this does not exclude the possibility that various mythical features may have been fastened on this undoubtedly historical personage, as is the case with many other persons of Hebrew history, for example, most strikingly with David. The most prominent mythical characteristic of the story of Jonah is his celebrated abode in the sea in the belly of the whale. This trait is eminently solar and belongs to the group on which we are now engaged. As on occasion of the storm the storm-dragon or the storm-serpent swallows the sun, so when he sets he is swallowed by a mighty fish, waiting for him at the bottom of the sea. Then when he appears again on the horizon, he is spit out on the shore by the sea-monster.[^[289]]

Accordingly, when Chrysôr is said to have been the first navigator, this must have the same meaning that it has when applied to Apollo, viz. that the Sun, sinking and going down into the ocean, is taking a journey by sea; or when applied to the Tyrian Herakles, the builder of the city (building of cities we shall see to be a specially solar characteristic), called the inventor of navigation;[^[290]] or when used of Prometheus, recounting before the descendants of Okeanos his benefits conferred on mankind, and saying:—

βραχεῖ δὲ μύθω πάντα συλλήβδην μάθε,

πᾶσαι τέχναι βροτοῖσιν ἐκ Προμηθέως.

Learn, in a word, the sense of all I mean:

Prometheus gave all arts to mortal men;—

without forgetting to allude to the ships:—

θαλασσόπλαγκτα δ’ οὔτις ἄλλος ἀντ’ ἐμοῦ

λινόπτερ’ εὗρε ναυτίλων ὀχήματα.

The seaman’s chariot roaming o'er the sea

With flaxen wings none other found—’twas I.[^[291]]

Now if this trait raises the solar character of Chrysôr to a certainty, then it cannot be doubted that his epithet the ‘Opener,’ which is identical with the Hebrew name Yiphtâch (Jephthah) is an appellation of the Sun—the First-born. The Sun sacrifices his own daughter. In the evening the sunset sky is born from the lap of the sun, and in the morning, when in place of the red sunrise (which the myth does not distinguish from the red sunset) the hot midday sun comes forth, Jephthah has killed his own daughter, and she is gone.

Thus we see in the myths of Abram and of Jephthah the two sides of the same idea, each having its peculiar form and frame: the former tells of the victory of the Night, the dark sky of night over the Sun, the latter of that of the Dawn over the shades of Night. In Hebrew mythology the name Enoch (Chanôkh) belongs to this series. It was very happily explained by Ewald[^[292]] as denoting the Beginner, inceptor, and is therefore a strict synonym of Jephthah.

We meet with one other ‘Opener’ on Semitic ground, the Libyan and especially Cyrenaic god of agriculture, whose name is preserved in the Grecized form Aptûchos (Ἀπτοῦχος). Blau[^[293]] has already connected the name with the verb pâthach ‘to open,’ as opener of the ground by the plough. We must here refer in anticipation to the following chapter, which will elucidate the connexion in which the ancient religions put the rise of agriculture with the personages of mythology; and such a personage this Libyan ‘Opener’ undoubtedly is. Anyhow, we must hold fast to the identity of Aptûchos (Ἀπτοῦχος) and Jephthah.

§ 3. The myth of the death of Isaac, and that of his later life, which of course presupposes that he continued to live, are not contradictory to the mythical mind. At a more advanced stage of intellectual life, which had lost all share in and understanding of the nature-myth, and the mythical figures became epic persons, this contradiction necessitated an arrangement or harmonising process; and in this lies the reason for the origin of the turn which occurred in the historical form of the legend of Isaac, substituting for the accomplished homicide an intended homicide; which latter, when religious feeling began to rule over the still existing mythic materials, became later simply an act of pious willingness to perform a sacrifice. Such contradictions do not present themselves distinctly to the mind of men at the stage of the actual formation of myths. The slain Isaac appears again on the arena a few hours after he was killed; he shews himself afresh. Some fifteen years ago when a Christian mission penetrated to the Central-African tribe of the Liryas, a great crowd collected round a priest, who began to expound to them the main principles of his religion. ‘But when he came to the attributes of God, they absolutely refused to allow that he is very good. On the contrary, they said, he is very angry, and even bad, for he sends death; he is the cause of dying, and sends the sun, which always burns up our crops. Scarcely is one sun dead in the west in the evening, than there grows up out of the earth in the east next morning another which is no better.’[^[294]] In this story we see the beginning of the transition from the formation of myths to religious reflexion: the sun that appears in the morning in the east is a different one from that which fell dead to the earth in the evening in the west. Yet, though substantially it is a different one and not identical with that of the previous day, it is still perfectly like it, and qualitatively not distinct from it. At the mythical stage, when it was still productive, Isaac reappearing is the same as Isaac already killed. He appears again several times; he marries Ribhḳâ (Rebekah); and again we meet him old and blind ‘with weakened eyes,’ sending his son Yaʿaḳôbh (Jacob) into a foreign land, to return only after the death of the old blind ‘Smiling’ one, with a large family, and prepared to take up again his old quarrel with his hairy brother Esau, the hunter. The living myth does not treat these events as following one after the other. To work up together the various members of the group of myths which assemble round a common centre or a common name, is not the business of the myth proper. The epic impulse first begins to act in this direction, and gives the first incitement to the harmonising of myths.

We will linger a few minutes longer with Isaac.

He loves and marries Rebekah, or as she is called in the Hebrew text, Ribhḳâ. The Dutch historian of religions C.P. Tiele sees in this name an appellation of the fruitful, rich earth,[^[295]] a view which is partially supported by the etymology of the word. ‘The laughing sky of day or the Sun-god (surely originally only the Sun?) is united in marriage with the fatness and fruitfulness of the earth.’ This conception of the myth, notwithstanding its etymological correctness, has little to recommend it to my feeling, but I cannot propose any better in its stead. I only add, that if Tiele’s conception is correct, we shall certainly understand better the feature of the myth which makes ‘the Laughing one’ (Isaac) of his two sons prefer Esau (who will be proved to be a solar character), while the mother’s love attached itself more to Jacob. Esau is a mythical figure homogeneous with Isaac; but the fruitful earth is more closely connected with the dark rainy sky, as a kindred and homogeneous phenomenon.

Another notable point in the myth of Isaac is blindness. ‘And when Isaac was old, his eyes became too dim to see’ (Gen. XXVII. 1). It is an idea peculiarly mythical (which found an echo in poetry), to regard the Sun as an Eye, which looks down with its sharp sight upon the earth. In the Egyptian monuments and in the Book of the Dead the Sun is often represented as an eye, provided with wings and feet. To the same conception are also due the so-called mystic eye which is often met with on Etruscan vessels of clay, and the part played by the eye in the representation of Osiris.[^[296]] The sun is called in the Malacassa language masovanru, and in Dayak matasu, both of which expressions denote oculus diei.[^[297]] In the Polynesian mythology the sun is the left eye of Tangaloa, the highest god of heaven, hence the Eye of Heaven.[^[298]] The sun accordingly possesses also the attributes of the eye. Thus in the Hebrew poetry we meet with the Eyelashes[^[299]] (i.e. rays) of the Dawn, ʿaphʿappê shachar (Job III. 9, XLI. 10), as in the Greek with ἁμέρας βλέφαρον (Soph. Ant. 104),[^[300]] and in the Arabic with ḥawâjib al-shams. This notion has so completely become an idiom of the Arabic language, where the mythical force of the ‘sun’s eyelashes’ has retired into the background, that we even find the singular: ‘the sun’s eyelash is risen,’ (ṭalaʿa ḥâjib al-shams) or ‘set’ (ġâba ḥâjib al-shams).[^[301]]

Among more recent poets Shakespeare is most familiar with the expression eye, eye of heaven, as descriptive of the sun:

Though thy speech doth fail,

One eye thou hast to look to heaven for grace;

The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.

King Henry VI. Pt. I. I. 4.

Or with taper light

To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish.

King John, IV. 2.

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

King Richard II. I. 3.

When the searching eye of heaven is hid

Behind the globe and lights the lower world,

Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen.

King Richard II. III. 2.

Hence also the Dawn is spoken of as looking about:—

Who is this that looketh forth as the morning?

Song of Songs, VI. 10.

At the theological stage the mythical view was subjected to several alterations. The holy book of the Parsees[^[302]] calls the sun the Eye of Ahuramazda. Many regard the name ʿAnamelekh, who from 2 Kings XVII. 3 was a deity of the inhabitants of Sepharvaim (the Babylonian Sipar of the cuneiform Inscriptions), expressly designated in the national documents a solar town,[^[303]] as contracted for ʿÊn ham-melekh, i.e. Eye of the Sun-god Melelkh, and so probably the sun itself.[^[304]] Even in the speech of a late Hebrew prophet (Zech. IV. 10) we find the same view, somewhat modified: ‘These seven are the eyes of Jahveh, that run over the whole earth.’ Here Jahveh’s eyes are undoubtedly to be referred to the sun, and the number seven allows us to think of the seven days of the week.[^[305]] Similarly, it is said in the Atharvaveda IV. 16. 4 of the messengers of Varuṇa; ‘descending from heaven they traverse the whole world, and inspect the whole earth with a thousand eyes.’[^[306]] To the same tendency we must attribute names of places such as ʿÊn Shemesh, ‘Sun’s Eye,’ (e.g. Josh. XV. 7), and the Egyptian Heliopolis, Arabic ʿayn shams;[^[307]] which suggests the obvious conjecture that the Hebrew ʿIr ha-cheres ‘city of the sun’ was originally and more correctly ʿÊn ha-cheres. The emendation affects only the final consonant ר.[^[308]]

The Indian singer (Rigveda I. 164. 14), says that the sun has a sharp sight, and the same idea is preserved in a relic of Hebrew mythology, which has attached itself to an historical person. Of King David, an historical hero, it is written among other features borrowed from the myth of the Solar hero (to which also must belong the idea that he takes the life of his giant adversary by hurling stones), that 'he was ruddy, with beautiful eyes, and a good sight, admônî ʿim yephê ʿênayim we-ṭôbh rôʾî' (1 Sam. XVI. 12). The red colour itself which is praised, since the narrator evidently wishes to characterise David’s handsomeness, shows us that these traits cannot have been invented directly for the hero of this story; for it can scarcely be proved that the Hebrews in ancient times considered reddishness an element of beauty. But the red colour is admirably fitted to figures of the solar myth, as we shall have further occasion to observe in the course of this chapter. With this are connected the beautiful eyes and the good sight, which are certainly taken from the mythical description of the blazing midday sun. They are the relics of a mythic cycle only preserved in fragments, and have been tacked on to the portraiture of an historical hero, who had, like the Solar hero, to fight with a hostile giant. When the sun appeared at noon with a red glow at its highest point in the heaven, the men of old said ‘The Red one is looking down on the earth with his perfect eyes and sharp sight.’ And he viewed the diminution of the solar rays and heat as a weakening of his sight, which ended at sunset with total blindness. Samson (Shimshôn), the hero whose solar character Steinthal has raised above all doubt, ends his heroic career by being made blind. In the Greek mythology the significance of one-eyed and blinded persons is exhibited with equal clearness.[^[309]] This mythical idea is very clearly reflected in language. In Arabic, for example, iṭlachamma or iṭrachamma signifies both oculos hebetiores habuit and obscura fuit [nox]. The verb aġdana, from which aġdan is derived, which is used of suffering from certain eye-diseases, expresses the idea of darkness, and the word inchasafa unites the two meanings to be eclipsed (of the moon) and to lose one’s sight. Hence the expression, al-leyl aʿwar, ‘the night is one-eyed.’[^[310]] It becomes clear from all this what is the meaning of the mythical words, ‘And when Isaac was old, his eyes became too dim to see.’ It may also be mentioned here that Shakespeare calls night the eyeless:—

Thou and eyeless night

Have done me shame.

King John V. 6.

§ 4. The battle of the Day with the Night is still more frequently represented as a quarrel between brothers. At the very threshold of the earliest Biblical history we meet a brothers’ quarrel of this kind, the source of which is the nature-myth, spread out among all nations of the world without exception. It is not difficult to prove that Cain (Ḳayin) is a solar figure, and that Abel (Hebhel) is connected with the sky dark with night or clouds. Here, as everywhere, investigation must of course be guided by the nature of the personages in question, by the matter of the story, and by the appellative signification of the names. Cain is an agriculturist, Abel a shepherd. We have demonstrated in the preceding chapter that agriculture always has a solar character, whereas the shepherd’s life is connected with the phenomena of the cloudy or nightly sky. Shepherds in mythology are figures belonging to the dark or overclouded sky; whereas huntsmen and agriculturists are solar heroes. The heaven at night is a great tent or a group of tents, with a great piece of pasture close by, where the herds (the clouds) are driven to feed. In German, to be sure, the expression Himmelszelt (heaven’s tent) is also used of the heaven by day, but this is a generalisation of the original limitation to the nocturnal and cloudy sky. This limitation is still acknowledged in the Hungarian language, where sátoros éj is said, ‘the tented (provided with many tents) night;’ e.g. by Vörösmarty at the commencement of the second canto of his national epic ‘Zalán Futása’ (the Flight of Zalán). And in Arabic, ‘Night spread out its tent, and there arose thick darkness,’ is quite a familiar expression.[^[311]]

The shepherd Abel (Hebhel) is accordingly a figure of the dark sky. This is proved also by the signification of the name. For it denotes neither childlessness, as some try to explain it by the help of Arabic, and on the supposition that the first parents anticipated their son’s future fate on giving his name, nor simply son, being explained from the Assyrian. The Hebrew language itself is adequate to establish the proper signification. The word denotes in Hebrew a ‘breath of wind;’[^[312]] and the wind stands in connexion with the dark sky. Another modification of the same appellation is known to Hebrew mythology. As in other classes of language h and y may interchange dialectically, so here beside Hebhel (Abel) we have Yâbhâl (Jabal). This latter appellation is etymologically either identical with the former, or if not, at least its mythological identity can scarcely be questioned. Yâbhâl (from whence comes mabbûl, ‘body of water,’ hence of the Deluge) signifies Rain (like Indra). Rain and Wind are both attributes of the dark sky and the night-sky. In Arabic the verb ġasaḳa denotes both the darkness of the sky, and the rain, and (what exactly suits the mythical circle of ideas) the flowing of milk from the udder. The rain is to the men of the myth-creating age a milking of the cloud-cows, which the shepherd leads out to pasture by night on the heavenly meadows. The verb aġḍana, of which Freytag, following al-Jauharî, gives only the meaning perpetuo pluit coelum, is known to the classical lexicographer of Arabic synonyms also in the sense it is dark night. Similarly, aġḍafa denotes both obscura, atra fuit nox and ad pluviam effundendam paratum et dispositum fuit coelum. In poetry also rain is often attached to night: an old poet quoted by Ibn al-Sîkkît says,[^[313]] ‘A dark night, during which a drenching rain pours down upon the streets.’[^[314]]

The identity of Abel and Jabal appears conspicuously in another circumstance. Abel is introduced as a Herdsman. In the system of the harmonising genealogy of Genesis, in which Jabal appears some generations later, he is described as the ‘Father of those that dwell in tents and with cattle’ (Gen. IV. 2, 20). Both features or rather this identical feature told of both these Patriarchs, have a foundation and are equally true. But in the method of the critical school of Biblical exegesis these two accounts involve a contradiction which it is attempted to solve, either by the usual supposition of different narrators, or by minutely pressing the literal meaning of words and setting up delicate distinctions. The acute Knobel, for instance, pretends to know that 'Even Abel had kept cattle, but only small cattle, and these only in his own district; Jabal invented the moving about with cattle from one district to another.[^[315]] It concerns us not to know how far Jabal extended the area of his pasture, and within what narrow limits Abel confined his: our assumption of the mythological identity of the two designations solves the inconsistency without any resort to minute distinctions.

Equally clear is also the Solar character of the name Cain (Ḳayin). This word, which, with other synonymous names of trades, occurs several times on the so-called Nabatean Sinaitic inscriptions,[^[316]] signifies Smith,[^[317]] maker of agricultural implements, and has preserved this meaning in the Arabic ḳayn[^[318]] and the Aramaic ḳinâyâ, whilst in the later Hebrew it was lost altogether, being probably suppressed through the Biblical attempt to derive the proper name Cain etymologically from ḳânâ ‘to gain.’ In Hebrew therefore it appears only as the name of the first fratricide and of his duplicate Tubal-cain (Tûbhal-ḳayin), the brother of Jabal, who is called the founder of the smith’s trade (Gen. IV. 22), and stands to Cain in very much the same relation as Jabal does to Abel.

Cain is accordingly the same mythological figure as Hephaestus and Vulcan with the Greeks and Romans. But there are some other points which determine his Solar character. First, there is the characteristic that after the murder of his brother he built the first city, and called it Enoch (Chanôkh, Gen. IV. 17). We have seen above, and I shall show still more clearly in the treatment of the Myth of Civilisation, that in the myths of all peoples the Solar heroes are regarded as the founders of city-life, and that a fratricide often precedes the building of the city. The agricultural stage, which is connected with the Solar worship, overcomes the stage of nomadic life, which holds to the dark sky of night or clouds; and, after conquering the herdsmen, the surviving agriculturists build the first city. It will not surprise us if the solution of the question raised by F. Lenormant, ‘pour en suivre toutes les formes depuis Cain bâtissant le première ville Hanoch après avoir assassiné Abel, jusqu'à Romulus fondant Rome dans le sang de son frère Remus,’[^[319]] proves the consistency and universality of the ideas of mankind at the mythic stage in reference to this point. Whether the connexion of the zodiacal figure of the Twins with this feature of the myth is so close as this acute French scholar imagines, is an independent question. The account of Cain as the first builder of a city is accordingly a testimony to his Solar character. But far more important testimony is afforded by the characteristic feature in the story of Cain, that after the commission of the crime that fratricide, laden with the curse of Jahveh, has to be ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’ (Gen. IV. 11). We will pause a little at this mythic feature, and passing beyond Cain, consider it in connexion with a larger group of myths which exhibit the same.[^[320]]

§ 5. The word which preeminently denotes the Sun in the Semitic languages, and which, when the abundant synonyms produced by mythology to designate the Sun had vanished, drove all other names of the Sun into the background, viz. the Hebrew shemesh and the corresponding words in the cognate languages, has been proved to descend from the etymological basis of the idea of rapid motion, or busy running about. This original sense gives the point of connexion with the Aramaic terms shammêsh ‘to serve’ and shûmshemânâ ‘an ant.’[^[321]] The same function which language exhibits in the most prominent name of the Sun is also repeatedly shown in mythology.

The myth views the Sun from the point of view of his rapid course, hastening and continuous motion, or steady march forwards.

Like a bridegroom coming out of the bridal chamber,

Who exults like a hero to run a course.

Ps. XIX. 6 [5].

Hence fiery, rapid horses are attributed to the Sun both in the classical mythology and in Indian and Persian,[^[322]] and no less so in the Hebrew. The latter may be inferred from the fact that in the Hebrew worship in Canaan there were horses dedicated to the Sun. King Josiah, the zealot for Jahveh, was the first to abolish this worship (2 Kings XXIII. 11). And Heinrich Heine gives the jesting couplet:—

Phoebus lashed his steeds of fire

In the Sun’s own cab with ire.[^[323]]

To the same mythical conception must be referred the Wings assigned to the Sun or the Dawn, which are mentioned very frequently in the classical mythology.[^[324]] Just as the Egyptians and the Assyrians[^[325]] in their monuments express this aspect of the sun by the picture of a winged solar disc, so the Hebrews, although they did not give expression to their ideas in monuments and imitations which might have been preserved to the present time, have in the extant fragments of their poetical literature left behind them confirmation of the fact that they conceived of the Sun and the Dawn in the same way. As they called the wind ‘winged,’ so that the monotheistic singer imagines Jahveh as ‘flying on the wings of the wind’ (Ps. XVIII. 11 [10]), so he binds wings also to the rapidly increasing light of the Dawn:—

If I take the wings of the Dawn,

And go down at the uttermost parts of the sea.[^[326]]

Ps. CXXXIX. 9.

Jahveh ‘makes the Dawn flying’ (literally for flight), as the prophet Amos (IV. 13) says. The prophet speaks in this verse of the regular phenomena of nature, not of exceptional physical changes, which would allow us to take ʿêphâ as obscuration, as in Job X. 22; it is therefore best to keep to the sense of flying. Joel (II. 2) says, ‘As the Dawn, spreading out her wings over the mountains.’[^[327]] Accordingly the Dawn or the Sun is a bird, and the Persian expression murġ-i-saḥar ‘Bird of the Dawn’ becomes intelligible. When the sun sets, the runner has stumbled and fallen to the ground; or the bird gliding through the air has lost its power of flight and fallen into the sea. Hence comes the use of ‘to fall’ of the setting sun: cadit sol, and in Homer:[^[328]]—

Ἐν δ’ ἔπες’ Ὠκεανῷ λαμπρὸν φαὸς Ἢελίοιο,

ἔλκον νύκτα μέλαιναν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν.

And in Arabic they say of the setting of the sun, wajabat al-shams, or habaṭat al-shams,[^[329]] verbs which are synonymous with waḳaʿa, ‘to fall.’ We then understand (passing again to Hebrew) Isaiah’s exclamation (XIV. 12), ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, Light-bringer, son of the Dawn!’

As the rising Dawn is said to spread out her wings, so the setting evening sun drops her[^[330]] pinions, bends her wings downwards. This expression, a relic of the mythic view, is retained in the Arabic language. The Arab says of the setting sun, janaḥat; but although this verb according to the lexicons denotes inclinavit in general, yet there can be no doubt that this inclinatio was originally something special, namely the bending of the wings, from whose name janâḥ, indeed, the above denominative verb is formed. Ḥassân b. Thâbit,[^[331]] a poet contemporary with Moḥammed, says, ‘The sun of the day bent herself (i.e. bent her wings) that she might set’ (wa-ḳad janaḥat shams-al-nahâri litaġribâ). But when wings are attributed to the Night, the basis of the conception is quite different from that which gives wings to the Sun or the Dawn. In this case the thought is of covering and hiding.[^[332]] In this sense are to be understood such phrases as kâna-l-leyl nâshiran ajniḥat al-ẓalâm, ‘Night unfolded the wings of darkness,’ or kâna-l-leyl ḳad asbala ʿala-l-châfiḳeyni ajniḥat al-ẓalâm, ‘Night had thrown down over the ends of the earth the wings of darkness.’[^[333]] The frequent expression fî junḥ or jinḥ al-leyl certainly belongs to this category. Lexicographers who translate the word junḥ pars noctis, even on the authority of native lexicons, e.g. al-Jauharî, who explains it as ṭâʾifâ minhu ‘a portion of it,’[^[334]] are mistaken. It must rather signify ‘under the wings of Night,’ which is also supported by the fact that, besides junḥ al-leyl, fî junḥ al-ẓalâm is also found,[^[335]] where wings only can be understood.[^[336]]

From all this it is easy to perceive that the solar figures of the myth are brought into connexion with the idea of swiftness, flight, and constant marching forwards; for rapid motion is one of the chief attributes of the Sun which naturally present themselves to the eye and the mind. From this mythical view of the rapid running of the Sun may also be explained a feature in the German mythology which Holtzmann[^[337]] leaves unexplained. ‘The Osterhase [Easter-hare],’ he says, ‘is inexplicable to me; probably the hare is the animal of Ostara [the goddess]; on the picture of Abnoba a hare is present.’ If Ostara, as Holtzmann proves, is the sun or the sunrise, then the hare is easily explained as indicating the quick-footed sun. The connexion of ideas required to bring the hare into connexion with this view is one that needs no proof. In the hieroglyphs also, when there is free choice among various phonetic signs (e.g. with the vowel u), the figure of the hare is generally chosen when the word expresses a rapid motion.[^[338]] So the Red Indians, in calling their Kadmus a great white hare, may have been influenced (independently of the false popular etymology of the word michabo[^[339]]) by the conception of the Sun as a swift-footed hare.[^[340]]

Abraham and his wife Sarah (the princess or queen of heaven—the Moon as we shall see) expel Hagar (Gen. XVI. 6). The Moon is jealous of Hagar. What does Hagar signify in this Hebrew myth? The cognate Arabic language offers the most satisfactory basis of interpretation of this name. Hajara, the root of the name Hâgâr, denotes ‘to fly,’ and yields the word hijrâ, ‘flight,’ especially known from the flight of Moḥammed from Mecca to Medina. The mythic designation Hâgâr is consequently only one of the names of the Sun in a feminine form. The battle of the two figures of the night-sky against Hagar is again that inexhaustible theme of all mythology, the battle of Day with Night. With respect to this particular name the Arabic language gives us still further light. While ġaṭasha denotes both ‘to be dark’ and ‘to move slowly,’ the hot noonday sun is described by the Arabs by the participle of the verb from which we have explained the name Hagar, al-hâjirâ or al-hijîrâ ‘the flying one.’ That this is not mere chance, but is connected with the mythical order of ideas from which we deduced the designation Hâgâr for the Sun, is further confirmed by the word barâḥi or birâḥ, also denoting ‘flight’ (from the Hebrew and Arabic root brḥ ‘to flee’), and yet belonging to the nomenclature of the Sun.

The case is the same with the ‘fugitive and vagabond’ life of Cain; after the conquest of Abel the Sun wanders from place to place, and leads a life of unrest and motion till night comes. A reminiscence of the solar significance of Cain is even found in the Agâdâ, which makes the sign granted for the safety of Cain to consist in the brightening of the sun; or, according to another interpretation, in a horn, which grew up on him from the moment of the promise.[^[341]] It is well known that the sun’s rays were mythologically called horns,—a meaning which the language preserved.

§ 6. With this group of Solar figures of the Hebrew mythology which are exhibited as wandering or rapidly marching forward,[^[342]] I also class some others whose names alone lead us to recognise this mythological character. First and foremost we must consider a word which has been retained in the language beyond the mythical stage: the Hebrew shachar, Arabic saḥar, ‘morning, dawn.’ This word is doubtless connected with the verb sâchar, which denotes constant moving, wandering.[^[343]] The Arabic sâḥir ‘magician’ is the same word as the Hebrew sôchêr ‘merchant,’ both signifying originally those who are always travelling about from place to place. The Hebrew verb shachêr ‘to seek’ relates originally to the movement of one who has lost something and goes about looking for it. Although in the course of this chapter I shall devote a special connected disquisition to Jacob’s sons, yet I must here pick out a few beforehand to incorporate them in the class of solar figures whose characteristic feature is that here discussed. To this class belongs e.g. Âshêr, the name of a son of Jacob by his concubine Zilpah. The name cannot be explained (according to Gen. XXX. 13) as the ‘Happy,’ or ‘Bringer of Happiness,’ since this signification of the root (‘to be happy’) is only secondary to the fundamental meaning—applied, not original. Language does not form originally expressions for ethical notions of this kind, any more than the notion itself rises without contact with something sensual, which may subsequently be transferred to the ethical. The Arabic words for similar ideas spring up in a similar way, e.g. muṣliḥ ‘successful’ denotes properly ‘one who penetrates through something,’ &c. The root of Âshêr, in Hebrew âshar, in Arabic athara (whence athar ‘a trace’), originally denoted to march, go forwards (Prov. IX. 6); intensively ashshêr, to make some one go forward, to lead, and as a noun, ashûr ‘way, path.’ From the same root comes also the relative pronoun asher, which originally signified place, (compare the Aramaic athar ‘place’); but we know that expressions which serve as exponents of the category of relation, both in time and space, generally start from the conception of space, as is clearly seen in the Hebrew shâm, indicating originally the idea of place, ‘there’ but also transferred to the expression of the idea of time, ‘then.’[^[344]] We see the same quite as clearly in the employment of the Aramaic athar in the combination bâthar (from ba-athar) to denote after, afterwards, properly on the spot.[^[345]]

To this fundamental meaning of the root âshar ‘to march, go forward’ is added the secondary application ‘to be happy,’ properly ‘to advance prosperously.’ But the old mythical designation Âshêr is connected with the original sense: since at the time when this mythical word was first spoken the verb had not yet obtained its secondary sense, nor could yet obtain it, as ethical ideas were still non-existent. Accordingly Âshêr signifies ‘he who marches on,’ and is simply a solar name. Thus the ancient Hebrew called the Sun, when he noticed the continual change of his place on the horizon, and observed his constant movement. ‘Through Asher,’ it is said, in a fragmentary hymn on Asher in Gen. XLIX. 20, ‘his bread is fat; he gives dainties for a king;’ for the sun is to the agriculturist the beneficent element that hastens the ripening of his crops.

This simple and, I hope, obvious explanation throws light on another expression in Hebrew mythology, which stands in the closest connexion with Asher. I mean the feminine form derived from the masculine sun, the appellation Ashêrâ, on which Biblical interpreters and antiquaries have had so much to say. Ashêrâ, as the feminine form of Âshêr, denotes what the Hebrews regarded as the marriage-consort of the Sun. We know this of the Moon, as I hope to show more fully in speaking of Sarah. Ashêrâ is, therefore, an old Hebrew name of the Moon. In those passages of the Old Testament which speak of the idolatry of the Hebrews in Canaan, Asherah is named with Baal (the Sun-god): ‘The vessels that were made for Baal and for Asherah and for all the host of heaven’ (as though for Sun, Moon, and Stars), 2 Kings XXIII. 4; ‘And the children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of Jahveh, and forgat Jahveh their God, and served Baal and Asherah,’ Judges III. 7. They probably served Asherah too at the altar of Baal (see Judges VI. 25); but this is quite in the spirit of the Canaanitish and Mesopotamian religious practice. One mode of doing homage to the supreme God was to offer sacrifices and build temples to his subordinate deity, just as any honour conferred on the Satraps conduced to the greater excellence of the ‘King of kings.’ This view is very general on the votive tables with cuneiform inscriptions; so e.g. in an inscription in the Temple of Mugheir: ‘In honore Sin domini deorum coeli et terrae, regis deorum ... templum Iz deae magnae condidi et feci.’

Asherah is accordingly the Wandering one, and the moon is here made feminine. A masculine word for the Moon, which, being common to all the Semitic dialects (unlike the later, lebhânâ), must be one of the oldest Semitic names for moon, viz. yârêach, expresses the same idea; for it is derived from the noun ôrach, ‘a path, way,’ and stands for ôrêach with the initial hardened[^[346]] (like yâchîd ‘only,’ with initial y, yet echâd ‘one;’ and yâshâr ‘straight,’ connected with the root under discussion, âshar ‘to go forwards’). In Job XXXI. 26, the epithet hôlêkh, ‘marching,’ is applied to the moon. Therefore the two plural forms ashêrîm and ashêrôth are not identical (the former denoting objects of worship, and the latter as ‘femininum vilitatis’ declaring them to be in the opinion of the writer objects of abomination);[^[347]] but the masculine form is derived from the singular Âshêr, and the feminine from the singular Ashêrâ.

§ 7. To the same series belong also the names Dân and Dînâ, which latter is only a feminine to the first, and occurs again as a proper name in Arabic.[^[348]] It would be erroneous to regard the verb dîn ‘to judge’ as the etymon: for this would give no solution of the question concerning the nature and signification of the designations under review. Then, as the Hebrew language itself offers no satisfactory points d’appui, we are fully entitled to look for information to the cognate idioms. I believe that the fundamental idea contained in the group of consonants Dn is extant in the Assyrian, where it expresses the idea of going;[^[349]] whence the Arabic dâna ‘to approach,’ the secondary dana, and the adjective dunya, which denotes the near and visible world, in opposition to al-âchirâ, the life beyond.[^[350]] Consequently, Dân and Dînâ must denote ‘he or she who marches on, or comes nearer,’ or ‘goes’ in general, synonymous with Âshêr, i.e. the Sun. In Arabic also al-jâriyâ ‘who goes’ is one of the many names of the Sun which are enumerated by Ibn al-Sikkît in his Synonymical Dictionary of the Arabic Language.[^[351]] Whilst of Dan no actual myth has reached us, and etymology alone gives us any help in discovering his mythical character, of Dinah on the other hand the chief source of our knowledge of Hebrew antiquity has preserved a more material statement, telling of the love of Shechem for Dinah and their ultimate union, and of the immediately following murder of Shechem by Jacob’s sons. These are the features which come under our view when we draw out the mythical kernel from the mass of epical description surrounding it (Gen. XXXIV). From the arguments of the Second Chapter the connexion of the noun shekhem with the verb hishkîm may surely be treated as removed beyond all doubt, as well as the fact that this word is a designation of the Morning-dawn. I will add at this place, to complete what was discussed at p. 26, that the Hebrew word shekhem seems to be etymologically connected with the Arabic thakam, which signifies ‘way.’ Like most Hebrew words denoting a way, this word shekhem must stand in connexion with the verbal idea of ‘marching forwards’—either by the verb being a denominative (like the German bewegen from Weg), or inversely by the noun being a deverbal. The changes of consonants which we find here are in accordance with the law of the Semitic languages, namely:

Therefore also:

The longing love of the Dawn for the Sun and her union with him—the same theme which Max Müller in his essay on ‘Comparative Mythology’ has so ingeniously traced in Indian and Hellenic myths—was told also by the Hebrews; only that the Hebrew inverted the relation. When the Dawn vanished and the Sun began to shine bright in the sky, the Hebrew said of the union between the Dawn and the Sun that the Dawn snatched up the Sun to himself and was united with her. Not long afterwards followed the vengeance taken by the sons of Jacob (the night-sky), who, enraged at the abduction of their sister, murder the ravisher and deliver her. This is only the disappearance of the Sun, while the evening glow comes forward, again independent, to inaugurate the dominion of the Night.[^[352]] The myth makes no distinction between the morning and the evening glow, but treats them as identical phenomena. Therefore Shekhem is made a son of the Ass (Chamôr); and there is no doubt that chamôr (ass) has here the mythic significance which accompanies that animal whenever it appears in the Aryan mythology.[^[353]]

Zilpah also, the mother of Asher, is to be classed in the same group. Any one who has cast even a superficial glance on the real meaning of the myths of the Aryan nations, as now discovered and recognised, must have noticed the peculiarity that the mythical relation of child to parent does not always indicate a succession of what should precede and what follow, but that the child is not unfrequently only a repetition of the father or the mother, and is therefore to be considered identical with them.[^[354]] The present is a case of this kind. Âshêr is only a repetition of his mother. The designation Zilpâ, the explanation of which has been sought in vain in Hebrew—for the meaning ‘a drop’ can hardly be maintained—finds a smooth and ready interpretation in Arabic, where zalafa, as well as zlp, zlb in Assyrian,[^[355]] denotes ‘to march on.’ So that Zilpâ also is ‘she that marches forward.’ Another ‘marcher forward’ is preserved by Arabian tradition, viz. Zalîchâ. She is unmistakably a solar figure, and her name (zlch has the same signification ‘to march forward’) is perhaps even formally connected[^[356]] with that of Zilpâ, with whom she is identical. The battle of the Sunshine with the Rainy Sky is the amorous contest of the beautiful Zalîchâ (or, as the name is commonly but erroneously pronounced, Zuleychâ) with Yôsêph ‘the Multiplier.’ Now, having been led into the above digressions by the explanation of Cain’s flight, we return to Cain again.

§ 8. We have just alluded to the fact that in the Hebrew mythology the figures presented as children are frequently only repetitions of one of their parents.[^[357]] This observation is found to be confirmed in the case of the posterity which the Biblical genealogy in Gen. IV. derives from Cain. Some of the descendants of Cain are quite as much solar figures as their ancestor himself; and in an age which had advanced beyond the stage of the formation of myths, and even beyond the after-sentiment of mythology, this identity occasioned the idea that these figures must stand in a genealogical connexion with the ancestor. The same psychological process which in the employment of language produces a specialisation or limitation in the sense of words originally synonymous, is at work here also, forming from the numerous synonyms of mythology genealogies, in which identical designations, after their substratum has been personified, become his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons. Thus among Cain’s descendants none but solar figures are to be found. In the demonstration of this fact, I limit myself to those names which can be interpreted without at all forcing their meaning. The very first, Enoch (Chanôkh), the son of Cain, from whom he names the first city he built, is of pure solar significance. We have above already, with Ewald, put his name in the class in which the Sun is presented as the ‘Opener.’ The solar character of Enoch admits of no doubt. He is brought into connexion with the building of towns—a solar feature. He lives exactly three hundred and sixty-five years, the number of days of the solar year; which cannot be accidental.[^[358]] And even then he did not die, but ‘Enoch, walked with Elôhîm, and was no more [to be seen], for Elôhîm took him away.’ In the old times when the figure of Enoch was imagined, this was doubtless called Enoch’s Ascension to heaven, as in the late traditional legend. Ascensions to heaven are generally acknowledged to be solar features. Herakles among the Greeks, Romulus the city-founder among the Latins, and several heroes of American mythology,[^[359]] agree in this. The same feature also often attaches itself even to historical persons—e.g. to the legend of the Prophet Elijah, the ‘hairy man’ who ascends to heaven on ‘a chariot of fire and horses of fire,’[^[360]] indeed this as well as other mythical features has been better preserved in the case of this favourite hero of Israelitish prophecy than in that of the former purely mythical personage.