Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development
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Title: Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development
Author: Ignác Goldziher
Contributor: Heymann Steinthal
Translator: R. Martineau
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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.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION xiii
CHAPTER I.
ON HEBREW MYTHOLOGY 1
CHAPTER II.
SOURCES OF HEBREW MYTHOLOGY 17
CHAPTER III.
THE METHOD OF INVESTIGATING HEBREW MYTHS 35
CHAPTER IV.
NOMADISM AND AGRICULTURE 49
CHAPTER V.
THE MOST PROMINENT FIGURES IN HEBREW MYTHOLOGY 90
CHAPTER VI.
THE MYTH OF CIVILISATION AND THE FIRST SHAPING OF HEBREW 198
RELIGION
CHAPTER VII.
INFLUENCE OF THE AWAKING NATIONAL IDEA ON THE TRANSFORMATION 231
OF THE HEBREW MYTH
CHAPTER VIII.
COMMENCEMENT OF MONOTHEISM AND THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE 259
MYTHS
CHAPTER IX.
PROPHETISM AND THE JAHVEH RELIGION 290
CHAPTER X.
THE HEBREW MYTH IN THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY 316
EXCURSUS 337
APPENDIX.
_Two Essays by H. Steinthal._
1. THE ORIGINAL FORM OF THE LEGEND OF PROMETHEUS 363
2. THE LEGEND OF SAMSON 392
INDEX 447
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.
-----
Footnote 1:
Especially Max Müller’s essay on _Comparative Mythology_ (_Chips_
etc., II. 1), and the ninth in the second series of his _Lectures on
the Science of Language_; and Cox’s introductions to his _Manual of
Mythology_, _Tales of the Gods and Heroes_, and _Tales of Thebes and
Argos_.
Footnote 2:
Both in England and in France the attempt has been made with much
taste to introduce the results of comparative mythology in the
instruction of youth; in England by Rev. G.W. Cox in his _Tales of the
Gods and Heroes_, _Tales of Thebes and Argos_, _Tales from Greek
Mythology_, _Manual of Mythology in the form of question and answer_,
1867, and _Tales of Ancient Greece_, 1870, the last two of which have
just been translated into Hungarian, and published by the Franklin
Society; in France by Baudry and Delerot (Paris 1872). Still more
recently the results of comparative mythology have also been
summarised in two excellent books for children by Edward Clodd, _The
Childhood of the World: a simple account of Man in Early Times_, 1873,
and _The Childhood of Religion; embracing a simple account of the
birth and growth of Myths and Legends_, 1875.
Footnote 3:
This psychological uniformity of all races of men is independent of
the question of the monogenetic or polygenetic origin of races. The
psychological uniformity of different races is especially conspicuous
when we observe and compare individuals of the separate races in
infancy, when the distinctions produced by history, education,
instruction, etc., are not yet present (see Frohschammer, _Das
Christenthum und die moderne Naturwissenschaft_, Vienna 1868, p. 208.)
When we are considering the growth of mankind in general, the stage
when myths are created corresponds to the infancy of the individual.
Footnote 4:
_Das Beständige in den Menschenrassen und die Spielweise ihrer
Veränderlichkeit_, Berlin 1868, p. 78.
Footnote 5:
François Lenormant, _Essai sur la Propagation de l’Alphabet phénicien
dans l’ancien monde_, Vol. I. (2nd ed., Paris 1875), p. 17.
Footnote 6:
Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, I. 6.
Footnote 7:
On these two see Pfleiderer, _Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre
Geschichte_, II. 8.
Footnote 8:
The title is 'Conférence de la Fable avec l’Histoire sainte, où l’on
voit que les grandes fables, le culte et les mystères du paganisme ne
sont que des copies altérées des histoires, des usages et des
traditions des Hébreux.'
Footnote 9:
Edward Wilton in the _Journal of Sacred Literature_, 1849, II. 374
_et seq._
Footnote 10:
Dr. Vollmer’s _Wörterbuch der Mythologie aller Völker_, newly revised
by Dr. W. Binder, with an Introduction to Mythological Science by Dr.
Johannes Minckwitz, 3rd ed., Stuttgart 1874.
Footnote 11:
See the Augsburg _Allgemeine Zeitung_, 1875, no. 169, p. 2657.
Footnote 12:
_Primitive Culture_, I. 22.
Footnote 13:
See Virchow in the _Monatsbericht der königl. preuss. Akademie der
Wissenschaften_, January 1875, p. 11.
Footnote 14:
_Origin of Civilisation_, 3rd ed., p. 330, quoting Sibree’s
_Madagascar and its People_, p. 396.
Footnote 15:
_Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie_, pp. 62, 63. This is
the idea to which Max Müller refers in noticing the lectures of the
philosopher of Berlin, in his _Introduction to the Science of
Religion_, p. 145.
Footnote 16:
See his _Populäre Aufsätze aus dem Alterthum, vorzugsweise zur Ethik
und Religion der Griechen_, second edition, Leipzig 1875, especially
p. 272 _et seq._
Footnote 17:
Flach, _Das System der Hesiod. Kosmogonie_, Leipzig 1874; see
_Literar. Centralblatt_, 1875, no. 7.
Footnote 18:
_Rude Stone Monuments in all Countries_, p. 32, note 2.
Footnote 19:
_The Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 302.
Footnote 20:
Sayce in the _Academy_, 1875, p. 586.
Footnote 21:
The _Academy_, 1875, no. 184, p. 496. The promoters of the
_Theological Translation Fund_, by whom Kuenen’s _Religion of Israel_
was published, Dr. J. Muir of Edinburgh, who wrote some letters to the
_Scotsman_ on the Dutch Theology, and to a certain extent Bishop
Colenso, besides many others who have not avowed their views so
publicly, indicate the progress of opinion in England.—TR.
Footnote 22:
See _Literar. Centralblatt_, 1875, no. 49, p. 157.
Footnote 23:
_Biblische Mythologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments_, 2 vols.,
Stuttgart 1842; _Etymologisch-symbolisch-mythologisches Realwörterbuch
für Bibelforscher, Archäologen und bildende Künstler_, 4 vols.,
Stuttgart 1843–5.
Footnote 24:
I have not succeeded in obtaining a sight of Schwenk’s _Mythologie der
Semiten_, published in 1849; but Bunsen’s condemnation of it in
_Egypt’s Place in Universal History_, IV. p. 363, made me less anxious
to get it.
Footnote 25:
_Naturgeschichte der Sage. Rückführung aller religiösen Ideen, Sagen,
Systeme auf ihren gemeinsamen Stammbaum und ihre letzte Wurzel_, 2
vols., Munich 1864–5.
Footnote 26:
In Vol. II. of his _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und
Sprachwissenschaft_, translated and appended to this volume.
Footnote 27:
_Der Semitismus_, in _Zeitsch. für Völkerpsychologie etc._, 1875,
VIII. 339–340.
Footnote 28:
It would be unfair not to mention the Dutch Professor Tiele as a
worker on this field. In his _Vergelijkende Geschiedenis der oude
godsdiensten_, Vol. I.: _De egyptische en mesopotamische godsdiensten_
(Amsterdam 1872) he has occasionally inserted explanations of Hebrew
myths, to which I have referred at the proper places.
Footnote 29:
II. 421 _et seq._; see his _Rivista Europea_, year VI. II. 587. Cf.
his review of the German edition of this work in the _Bollettino
italiano degli studj orientali_, 1876, I. 169–172.
Footnote 30:
In reference to this I may refer to the eloquent expressions of
Steinthal in his lecture _Mythos und Religion_, p. 28 (in Virchow and
Holtzendorff’s _Sammlung gemeinverständlicher Vorträge_, Bd. V. Heft
97).
Footnote 31:
_Mythologie der Ebräer in ihrem Zusammenhange mit den Mythologien der
Indogermanen und der Ægypter._ Nordhausen 1876.
Footnote 32:
_Ausland_, 1874, p. 961 _et seq._, 1001 _et seq._
Footnote 33:
The above-named work was published immediately after the conclusion of
this Introduction.
Footnote 34:
_Die Erzväter der Menschheit: ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung einer
hebräischen Alterthumswissenschaft._ Leipzig, Fues 1875.
Footnote 35:
Ibn Yaʿîsh’s Commentary on the Mufaṣṣal, p. 74 (of the edition now
being published by Dr. Jahn of Berlin). See _Fables_ de Loqman le Sage
(éd. Dérenbourg), Introduction, p. 7.
Footnote 36:
I may refer on this point to Von Grutschmid’s excellent critique on
Bunsen’s attempt to explain Athene as Semitic, in the former’s
_Beiträge zur Geschichte des alten Orients_, Leipzig 1858, p. 46.
Footnote 37:
Stade (_Morgenländische Forschungen_, p. 232) justly insists on the
good Hebrew character of the names occurring in the Hebrew stories,
even against the false supposition of the original Aramaic character
of the Hebrew people.
Footnote 38:
_Zeitsch. d. D.M.G._, 1871, XXV. 139; see Lepsius, _Einleitung zur
Chronologie der alten Ægypten_, I. 326.
Footnote 39:
See Ibn Yaʿîsh’s Commentary on the Mufaṣṣal of Zamachsharî, p. 47, in
which the name of the constellation al-ʿAyyûḳ (Auriga, ‘The Hinderer’)
is imported into this story, as hindering al-Dabarân from coming up
with his beloved.
Footnote 40:
al-Meydânî, Majmaʿ al-amthâl (ed. of Bûlâḳ), II. 209.
Footnote 41:
See Nöldeke in Schenkel’s _Bibellexikon_, 2nd ed. IV. 370.
Footnote 42:
_Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, 1869, VI.
Footnote 43:
Theodor Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, II. 85.
Footnote 44:
W.H.I. Bleek, _Reynard the Fox in South Africa_, 1864, pp. xx-xxvi.
See Max Müller’s _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, London
1873, p. 54.
Footnote 45:
_Histoire générale et Système comparé des Langues sémitiques_, p. 7.
Footnote 46:
Two instances will suffice to show how Renan’s hypothesis became the
common property of educated people. It is treated as fully made out,
both by Roscher, the German political economist, and by Draper, the
American naturalist and historian of civilisation. The former says:
‘Life in the desert seems to be an especially favourable soil for
Monotheism. It wants that luxuriant variety of the productive powers
of nature by which Polytheism was encouraged in remarkably fruitful
countries, such as India’ (_System der Volkswirthschaft_, 7th ed.,
Stuttgart 1873, II. 38). The latter: ‘Polytheistic ideas have always
been held in repute by the southern European races; the Semitic have
maintained the unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a
recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape of mountains
and valleys, islands, rivers, and gulfs, predisposes man to a belief
in a multitude of divinities. A vast sandy desert, the illimitable
ocean, impresses him with an idea of the oneness of God’ (_History of
Conflict between Religion and Science_, London 1875, p. 70). This view
has also passed into Peschel’s _Völkerkunde_, and Bluntschli also, in
his lecture on the ancient oriental ideas of God and world in 1861,
echoed Renan’s hypothesis of 1855.
Footnote 47:
_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, I. 297.
Footnote 48:
On the other side, Renan says (_Hist. gén._ 4th ed., p. 497) ‘Cette
grande conquête (the recognition of Monotheism) ne fut pas pour elle
(i. e. for the Semitic race) l’effet du progrès; ce fut une de ces
premières aperceptions.’
Footnote 49:
Much of this literature has been unnoticed, as e.g. a late pamphlet by
Léon Hugonnet: _La civilisation arabe, défense des peuples sémitiques
en réponse à M. Renan_, Geneva 1873.
Footnote 50:
_Histoire générale_, p.
Footnote 51:
_Geschichte des Materialismus_, 1st ed., 1866, p. 77. See 2nd ed.,
1873, I. 149.
Footnote 52:
Ib. p. 83. See 2nd ed., p. 152.
Footnote 53:
_Cours de Philosophie Positive_, éd. Littré, Paris 1869, V. 90, 197,
324.
Footnote 54:
_Histoire générale_, p. 486: ‘L’unité de constitution psychologique de
l’espèce humaine, au moins des grandes races civilisées, en vertu de
laquelle les mêmes mythes ont dû apparaître parallèlement sur
plusieurs points à la fois, suffirait, d’ailleurs, pour expliquer les
analogies qui reposent sur quelque trait général de la condition de
l’humanité, ou sur quelques-uns de ses instincts les plus profonds.’
Footnote 55:
Ib. p. 27.
Footnote 56:
Max Müller, _Chips from a German Workshop_, I. 370.
Footnote 57:
_Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 390 _et seq._
Footnote 58:
In _Chips_, &c., I. p. 341.
Footnote 59:
In _The Myths of the New World_, New York 1868. See Steinthal’s
criticism of this collection in the _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie
and Sprachwissenschaft_, 1871, Bd. VII.
Footnote 60:
_Myths and Myth-Makers_, Boston 1873, p. 151 _et seq._
Footnote 61:
In the sixth vol. of Waitz’s _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, where I
obtained information about Schirren’s works.
Footnote 62:
_Les premières civilisations_, Paris 1874, II. 113 _et seq._
Footnote 63:
_Gott in der Geschichte_, I. 353; a passage which, with a large part
of the volume, is omitted in the greatly abridged English translation.
Footnote 64:
_Aegyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte_, V. ii. 18–19 (English tr.
IV. 28–29).
Footnote 65:
Even old Plutarch observed in reference to the then favourite
explanation of the myths _ex ratione physica_: Δεῖ δὲ μὴ νομίζειν
ἁπλῶς εἰκόνας ἐκείνων (i.e. of the sun and moon) τούτους (Zeus and
Hera), ἀλλ’ αὐτὸν ἐν ὕλη Δία τὸν ἥλιον καὶ αὐτὴν τὴν Ἥραν ἐν ὕλῃ τὴν
σελήνην (_Quaestiones Romanae_, 77). See Cicero, _De Nat. Deorum_,
III. 24: Longe aliter rem se habere, atque hominum opinio sit: eos
enim, qui dii appellantur, _rerum naturas_ esse, non _figuras deorum_.
Footnote 66:
Spiegel still does this up to a recent date in his _Eranische
Alterthumskunde_, II. 19.
Footnote 67:
See Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, II. 287 _et seq._
Footnote 68:
The story of Osiris and Typhon _e.g._ originally personified the
vegetative life of nature and the struggles incident to it, but was
afterwards transferred to the destinies of the human soul. See Ebers,
_Durch Gosen zum Sinai_, Leipzig 1872, p. 477.
Footnote 69:
Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, III. 183.
Footnote 70:
See Roth in the _Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen
Gesellschaft_, 1848, II. 217; Albrecht Weber, _Akademische Vorlesungen
über indische Literaturgeschichte_, Berlin 1852, p. 35.
Footnote 71:
See Kuenen, _The Religion of Israel_, London 1874, I. 226.
-----
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.
-----
Footnote 72:
We shall treat of this in the Third Section of Chapter VIII.
Footnote 73:
Translated and given as an Appendix to this volume.—TR.
Footnote 74:
How readily Alexander’s history was combined with the Solar myth is
best proved by the fact that Arabian tradition gives Alexander a
Sun-name, the variously interpreted Ḏû-l-karnein = the Horned, i.e.
the Beaming.
Footnote 75:
Translated and given as an Appendix to this volume.—TR.
Footnote 76:
_Wayyiḳrâ rabbâ_, sect. XIX.: hishchîr we-heʿerîbh.
Footnote 77:
See Gesenius, _Thesaurus_, p. 1406. _b._
Footnote 78:
See Hermann Cohen’s dissertation, _Die dichterische Phantasie und der
Mechanismus des Bewusstseins_, in the _Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie_, &c. 1869, VI. 239 _et seq._
Footnote 79:
On the German legends in which this idea occurs see Henne-Am-Rhyn,
_Die deutsche Volkssage_, Leipzig 1874, p. 268 _et seq._
Footnote 80:
See Ps. LXXIV. 13–14; LXXXIV. 11. There is nothing to justify those
interpreters who, caring nothing for the remains of ancient myths,
always wish to understand by _Rahabh_ and _Tannîn_ the kingdom of
Egypt.
Footnote 81:
Angelo de Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, II. 217. On the meaning
of milk and honey in the Hebrew myth, Steinthal has written
exhaustively in his Treatise on the Story of Samson, given in the
Appendix.
Footnote 82:
See Weber in the _Zeitschrift der D. M. G._, 1855, IX. 238.
Footnote 83:
Al-Meydânî, _Majmaʿ al-amthâl_, II. 203.
Footnote 84:
_Korân_, Sûr. V. v. 69.
Footnote 85:
_Sonne, Mond und Sterne_ [i.e. Bd. I. of _Die poetischen
Naturanschauungen_, &c.], p. 4.
Footnote 86:
_Die Naturgeschichte der Sage_, I. 127.
Footnote 87:
See Excursus A.
Footnote 88:
Such names have often planted themselves firmly in popular tradition,
and are accordingly mentioned in various quarters with perfect
uniformity. So e.g. Ιαννῆς and Ιαμβρῆς, who appear both in Rabbinical
writings and in 2 Tim. III. 8 (see Jablonski, _Opuscula_, ed. Te
Water, II. 23).
Footnote 89:
See Wilhelm Bacher’s treatise, _Kritische Untersuchungen zum
Prophetentargûm_ (_Zeitschrift der D. M. G._ 1874, XXVIII. 7).
Footnote 90:
_Leben Abraham’s nach Auffassung der jüdischen Sage_, Leipzig 1859.
Another good compilation is that of Hamburger, _Geist der Hagada_,
Leipzig 1857, I. 39–50.
Footnote 91:
_Bêth ham-midrâsh: Sammlung kleiner Midrashim und vermischter
Abhandlungen aus der jüdischen Literatur_, ed. Ad. Jellinck, Vienna
1873, V. 40.
Footnote 92:
Max Müller, _Essays_ [German translation of _Chips_], II. 147; not in
the English.
Footnote 93:
Rigveda, L. 8; CCCXCIX. 9.
Footnote 94:
_Sonne, Mond und Sterne_, p. 4.
Footnote 95:
Bab. Bâbhâ bathrâ, fol. 16. _b._
Footnote 96:
See Kuhn, _Ueber Entwickelungsstufen der Mythenbildeng (Abhandl. der
kön. Akad. d. W._ 1873, Berlin 1874), p. 144.
Footnote 97:
Berêshîth rabbâ, sect. 68.
Footnote 98:
See on the other side Ewald, _History of Israel_ (2nd or 3rd ed.), II.
214.
Footnote 99:
Welcker, _Griechische Götterlehre_, Gottingen 1857, I. 66.
Footnote 100:
I find this identification, it is true, only in later books, Tânâ
de-bhê Elîyâ, c. 27; Sêder ʿôlâm, c. 21; see Halâkhôth gedôlôth
(hilkhôth haspêd). In the Sêder had-dôrôth, under the year 2189, Beor
is called son of Laban. On Laban see Chap. V. § 11. Besides the name
Loḳmân, which in signification corresponds with Bileʿâm (Balaam), we
find in the Preislamite genealogy of the Arabs, which in my opinion is
largely mixed up with mythical names, the chief Balʿâʾu, who is said
to have been a leper (Ibn Dureyd, _Kitâb al-ishtiḳâḳ_, p. 106. 8). It
should be observed that this is a man’s name with the grammatical form
of a feminine adjective.
Footnote 101:
See Chap V. § 10 end.
Footnote 102:
Sôṭâ, fol. 10. _a._
Footnote 103:
See Excursus B.
-----
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. ‘אַבְרָם
Abh Râm, the _Lofty Father_, kills his son יִצְחָק 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.
-----
Footnote 104:
‘Die andere _culturhistorisch_.’ I am obliged to render this
convenient adjective by a circumlocution, as ‘civilisation-historical’
would be too cumbrous and hardly intelligible.—TR.
Footnote 105:
I must refer those readers who are not sufficiently familiar with the
terminology to Steinthal’s _Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft_, Berlin
1871, vol. I., where all this is fully discussed in the section
_Elementare psychische Processe_.
Footnote 106:
But it is to be observed that some of the expressions produced by
Polyonymy [multitude of names] survive the process of fusion and
remain with the original signification; thus e.g. several names for
Moon in Hebrew. On such names Synonymy, a secondary function of
conscious speech, then performs its work.
Footnote 107:
_Chips_, First Series, pp. 356, 361.
Footnote 108:
On the Pronoun Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay, _Ueber die Verwandtschaft
der Ortsadverbien mit dem Pronomen_, Berlin 1830, still deserves
study. See also what is said below (Chap. V. § 6) on Âshêr.
Footnote 109:
Budenz, in the Hungarian review _Magyar Nyelvőr_ (‘Guardian of the
Hungarian Language’), 1875, IV. 57.
Footnote 110:
Max Müller, _Chips_, II. pp. 93–106.
Footnote 111:
See Chap. V § 5, 6.
Footnote 112:
_Kitâb al-aġânî_, I. 133. 19. Compare _al-Meydânî_, ed. Bûlâḳ, II.
262. 4.
Footnote 113:
Both wind and rain are placed in connexion with the night in the
_Dîvân of the Huḏailites_, ed. Kosegarten, p. 125, v.5: taʿtâduhu
rîḥu-sh-shimâli biḳurrihâ * fî kulli leylatin dâjinin wa-hutûni, ‘the
Northwind blows over it with his coldness every cloudy rainy night.’
Footnote 114:
Yâḳût’s _Geogr. Dictionary_, I. 24. 2.
Footnote 115:
_Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, &c. 1874, VIII. 179.
Footnote 116:
See Böttcher’s article on this group of roots in Höfer’s _Zeitschrift
für die Wissenschaft der Sprache_ (Greifswald 1851), III. 16.
Footnote 117:
See especially the lucid exposition of Dr. Abr. Geiger, in his _Das
Judenthum und seine Geschichte_ (2nd edit.), I. 51.
Footnote 118:
In other countries also human sacrifices have been abolished by a
reform of religion, and sacrifices limited to beasts and vegetables;
e.g. in Mexico, where the reform is attributed to Quetzalcoatl. See
Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, IV. 141.
Footnote 119:
The Sunset is child of Night only if we keep before our eyes the
mythical identity of the Morning and Evening Glow, according to § 2 of
this chapter.
-----
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 _
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