Chapter V: The Most Prominent Figures in Hebrew Mythology (3)

But this uncertainty of the colour which is associated with the Night is far less prominent than the fluctuation which prevails when the colour of the Day has to be described. In the former case, with a few exceptions based on the impression which a certain peculiar night may have made on the mind of the speaker or poet, black is by far the prevailing colour. Not so with the colour-distinctions of the solar phenomena. Here usage wavers among three colours, which are usually connected with the various stages of the Sun himself: _golden-yellow_, _red_, and _white_. The greatest definiteness is found to exist with reference to the first. It refers mostly to the dawn and sunset. In Aramaic the early morning is ṣafrâ. Etymologically this word is capable of many explanations which justify the above-expounded mythical conceptions of the dawn. It may be explained, as the soundest lexicographers on Semitic ground do explain it,[429] to denote _curled locks of hair_, or _one who springs, leaps_. Both explanations take us back to mythic attributes of the morning-sun; in the second we see the morning-sun springing up to heaven from behind the hills like a bird (ṣippôr). But I believe that the word ṣafrâ is related to aṣfar, a colour-name in Arabic, which, though like all such it has an extremely vague signification, and may even mean _nigredo_, prevailingly indicates a golden-yellow colour. Now while the Aramaic ṣafrâ is exclusively the morning-sun (compare Ἢὼς κροκόπεπλος, Iliad, VIII. 1, and μελάμπεπλος of the night), in Arabic the colour-word in question is prevailingly applied to the evening-sun: ‘Until upon him came the end of the day, and the Sun put on the garment of yellowness’ (ila an atâ ʿaleyhi âchir al-nahâr wa-labisat al-shams ḥullat al-iṣfirâr, Rom. of ʿAntar, VI. 244. 1). Another example, in which the succession of time comes out with still greater clearness, is: ‘They had defeated al-Noʿmân at noon; then they took rest till the Sun put on the garment of yellowness, and towards evening dust appeared before them’ (wa-kânû ḳad sabaḳû al-Noʿmân bi-niṣf al-nahâr wa-achaḏû râḥâ ḥatta labisat al-shams ḥullat al-iṣfirâr wa-ʿind al-masâ ṭalaʿ ʿaleyhim ġobâr, Rom. of ʿAntar, VI. 35. 2). It is remarkable that in Egyptian the setting sun is said to throw out rays of _tahen_—a metal distinguished for its saffron colour, which is frequently contrasted with the colour red.[430] Chabas finds this contrast to constitute a difficulty in the comparison with the setting sun. Semitic analogies, however, show that the association of saffron colour with the sun, especially the evening-sun, is not confined to Egyptian. No case on Arabic ground is as yet known to me in which this yellowish colour, al-iṣfirâr, is attributed to any other stage of the sun’s course except the evening. But there is the word aṣbaḥ (from ṣubḥ ‘the early morning’) ‘morning-coloured,’ used of the lion, which is said to denote a colour near to aṣfar.[431] At all events, the Aramaic ṣafrâ and the Arabic usage teach us that a yellow colour is in Semitic an attribute of both the morning- and the evening-sun. It is very different with the two other colours, white and red. There we meet with greater fluctuations. Sometimes the morning-sun is described as white, in comparison with the sun of the advanced day; sometimes the former is bright red and the latter white:

Kaʾanna sana-l-fajreyni lammâ tawâlayâ * damuʾl-achaweyni zaʿfarâni
wa-aydaʿî.
Afâḍa ʿala tâlîhima-ṣ-ṣubḥu mâʾahu * faġayyara min ishrâḳi aḥmara
mushbaʿi.

As if the light of the two daybreaks when they follow one after the
other
Were the blood of the two brothers saffron and red.
The dawn poured its waters over the latter,
And changed into white its deep red.[432]

At its very first appearance the morning-dawn is of saffron colour, then a bright red comes, and the further the day advances, the whiter it becomes. The two daybreaks (al-fajrân), as the scholiast observes on this passage, are al-kâḏib wa-l-ṣâdiḳ—the _lying_ or supposed one, which precedes the true dawn, and the latter itself. The very poet, however, from whom I quote this fragment, at another place exactly inverts the order of colour: representing the white or grey colour as appearing first, and then passing into the reddish or saffron. In a poem to a friend, in which he gives a beautiful description of night, he brings forward Night as in love with the stars. But she grows old—

Thumma shâba-d-duja wa-châfa min al-haj- * ri faġaṭṭa-l-mashîba
bi-z-zaʿfarâni.

And Night grew grey, and feared the desertion [of her lover, the starry heaven]: So she dipped her grey hair into saffron.[433]

The idea that the poet intends to express here is, that Night at its latter end becomes grey, when the grey morning begins to appear, and that to preserve the appearance of youth and be still acceptable to her lover she must put on red paint. But even the brightness of the sun by day (ḍiâ al-nahâr) is compared by the same poet to the grey hairs of an old man (II. 226. 2), as is also the brightness of the stars:[434]

Raʾâhâ salîlu ṭ-ṭîni wa-sh-sheybu shâmilun * lahâ bith-thureyyâ
wâ-s-simâkeyni wa-l-wazni.[435]

He that was brought out of clay [Adam] saw it [the world], when its hair
was all grey,
With the Pleiades, the two Fishes and the Balance.

We find the same figure, of which we have seen Abû-l-ʿAlâ to be so fond, used by Abû-l-Ḥasan ʿAlî b. Isḥâḳ al-Waddânî, a Maġreb [North African] poet, who says of the morning: ‘It is like the greyness which spreads itself over the black hair of youth (the black night):’

Dâna-ṣ-ṣabâḥu wa-lâ ata wa-kaʾannahu * sheybun aṭalla ʿala sawâdi
shibâbî.[436]

So, inversely, when the hair grows grey it is said ‘The dark night is lighted.’[437]

From all these cases it may be gathered that the progress of the sun from the dawn to the full day is treated sometimes as a transition from a whitish to a reddish colour, sometimes as the reverse. Sometimes the redness of morning begins, and turns into white; sometimes the greyness, which passes into red.[438] But both conceptions are also found combined in a single idea: thus, for instance, al-ʿArjî the poet says:

Bâtâ bi-anʿâmi leylatin ḥatta badâ * subḥun talawwaḥa ka-l-aġarri-l-ashkari. They both passed a joyous night, until began The morning to appear, like a red horse with white forehead-spot (ġurrâ).[439]

Some already-cited examples have enabled us to observe that when day is contrasted with night, it is done by calling the night black and the day white. To the former instances I will now add another for clearness’ sake: ‘Till the whiteness of the day became black’ (ḥatta ʿâda bayâḍ al-nahâr sawâdan, Rom. of ʿAntar, XXV. 5. 4). The attribute _white_, applied to the sun of the advanced day, is especially clear in a passage which I must not omit to mention. The poet al-Mutanabbî says:

Azûruhum wa-sawâdu-l-leyli yashfaʿunî * wa-anthanî wa-bayâḍu-ṣ-ṣubḥi
yuġrî bî.
I visit them when the _blackness of the night_ aids me;
And I retire when the _whiteness of the morning_ drives me away.

A critic[440] remarks on this passage that the writer ought to have spoken of the _day_ rather than of the _whiteness of the morning_, as the rhetorical law of al-muḳâbalâ ‘antithesis’ demands as the opposite to Night not Dawn, but Day. Thus ‘the whiteness of day’ would be better. Another passage with the antithesis is contained in Ḥarîrî: ‘The white day becomes black’ (iswadda-l-yaum al-abyaḍ).[441] This use of language is characteristically exemplified in the expression sirnâ bayâḍa jauminâ wa-sawâda leylatinâ, ‘we travelled night and day’ (literally, ‘we travelled during the whiteness of our day and the blackness of our night,’ Aġânî, II. 74. 20). But apart from any antithesis, the white colour is attributed to the light of the morning and the day: falamma-rtafaʿat al-shams fabyâḍḍat, ‘after the sun had risen high and _become white_,’ is said in a tradition.[442] In the Romance of ʿAntar (XXIV. 111. 3), a horse is thus described: ‘he was white in colour, as if he were the day when it breaks, or the moon[443] when it shines with full beams’ (wa-hua abyaḍ al-laun kaʾannahu al-ṣabâḥ iḏa-nfajar wa-l-ḳamar iḏâ badar).

On Assyrian ground also we discover the idea of the _whiteness_ of the sun, expressed, not indeed by a word directly signifying a colour, but yet by an epithet which is undoubtedly founded upon this idea. In the lyrical poem, called by Schrader ‘The Assyrian Royal Psalm’ (line 29), a land with a _silver sky_,[444] i.e. with a bright shining sunny sky, is desired for the king. So here the bright sunny sky is represented as of silver colour. On the other hand, Ḥomar^m, the name of a Himyarite god,[445] has perhaps a solar meaning, equivalent to the Arabic aḥmar ‘Red;’ at all events, the fancy that he may be a sort of Bacchus (chamr ‘wine’) sounds improbable. In Hebrew literature we find no direct indications of the colours which were associated with the sun: an indirect indication is afforded by the passage in Is. XXIV. 23, where it is said that ‘the sun grows pale and the moon red.’[446] In the Talmûd literature, however, we find an incidental discussion of the colour of the sun; to which one of the Excursus is devoted.[447]

I have paused long on the ideas held of the Sun with reference to colour, longer than is consistent with the symmetry of my book, and have especially brought up many examples from the Arabic language, celebrated for its wealth of synonyms and epithets—all with the object of giving probability to my ideas on the mythical character of Esau or Edom and Laban, Jacob’s two hostile kinsmen. We have seen that the sun is called _white_ quite as frequently as _red_;[448] now is it not certain beyond a doubt that the two foes of Jacob the Night-sky, namely Edom the red and Laban the white, are only names for the Sun, formed by the Hebrew myth on the ground of the sun’s colour? The war of darkness and the stormy sky against the red or white sunny sky is described in the rich language of Mythology, which has devoted such multifarious appellations to this struggle, as a strife of one who follows on the heel of his brother, against the white and the red. Here we will return to a point which was anticipated in the Third Section of this chapter; I mean the fact that the mythic feature which, with other solar characteristics, has fastened itself on the description of David, a perfectly historical person, that he was admônî ‘reddish,’ belongs to the same group of mythic ideas. It is a bit of solar myth: ‘He is red, and of excellent sight and good eyes’ (1 Sam. XVI. 12).

Thus the mythical appellations Jacob, Edom, and Laban appear to be cleared up, and the features belonging to them have discovered to us the nocturnal character of the first-named and the solar of the two latter personages. I have confined myself to the most essential point, the statement of the fact and the identification of the mythic figures in the centre of the story. If we were to use the collateral points also as mythic matter, more abundant results might be attained. But we must limit ourselves to an investigation of the main features, since in the present position of mythological inquiry it would be difficult and dangerous to try to pick out with any confidence from the epic descriptions in the Bible all that belongs to the original myth. It might, for instance, be urged that Jacob is endowed with a _deceitful_ character, since he cheats the one of his blessing and his birthright, and the other of his sheep (Hermes), and this might be treated as characteristic of the _night_, as the figures of the night-sky are credited elsewhere with a thievish nature. ‘Like thieves,’ said the ancient Indian singer, ‘so the nights stole away with their stars, that Sûrya might become visible’ (Rigveda, I. 50. 2).

In a legend of the Palatinate the _King of the Night_ residing at the Ice-sea _stole_ the Sun;[449] Rachel steals the household-gods of her father Laban (Gen. XXXI. 19); and Jacob himself, as the Scripture expresses it, _steals_ the heart of Laban the Aramean, not telling him of his intention to fly (v. 20).

Now wrapt in mantle, like a thief, the Night is seen,
She covers o'er her silver-studded raiment’s sheen.

says Arany, in his ‘Gipsies of Nagy-Ida’[450] (Canto I. v. 21).

But what I have hitherto explained is only one side of Jacob’s mythical characteristics: we have seen against whom he fought. But Jacob did not only fight: he loved also, loved with tenderness and self-abnegation. He wooed, he married; and the history of his children takes up a considerable portion of the Book of Genesis. The loves of the Night-sky, the names of his wives whom he gained by conquest, and of the children that came out of his loins, must be an important part of the Myth of the Night-sky; and we should be accomplishing our task very imperfectly if we refused to enter on the consideration of these figures of Hebrew mythology.

§ 12. Let us turn first to his women. He has both wives and so-called concubines. In my opinion this distinction belongs to the original form of the myth; and some explanation of its significancy must be given at the outset. There is another already-discussed name of the night-sky, Abhrâm, with which are associated both a legitimate wife Sârâ, and a concubine Hâgâr; and in the latter we discovered the mythical bearer of a solar name, ‘the Flying one.’ This circumstance leads to the discovery that, whilst the concubines in mythical phraseology are figures of _opposite_ nature to their master, like Hagar a solar figure to Abram the dark sky, the names of the legitimate wives represent figures homogeneous to the nature of the husband. This is the case preeminently with Sarah, Abram’s wife. The name signifies _Princess, Lady_, the Princess of the Heaven, the Moon, the Queen who rules over the great army of the night-sky (ṣebhâ hash-shâmayîm). Another name of the moon in Hebrew mythology is probably Milkâ (the wife of Abraham’s brother Nahor, Gen. XI. 29), i.e. ‘the Queen’—not expressly _wife_, but grammatically the feminine form of Melekh (Abhî-melekh) ‘King’ (the Sun), like Ashêrâ (Moon) from Âshêr (Sun), or Lebhânâ (Moon) from Lâbhân (Sun). ‘Queen or Princess of Heaven’ is a very frequent name for the Moon.[451] We learn most remarkable facts from the Chaldee-Babylonian series of deities, which, though not old enough to be a myth, must, like every theogony, have sprung from mythology misunderstood. In this system, in which the deities are arranged in male and female triads, so that there is always a male deity parallel to the goddess of the female triad who stands at the same spot, Sîn (the Moon) and Gula of the male triad are balanced respectively by ‘the highest Princess’ and by Malkît ‘the Queen’ in the female; and these are only Sarah and Milcah again. Istar also is described as Princess (sarrat) of heaven;[452] which is probably connected with the fact that this goddess of the Assyrian Pantheon, who is commonly compared to Venus, in later times became a moon-goddess.[453] Sir H. Rawlinson says that Μισσαρή in Damascius may be cognate with the Assyrian Sheruha or Sheruya, the wife of Asshûr, and signify ‘the Queen.’[454] And as it is the _stars_ over which the Queen of the night-sky bears sway, she is _siderum regina_ in Horace (_Carmen saeculare_, v. 35).[455] Even in the latest times the Hebrews called the moon the ‘Queen of Heaven’ (mele-kheth hash-shâmayîm, Jer. VII. 18), and paid her divine honours in this character at the time of the Captivity. The Hebrew women who had migrated to Egypt answered the Prophet who warned them: ‘As to the word that thou has spoken unto us in the name of Jahveh, we do not listen to thee; for we shall certainly do all the things that have gone forth from our own mouth; burning incense to the _Queen of Heaven_, and pouring libations to her as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and princes, in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, and were filled with food and were happy and saw no evil; whereas ever since we have ceased to burn incense to the _Queen of Heaven_ and pour libations to her, we have wanted everything, and been consumed by sword and famine. And when we were burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations to her, was it _without our men_ that we made cakes for her, to receive her image, and poured libations to her?’ (Jer. XLIV. 16–19). This reply leads us to infer that the moon-worship in Judah was specially attractive to the women and allowed by the men, and was not a mere secondary religious act, but a prominent worship of the first rank; yet a worship which, considering the prevailingly solar character of the religion of an agricultural people, was then kept up chiefly by the women as the relic of an ancient nomadic age. What was the antiquity of this lunar worship among the Hebrews, is testified (as has long been known) by the part played by Mount Sinai in the history of Hebrew religion. For this geographical name is doubtless related to _Sin_, one of the Semitic names of the moon. The mountain must in ancient times have been consecrated to the Moon.[456] The beginning of the Hebrew religion, which, as we shall see, was connected with the phenomena of the night-sky, germinated first during the residence in Egypt on the foundation of an ancient myth. The recollection of this occasioned them to call the part of Egypt which they had long inhabited ereṣ Sînîm ‘Moonland’ (Is. XLIX. 12). Obviously the lunar worship of Nomads stands in connexion with the prominent position occupied by the figures of the night-sky in their mythology. When, through that psychological process which results in the decay of the life of the myth and the rise of a religious view of the world, the mythic elements become religion, then the Moon is not believed to possess those deleterious qualities of which the later legends of the American nations are full, but is rather regarded as the source of blessing and success. The Hebrews called the most fruitful place in their new country, the ‘City of the Palms,’ formerly delightful, though now a very cheerless hole, by a name denoting _Moon-city_—Yerêchô (Jericho). An analogous system of nomenclature is mentioned by Ḥamzâ of Iṣpahân, a Persian who wrote in Arabic, who says in his _Kitâb al-muwâzanâ_ that, because the moon is the cause of an abundant supply of water and of rain, the names of the most fruitful places in Persia are compounded with the word _mâh_ ‘moon:’ e.g. Mâhidînâr, Mâhishereryârân, Mâhikârân, Mâhiharûm &c.[457] For, in the opinion of the Iranians the growth of plants depends on the influence of the moon.[458] The Arabic language still shows clearly the mythical connexion between the moon and good pasture,[459] in the fact that the same word, which as a noun, al-ḳamar, signifies moon, as a verb, ḳamara, expresses the notion _multus fuit_ (de aqua et pabulo), and ḳamir means _multa_ aqua.

The nomadic Hebrews called Sarah, the Princess of Heaven,[460] i.e. of the night-sky, Abram’s legitimate wife. The same relation between wife and concubine comes out with still greater distinctness in the case of Jacob, Abram’s synonym. His legitimate wives are Leah and Rachel; to the latter he is bound by the tenderest love—a love which in the view of the Biblical writer became the ideal of self-sacrificing conjugal affection. Both their names are homogeneous to Jacob’s mythical character, and the bearers of these mythical appellations are figures of the dark sky of night and clouds. It will be regarded by serious investigators as no mere chance that the word Lêʾâ in its origin signifies the same as Delîlâ, namely, _languida, defatigata_, the _Languishing, Weary, Weak_—the setting Sun that has finished its day’s work, or rather the time when there is no longer any sun, but the Night, who cuts off from her long-haired lover or bridegroom the locks (_crines Phoebi_) in which his whole force resides; the Night, which robs the Sun of his splendid rays, and causes him to fall powerless to the ground and lie blind on the battle-field. Even in a product of the Jewish literature of a later age the expression châlâsh ‘weak, debilitated’ is used of the setting sun. ‘He is like a hero who goes forth strong and returns home powerless; thus the sun at his rising is a mighty hero, and at his setting a _weakling_.’[461] Nothing similar is connected with the name Lêʾâ; yet it is clear that this name is an appellation of the setting sun or the advancing night, when we read: weʿênê Lêʾâ rakkôth ‘the eyes of Leah were weak’ (Gen. XXIX. 17).[462] How closely the ideas ‘End’ (here that of the day) and ‘Weariness’ hang together in Semitic, we see clearly in the Aramaic word shilhâ, shilhê ‘end,’ which is developed out of the Shaphʿêl form of the root lehî (the Hebrew lâʾâ, whence the name Lêʾâ), which denotes ‘to be wearied.’[463] The name Râchêl is still clearer and less ambiguous. It signifies ‘Sheep.’ When the ancients raised their eyes to heaven and saw grey clouds slowly driving over the celestial fields, they discovered there the same as our children see when in their innocent imaginations they find figures of hills and animals in the sky. Men who form myths stand in this respect on the same intellectual stage as our children. How finely has Angelo de Gubernatis, in the introduction to his most original work ‘Zoological Mythology,’ attached his profound explanations of the old animal-mythology, which are based upon a sympathetic poetical feeling after the sentiments of a mythic age, to vivid memories of that early age in which the enquirer after myths himself looked up to heaven and _made_ myths! Moreover, what the primitive humanity that created myths and the children of our advanced modern age read in the picture-book of nature,[464] is still found there by people who, although they no longer make myths, yet excel us in immediate observation of nature. The sandhills and downs of the Sahara are variously called by the natives kelb ‘Dog,’ kebsh ‘Ram,’ or chashm el-kelb or chashm el-kebsh ‘Dog’s nose’ or ‘Ram’s nose.’[465] But it is chiefly the clouds that gave so much food to fancy. On Arabic ground we can refer to a treatise by Abû Bekr ibn Dureyd, a linguist of an early age known to every Arabist, on the ‘Description of the Rain and the Cloud,’ which the learned Professor William Wright has published in a useful collection. In this treatise many a vivid picture is to be found which exhibits the continual working of the old mythic views.[466] Even a modern literature nearer to us may be quoted; for who knows not the classical passage in Shakespeare, where Polonius makes observations on the forms of the clouds—a series of mythical observations, which the same poet allows another of his heroes to condense into a mythological _résumé_:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish;
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon ’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.
_Antony and Cleopatra_, IV. 14.

If the sky is a pasture, it is most natural to see in the clouds beasts feeding there. So the nomad Arab sees in the clouds herds of camels,[467] and calls a small herd of twenty or thirty camels by the same name by which he describes a broken-off fragment of cloud—al-ṣirmâ. The poet Abû Ḥibâl calls a rain-cloud dalûḥ, i.e. ‘a heavily laden camel;’[468] and according to the Arabian philologist al-Tebrîzî a cloud accompanied by thunder and lightning is called al-ḥannânâ ‘the bellowing,’ because the ancient Arabs compared a thundering cloud[469] to a camel that breaks out into loud bellowing from painful desire to reach home.[470] How full of meaning is the myth that lies hidden behind this expression ḥannânâ! The camel on a journey has gone far away from home, longs to be back again, and bellows with terrible pain: it is the Thunder.[471] And this myth was not confined to the Arabs; we find a slight trace of it among the later Jews, in the Talmûd. When it thundered, they said, ‘The clouds groan.’ Achâ b. Jaʿaḳôbh describes meteorological phenomena in the following words: ‘The lightning sparkles, _the clouds groan_ (menahamîn ʿanânê), and the rain comes’ (Berâkhôth, fol. 59. a). This mythical conception is only a variation of the more general view that thunder is a _lion’s roaring_ (Job XXXVII. 4; shâʾag is used specially of the lion), out of which grew the roaring of Jahveh, mentioned in many passages of prophecy and poetry—a result of the monotheistic transformation of mythical ideas. In Arabic hamhama is used both of the lion’s roaring and of thunder; and so also zamjara. In the work of Ibn Dureyd already quoted an Arab says of a thunder-cloud, ‘Its thunders groan like camels longing to get home (ṭirâb), and roar like raging lions.’[472]

The Arab saw in the clouds a herd of camels, in a single cloud a single camel.[473] The ostrich, which is a favourite term of comparison in Arabic poetry, is also seen by them in the clouds. Zuheyr b. ʿUrwâ says of a little cloud visible behind a larger one, that it was an ostrich hung up by the feet (kaʾanna-r-rabâba duweyna-s-saḥâbi * naʿâmun tuʿallaḳu bi-l-arjuli).[474] From the Hebrew mythology we have the similar conception of the cloud as a _sheep_, as Râchêl. She is the legitimate wife of the dark, nocturnal or overclouded sky. When the cloud let fall its wet burden in drizzling rain upon the earth, the primitive Hebrews said ‘Rachel is weeping for her children’—a phrase preserved from an age of mythic ideas, which was retained to a late age in a very different sense.[475] For as the Arab regarded the thunder as the cloud’s cry of pain, so the Hebrew could see in the rain Rachel’s tears. Even up to the present day the Arabs say of the rain: ‘The sky weeps, the clouds weep;’[476] and the idea was not strange to the Greek, who spoke of the ‘Tears of Zeus.’[477] In the Romance of ʿAntar, XXV. 58. 4, it is said of the rain:

The gloomy heaven weeps with tears, that stream in constant flow
Out from the eye of a rainful cloud.

The poet Ibn Muṭeyr says most beautifully of the weeping sky: ‘The cloud smiles at the lighting up (of the lightning), and weeps from the corners of her eyes, the moisture of which is not excited by splinters (sticking in the eye); and without either joy or grief she combines laughing and weeping.’[478] Rachel has a favourite son called Yôsêph (Joseph). This name signifies: ‘He multiplies,’ or, from the explanation already given, ‘The Multiplier.’ He is called in a hymn addressed to him, ‘The blessing of the heaven above, the blessing of the flood that lies below, the blessing of the (female) breasts and of the womb’ (Gen. XLIX. 25). Can we doubt that this is the Rain, which multiplies—the blessing from above, which lies below in floods of water, the rain which mythologically was so often regarded as the nutritive milk of the milked cows of the clouds?[479] And probably the old Arabic idol called Zâʾidatu,[480] i.e. ‘the Multiplieress,’ has the same mythological signification as the synonymous term Joseph in Hebrew, and may therefore be regarded as a goddess of Rain. Can the least doubt be felt, that ‘the Multiplier,’ the son of the cloud, must be the rain, as wine is called the daughter of the grape,[481] and the fruit the son of the tree,[482] and as bread is called in Arabic jâbiru-bnu ḥabbata, like ‘Strengthener, son of Mrs. Grain?’[483] Moreover, while these latter views are natural, but not spread abroad everywhere, the idea that the rain is the child of the cloud is universal. We meet it among the Greeks, for Pindar sings:

... ἕστιν δ’ οὐρανίων ὑδάτων
ὀμβρίων, _παίδων Νεφέλας_ (Olymp. XI. 2, 3),—

just like the Arabs. The poet Moḥammed b. ʿAbd al-Malik said, when a violent shower of rain delayed the arrival of his friend al-Ḥasan b. Wahab, ‘I know not how to express my complaint against one heaven which keeps back from me another heaven (the friend), unless indeed I utter curse and blessing together: Let _the former become childless_, and the latter live long.’[484] The cloudy heaven was to lose his children—i.e. the rain was to cease.

Lastu adrî mâ ḏâ aḳûlu wa-ashkû * min samâʾin taʿûḳunî ʿan samâʾï Ġayra annî adʿû ʿala tilka bi-th-thuk- * lî wa-adʿû lihâḏihi bi-l-baḳâʾi.

It is this ‘Multiplier, Son of the Cloud,’ alone who can bring aid when the earth is visited by long drought and famine. The _multiplying_ Rain gives back to the parched earth her fertility and procures nourishment for starving mankind. This simple idea is formed from the mythic base into the story of the famine in Egypt and Joseph’s aid in allaying it. The myth itself, while it lived, was general, not bound by time or place, limited neither geographically or chronologically. When no longer understood and when lost to human consciousness, it became a locally defined legend, belonging to a certain historical period. This is the same experience which meets us in most of the myths of Hellenic Heroes. The Sun, which daily assails with an iron club and slays the monsters of darkness and the storms, when personified as Herakles does his deeds in a small place in Hellas, Nemea or Lerna. While Joseph imparts fertility to the parched earth, and in his character of ‘Multiplier’ delivers it from the curse which rested on it, the prophetic hero, in whom we have already detected some solar features, does the opposite. Elijah, who ascends to heaven on a fiery chariot with a fiery horse, the ‘hairy man,’ curses the soil of the Hebrew land in the time of Ahab (again a localising and chronological limitation of what the myth had told in general terms without such limitation) with drought, want of rain, and unfruitfulness; he is the cause of a fearful famine (1 Kings XVII. 1).

The ‘Multiplier’ has also severe contests to sustain. The most celebrated of them is that which he maintains against her who loves him dearly, whose name is preserved to us only in legendary tradition—Zalîchâ, the ‘Swift-marching.’[485] We know her already. He flies from the temptress, but _leaves his cloak in her hand_ (Gen. XXXIX. 12). This feature, which seems to us only accessory, may have been an important element of the original myth. We shall see further on, that the figures of the night-sky or the dark sky generally are provided with a covering or cloak, with which they cover over the earth or the sun, and thus produce darkness. It is a different battle that he fights against his brothers, the ‘Possessors of arrows,’ i.e. the sun-rays, which shoot at the rain-cloud and try to drive it off. Joseph’s persecution by his own brothers and expulsion to Egypt is only the other side of the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Typhon and the Phenician myth of Adonis; the solar hero being in the latter cases, and the rain-hero in the former case, the object of persecution. While the sarcophagus of Osiris starts from Egypt on its travels, and lands at Byblos on the Phenician coast, Joseph when sold goes in the opposite direction from Canaan to Egypt. Both these myths became local legends, one in Egypt, the other in Canaan; consequently the direction of the wandering is modified in conformity with the locality.

From the battle of the rainy sky against the solar heroes with their arrows our myth makes the Rainbow to arise: just as the lightning was called ‘the Arrow of God,’ so the rainbow was in later times described as the ‘Bow of God’ (ḳashtî, Gen. IX. 13). The later legend of civilisation gives to the rainbow a foundation which is quite foreign to mythology. In mythology the rainbow appears to be attributed to Joseph, who, when overcome and driven off the field by the ‘Possessors of arrows,’ is after all not totally defeated, for ‘his bow abode in strength’ (Gen. XLIX. 24). This expression indicates the following conception. When the rain-cloud was driven from its place by the solar heroes, he fixed his bow in the sky, to be ready for a future fight. Thus in the Hebrew myth the rainbow is a bow belonging to the hero of storms. We find the same idea in the Arabic mythology. Besides other names, the rainbow bears that of ḳausu Ḳuzaḥa, ‘the bow of Ḳuzaḥ’ (who has been proved to be a storm-hero); and it may be gathered from some passages which Tuch has incidentally brought together in his Treatise on Sinaitic Inscriptions,[486] that Ḳuzaḥ shoots his arrows of lightning during the storms from this same bow, which after the conclusion of the battle appears in the sky. In the same Hebrew hymn which contains the above mention of the Bow, ebhen Yisrâʾêl ‘the Stone of Israel’ is named. Perhaps I am not at fault in conjecturing that the Stone here has a solar signification, and is used of the Sun which after the victory over Joseph appears on the firmament. We know from Schwartz’s[487] demonstrations, which Kuhn has recently confirmed in his academical treatise on the stages of development in the formation of Myths, that in mythical language the sun and other luminous bodies are called ‘stones.’ To the same mythic cycle belongs the circumstance that David slays his giant-foe by casting stones. And tradition[488] says that Cain killed Abel by throwing stones. But on the whole we find in the above-quoted hymn (called Jacob’s) only slight hints that can be claimed for the mythic period; for the remains of primeval hymns like that fragment were in later times so overgrown with matter derived from historical circumstances, that we must be content if we can discover what were the points of view and conceptions chiefly represented by these fragments. The reason why it is so difficult to reconstruct the old mythic view of the Hebrews concerning the Rainbow, obviously lies in the fact that it was supplanted by a later theological explanation (Gen. IX. 12–17). It is curious that the reason assigned in this later passage for the origin of the Rainbow was not able to obtain general credence, and that even Christian popular legends frequently appear to flow from ancient mythic conceptions. I will only mention an instance given by Bernhard Schmidt—the Christians in Zante call the rainbow 'the girdle, or the bow of the Virgin, τὸ ζώναρι, τὸ τόξο τῆς παναγίας.[489]

§ 13. Now while Jacob’s lawful wives are mythical figures homogeneous to himself, as we have seen, his collateral wives, the two concubines Zilpah and Bilhah represent figures of the ancient myth standing in a position of opposition to Jacob. The mythical character of Zilpah has been already determined, in the Seventh Section of this chapter. For this determination we had no other resource but the etymology of the name, no mythical matter having been preserved concerning this mythical figure. The case is reversed when we enquire into the meaning of Bilhah. The resource of etymology abandons us here; for, even if we assume that the abstract idea represented by the name must here be understood in a participial sense (Bilhâ=‘the Trembling, Terrified’), yet, in the want of analogous cases, the signification of the name brings us to no track worth pursuing. But, on the other hand, we fortunately have a material myth (as opposed to a mere name), relating to Bilhah: ‘Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine’ (Gen. XXXV. 22).

The transition from one aspect of nature to another is not always regarded by the myth from the point of view of a battle, in which the vanishing aspect is represented by the conquered and the approaching one by the conqueror. The myth speaks equally frequently of love and union, i.e. of sexual connexion. The vanishing aspect disappears in that which immediately follows: they become one, as man and wife. In the myths of sexual union, the mythical feature that the two figures one of which follows the other are brother and sister, father and daughter, or mother and son, is sometimes disregarded. We had an example of this in the Hebrew myth of the union of Shechem with Dinah. This is very frequent in Aryan mythology; and it is sufficient to refer to the part of Max Müller’s essay which deals with this subject.[490] There is a very fine myth of this kind, preserved in a work ascribed to Plutarch, _De fluviorum et montium nominibus_ (IV. 3). It is there said with reference to the Ganges, ‘Near it is situated the mountain _Anatole_, or the Rising,’ so called for the following reason: ‘Helios saw the maiden Anaxibia dancing there, and was seized with violent love for her. No longer able to control his passion, he pursued her with desire to force her to yield to his desire. The maiden, surrounded on every side, escaped into the temple of Artemis Orthia on the mountain Koryphe, and was lost to the eyes of her pursuer. He, following after, and unable to overtake his beloved, went up to the same mountain grieving. Therefore the natives call the mountain Anatole or ‘Sun-uprising,’ as Kaemarus narrates in the tenth book of his ‘Indian Affairs.’[491] Here, where the sunrise is not even the result of a union, but very characteristically that of disappointed love, Helios is no relative whatever of the Dawn, any more than Shechem of Dinah, or Abimelech, the later Sun-god (Melekh, compare Abhîbaʿal and Baʿal), of Rebekah, whom he loves (Gen. XXVI), or of Sarah, ‘Moon,’ whom he takes to himself (Gen. XX). However, the view which we shall encounter in the myth of Lot, that the lovers or united couples are blood-relations, brother and sister, or parent and child, is more prevalent. The idea of a son in love with his mother is quite general in Asiatic mythology, as Lenormant proves: in the old Babylonian mythology Dâzî, the Hebrew Tammûz, is lover of his mother Istar, &c.;[492] among the Egyptians Amôn is called the husband of his mother Neith; and among the Hindus Pûshan is described as both his sister’s lover and his mother’s husband. When after long darkness a mysterious Twilight slowly advanced, followed by the Dawn with ever-increasing rapidity, the Aryan said, ‘Prajâpati loves his own daughter Ushas and forces her,’ or ‘Indra seduces Ahalyâ the Night,’ or forms a union with his mother Dahanâ.[493] To the same class Sarah also seems to belong, as she is not only wife but also sister of Abram. Reuben marries Bilhah, his mother, or more correctly his father’s wife. Reuben is a figure homogeneous to Jacob, and therefore belongs to the night, as we discover most certainly from the circumstance that in the battle of the ‘Possessors of arrows’ against Joseph he is on the side of the latter and tries to save him, while Judah, a solar man, proposes to sell Joseph (Gen. XXXVII. 21, 26). In a myth such sympathy indicates that the subject and object of it are at all events not hostile figures: we have already seen this in the relations between Isaac and Esau and between Rebekah and Jacob. However, Reuben here seems not to be the night in general, but the twilight which forms the beginning and the end of the night, if we attach weight to the fact that Reuben is Jacob’s son. Though unimportant and not even necessary for the appreciation of the myth, this is very probable. The Sun is the mother of the Twilight, for the twilight proceeds from the sun. So when at the end of the night the morning-darkness gives way to the sun or dawn and disappears in them, Reuben and Bilhah are united. Whatever part the twilight may play here, it is at least clear that this myth speaks of the union of Night with its mother Day: when Night gives place to Day, from whose womb it was born but yesterday, then the myth says ‘Reuben is marrying his mother.’

§ 14. But before we continue the chapter on love and sexual union, the materials of which are mainly drawn from the history of Jacob’s family, it is desirable to insert some remarks on the mythological significance of that family. Our mythological observation leads to the following result. From its first commencement the myth speaks of _twelve children_ of Jacob, i.e. of the dark night-sky. These children, on whose names the myth lays no stress, can hardly be anything else than the shining troop which has its home in the night-sky—the Moon and the Eleven Stars (comp. Gen. XXXVII. 9, achad ʿâsâr kôkhâbhîm). These are Jacob’s children, though in a different sense from that in which Isaac is the son of Abraham, or Joseph the son of Rachel. In these latter instances the conception of a parental and filial relation was the result of the impression produced upon the creators of myths by constant succession; in the case of Jacob’s sons it is only meant that the eleven stars and the moon together form the Family of the Night-sky. This conception having once been grasped, there was nothing to hinder creators of myths from speaking of a son of Jacob who did not belong to that Family. And if there were a myth which said that Jacob fought with his son, as is said of Abraham, then we could not seek such a son in the family of stars which fills Jacob’s house. It is a general rule which must never be lost out of sight in the investigation of myths, that mythology does not present a _system_, whose separate elements are comprehensive results, or abstractions from _continuous_ observation of nature. What is told in the myth expresses how each _single_ observation affects the mind of man. Hence the various modes in which the myth speaks of a phenomenon; viewing it from various positions, it constantly changes the names, and recognises different relations. Whoever finds contradictions in all this must not turn against the interpreter and reconstructor of the myth, but against the mind of man itself which created myths: his dispute lies with the latter, not with the method of mythological science.

Jacob’s twelve sons, who are mentioned by name in the document in Genesis, can hardly have had their separate existence acknowledged at so early an age as that of the myth which comprised them under the general name of the twelve sons of the starry sky. Fathers of tribes with twelve or thirteen children (even in the numeration of Jacob’s children this uncertainty of number occurs) are frequently met with in Biblical genealogies, e.g. Joktan, Nahor, and Ishmael. The same tendency towards the number twelve is encountered in genealogies in other parts of the world. In the Ojibwa legend Getube has twelve children, of whom the eldest is called Mujekewis, and the youngest, who obtains great power and successfully repels the evil spirits, Wa-jeeg-e-wa-kon-ay.[494] At a later time, when a harmonising of the legendary matter, not from a set purpose, but from the acknowledged tendency of the human mind to bridge over contradictions, was going on, then a desire was felt to know the names of the twelve sons. When mythic consciousness and the stage when the mind was self-impelled to mythic conception were long passed, and the real meaning of names connected by mythology with certain deeds was no longer known, twelve such names, most of which had no longer any meaning, were taken at random and called Jacob’s twelve sons. Thus were obtained twelve names to answer the general proposition, ‘The Twelve form the Family of Jacob.’ Among these names there are true sons of Jacob, i.e. some who are declared by the myth itself to be so: here the genealogical narrator employed data derived from the myth. Next, there are some among them whom the myth treats not as sons of Jacob but as sons of his wives. For we must not forget that when Joseph is said to be son of Rachel, the myth does not trouble itself to ask who the father was. The conception that ‘the Rain is the son of the Cloud,’ which is expounded in the mythic description of Joseph’s birth, is not the result of any consideration of the names of the two parents who gave life to him; but the myth-former, seeing the cloud heavy with rain and observing the rain dripping from its lap, combined these two impressions and said, ‘The Cloud has borne the Rain.’ The later genealogical story could then easily find a father for the children of Zilpah, Rachel and others, in him whom the myth introduces as husband of those female figures.

Other Hebrew tribes have names totally free from any mythical character, and ethnographical (Judah) or geographical in nature. The last especially must of course have originated after the conquest of Canaan, since they are connected with geographical peculiarities of that land. One of these is Ephraim, whose name we shall see in the Fourth Section of the Eighth Chapter to be derived from the name of the town Ephrathah; another is Benjamin. The name Bin-yâmîn is associated with the division of the land, and signifies _Son of the right side_. The tribe was probably so called by the leading tribe of Judah, on whose right side Benjamin was his next neighbour.[495] Yet myths have attached themselves even to these geographical and ethnographical names, as they have to many historical ones. Concerning some no mythical features have been preserved, which is most to be regretted in the case of Gad. This name occurs in a later age with a religious signification (Is. LXV. 11), and would doubtless yield much instruction if a fuller myth gave us insight into its original meaning and connexion. Gad is commonly held to be the so-called Star of Fortune (Jupiter); but it is difficult to determine whether Gad’s sons, when they were called his sons, were put into connexion with the Star. If they were, we should have a case analogous to the Arabic appellation ‘Daughters of the star al-Ṭâriḳ’ (see above, p. 57). As some Arabian tribes call themselves ‘Sons of the Rain’ (benû mâ al-samâ), &c. so the Hebrew tribes, at the time when the myth still lived in the understanding of all, took names from the mythical figures, one calling itself ‘Sons of the Longhaired,’ another ‘Sons of the Multiplier’ &c. I think I cannot be wrong in assuming this nomenclature of the tribes to be older than the assignation of names to each of Jacob’s twelve sons. When the names of tribes had long been in existence, they were brought forward to serve as names for Jacob’s sons; and thus they laid the foundation of the genealogical tradition which traces the people of Israel to its first father Jacob, and thence goes back to his father and to Abraham.[496] But the mythical matter transmitted to us concerning the twelve who are introduced as the sons of Jacob, independently of what we have already discussed, is very little. Some names resist any reasonable etymology, or at least any etymology consonant with the character of mythical appellations. Still, even from these scanty materials we can pick out some single points that seem worthy of preservation as relics of the old Hebrew mythology. If the investigation of this subject is to be successfully pushed further than I can pretend to do in this treatise, the accurate enquirer will have especially to adduce the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis, known as ‘Jacob’s Blessing,’ from which I have already borrowed materials. In this ancient piece I am convinced that many fragments of _hymns_ are contained which originally had for their subject those mythical figures to which in their present form as _blessings_ they refer. We have in this fragment a sort of Hebrew Veda before our eyes.

Those figures among Jacob’s sons, of whom I venture to treat,[497] so far as there are means available have a solar character, with the exception of those which we have already recognised to be figures of the sky of night and clouds, and of one other figure (Levi) in which we shall discover something antagonistic to solarism. Zebhûlûn was seen even by Gesenius to mean the _Round_, _Globular_. Though we cannot find any analogous expression as a name for the sun, it must be acknowledged to be a very natural one. I believe that Zebhûlûn designates the sun at the end of its course when its red ball appears on the horizon of the sea. Anyone who has had the opportunity of admiring a sunset at the sea-side, will understand why people living there should call the setting sun _globular_; for its true globular form is especially perceptible and striking in such localities. That the name Zebhûlûn owes its origin to such considerations is evident from the language of the Hymn to Zebulun: ‘he rests at the edge of the sea’ (lechôph yammîm yishkôn, Gen. XLIX. 13); and this verse (especially in yishkôn) further confirms what was said on p. 116. Naphtâlî (from the root _ptl_, ‘to twine, twist,’ whence pâthîl ‘thread’), is ‘he of the plaited locks of hair.’ The Hymn calls him ‘a hind let loose’ (ayyâlâ shelûchâ, ver. 21), which is decisive for the solar meaning of Naphtâlî with the locks of hair. For the Semites call the Dawn a _hind_—the Hebrews ayyeleth hash-shachar ‘the Hind of the Dawn’ (Ps. XXII. 1), the Arabs al-ġazâlâ.[498] Even the Talmûd seeks and finds the reason for the identification of the Dawn with a Hind;[499] and another ancient Jewish-Arabic philologist, Moses ben Ezra, in his book on Poetry, also recognised the connexion of this appellation in Hebrew and in Arabic.[500] Accordingly, we must think of a solar interpretation when we read that among the furniture of the ancient Kaʿbâ at Mekka, besides various idols, there were _golden Gazelles_, which were carried off and buried by the Jurhumites, but found again by ʿAbd-al-Muṭṭalib in the well Zemzem.[501] The mythical description of the rising sun as a hind or gazelle is explained by the animal’s horns; for the myth which regards the Sun’s rays sometimes as arrows, sometimes as locks of hair, also treats them sometimes as horns. For this reason the Hebrew language has only one word to denote ‘horn’ and ‘ray of light,’ viz., ḳeren; and for the same reason Moses, who received many features of the solar myth, as Steinthal has pertinently proved in his treatise on the Story of Prometheus,[502] was imagined provided with horns, i.e., with beaming countenance (Ex. XXXIV. 29, 30, 35), a symbol which sacred art has preserved only too faithfully. In the Edda the point of the horn of Heimdall (the sun) is fixed in Niflheim (abode of cloud), i.e. the rays of the sun come forth out of darkness. The glyptic representation of the Assyrian god Bêl in the Louvre is adorned with a tiara surrounded by a row of ox-horns. In the Accadian mythology the name of the goddess Ninka-si, ‘the Lady of the horned face,’ as Lenormant translates it, has undoubtedly a solar character.[503] The same is the case with the Egyptian Isis: Τὸ γὰρ τῆς Ἴσιος ἄγαλμα ἐὸν γυναικήϊον βούκερων ἐστι κατάπερ Ἕλληνες τὴν Ἰοῦν γράφουσι, says Herodotus (II. 41). Lucian, the frivolous scoffer at everything religious, expresses his surprise to Zeus why he is represented with ram’s horns;[504] to which he makes Zeus reply by referring to a mystery into which the uninitiated cannot penetrate.[505] In a word, Naphtali of the long locks, Naphtali the swift hind, is certainly identical with the ‘Hind of the Dawn.’

Whether the name Yehûdâ (Judah) belongs to mythology, or was an early ethnical name before tradition introduced it as that of a Patriarch, is difficult to determine. If the name Yehûdâ could be referred to an etymon which exhibited a solar signification, we should decide for the former alternative, on account of the solar characteristics which are attached to the name. The most plausible etymological explanation would be ‘the Splendid,’ or (on account of the feminine termination â, added to the passive participle with an abstract force) ‘Splendour.’ But if the second alternative be correct, and the name Yehûdâ had from the first only an ethnographical force, then, as in the case of other names not belonging to primeval myths, we must suppose that the solar myths, in company with which we find these historical names, were attached to them in later times.

It is a true solar legend[506] that Judah forms a sexual connexion with Tamar. The latter name denotes ‘Fruit;’ and the myth of her union with Judah expresses the fact that the autumn-sun pours its rays over the fruits of the trees and fields. Thus the Hebrew agriculturist may have said at harvest-time, when the hot rays of the sun rapidly ripened the fruits: and he may at such a time, especially with reference to the vintage, have addressed to the autumn sun ‘Yehûdâ’ the hymn which is contained in the so-called _Jacob’s Blessing_ for Judah (Gen. XLIX. 11–13):