Mythology Among The Hebrews And Its Historical Development

MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HEBREWS

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...

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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, bu

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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 al

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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

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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, &amp;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-creat

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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 configurati

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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

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CHAPTER V. THE MOST PROMINENT FIGURES IN HEBREW MYTHOLOGY.

Battle and bloodshed, pursuit and suppression on the one side, love and union, glowing desire and coy evasion on the other, are the points of view from which the Myth regards the relations of day and night, of the grey morning and the sunrise, of the red sunset and the darkness of night, and their recurring changes. And this point of view is made yet more definite by the mythical idea that when forces are either engaged in mutual conflict, or seeking and pursuing one another in mutual love, as o

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CHAPTER VI. THE MYTH OF CIVILISATION AND THE FIRST SHAPING OF HEBREW RELIGION.

§ 1. In close connexion with that stage of development of the myth-producing faculty which is inaugurated by the beginnings of agricultural life, is found a natural consequence of the solar myth among agriculturists—the Myth of Civilisation. We have seen that the advance in civilisation from the nomad life to the agricultural stage is accompanied by that inversion of the direction of the myth which puts the Sun in the foreground and allows a tone favourable to him to prevail in it, whereas at th

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CHAPTER VII. INFLUENCE OF THE AWAKING NATIONAL IDEA ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE HEBREW MYTH.

§ 1. The nomadic stage of the Hebrew tribes reached its end at the moment when a large part of them gained a land for themselves on the right bank of the river Yardên (Jordan); and that is the true beginning of the History of the Hebrews. Nomadism holds in itself nothing essential to the world’s history. Hence the nomadic age of most great nations fades away into the vague, and there are at most separate and unimportant reminiscences by each tribe of its ‘days of battle,’ which give the historia

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CHAPTER VIII. COMMENCEMENT OF MONOTHEISM AND THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE MYTHS.

§ 1. We have seen a new feeling aroused in the breast of the Hebrews, and gaining such force and intensity as to fill their souls with a new thought and impart spiritual significance and direction to their political life. In the history of the world there sometimes appear nations endowed with very small power of influencing the outside world, and whose intellectual mission is quite subjective, or, if we prefer so to call it, negative, insofar as their entire historical life is taken up by the re

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CHAPTER IX. PROPHETISM AND THE JAHVEH-RELIGION.

§ 1. The most brilliant point in the history of Hebrew Religion is distinguished by an ingenious original idea, imported by the Hebrews into the development of religion—a single thought, yet in itself sufficient to secure for that short history a permanent place on the pages of universal history. The idea of Jahveh is what I allude to. [687] To the question, when this idea was born, the sublimity of which exerted so powerful and irresistible an influence over the noblest minds, it can only be an

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CHAPTER X. THE HEBREW MYTH IN THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY.

If we limit the term Myth to those old sentences which the ancients used in speaking of physical changes and phenomena, then the period with which we have to do in this chapter lies outside the history of the Hebrew Myth; for the latter ceased to have any further growth to chronicle as the influence of Prophetism extended. Now, in place of the free life, organic development and gradual transformation of the myth, we have it in a final and canonical literary form, which we had to use as the only

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A. (Page 30.) Agadic Etymologies.

In another direction also the Agâdâ is wont to supply the omissions of the Scripture. In passages where the Bible itself gives no reason for the choice or origin of a name, the Agâdâ quite independently gives its own etymological reason: this peculiarity occurs excessively often (e.g. in the etymology of the name Miriam in the Midrâsh to the Song of Songs, II. 12, that of the names of the two mid wives Shiphrah and Puah, who in addition are identified with Jochebed and Miriam, in the Talmûd Bab.

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B. (Page 34.) A Hermeneutical Law of the Agâdâ.

The hermeneutic principle to which we have referred in the text, although not so well known to the Agadists as it was in other circles (for they have nowhere expressly declared it), is to be traced throughout their whole conception of Scripture. It is the principle that the intensity of the sense of a word increases with the enlargement of its from . This law was also set up by the Greek etymologists, and applied even to the point of pedantry by one of the oldest grammarians, Tryphon. [744] With

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C. (Page 100.) Pools and Whips of the Sun.

There is no doubt that the ancient idea which associates Pools with the rising and the setting sun was based on the conception that the rising sun emerged from water and the setting sun sank into water. In later times, when the original mythical circumstances had lost their clearness, the conception of the Sun’s Pools underwent a considerable modification. On this subject we must notice two different conceptions, both of which sound quite mythical, which are preserved in the Jewish and Arabic tr

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D. (Page 100.) Solar Myth and Animal-Worship.

The Egyptian animal-worship, indeed animal-worship in general, can only be traced back to mythical conceptions, which, when the myth passed into theology and the true understanding of it became rare and then ceased altogether, gained a new meaning quite different from the original. Animal-worship is accordingly one of the sources for the discovery of mythological facts. This is especially the case with the Egyptian animal-worship, which, as Plutarch ( De Iside et Osiride , c. VIII.) says of the

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E. (Page 109.) The Sun as a Well.

To the mythical conception discussed in the text, which regards the Sun as an Eye, must be added another parallel view, that of the Sun as a Well . Language and myth here show remarkable uniformity, which helps the identification. Many languages have the same name for Well and Eye, as if they followed the mathematical law that when two things are each equal to a third, they are equal to each other. So it is in Semitic (ʿayin, ʿayn, etc.); in Persian tsheshm and tsheshmeh; in Chinese ian, which w

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F. (Page 113.) Cain in Arabic.

The names of the first brothers in the Biblical legend of the Mohammedans are Hâbil and Ḳâbil. Even D’Herbelot ( Bibliothèque Orientale , S.V. Cabil) explains: Ḳâbil, ‘Receiver,’ as an Arabic diversion of the etymon with which the Hebrew text supplies the name, viz. kânîthî, ‘I have gained or received a man for Jahveh.’ Still we must doubt whether the name Ḳâbil has any etymological foot-hold in this group. Nor can it, as Chwolson supposes, be traced to a transcriber’s error which had been propa

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G. (Page 116.) Grammatical Note on Joel II. 2.

I reserved the justification of the use which I made of the verse Joel II. 2 for a short excursus here. It is well known that in the Semitic languages the passive participle is frequently used instead of the active, similarly to the English possessed of instead of possessing , and the German Bedienter for Bedienender . In Arabic (in which the native grammarians call this usage mafʿûl bimaʿna-l-fâʿil) ḥijâb mastûr ‘the concealed curtain,’ is said for ‘the concealing ,’ sâtir (Ḳorân, XVII. 47; com

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H. (Page 153.) Hajnal.

The Hungarian language shows how speech wavers in determining the colour of the rising Sun. The Hungarian word for Dawn, hajnal , is etymologically related to hó, which means snow . Therefore, the former must have originally denoted ‘the white;’ [770] and hajnalpir , ‘the morning Redness,’ is literally ‘the Redness of the White.’ And the conception of the redness of the dawn has overcome that which must have prevailed when the expression hajnal came into use, but which is now only recognisable b

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I. (Page 155.) The Sun growing Pale and the Moon Red.

Although, as we have seen, mythology ascribes a reddish as well as a white colour to the Sun, yet it must be observed that this is so only at the earliest stage of the myth. A later period prefers to connect the Sun with the conception of a reddish or yellow colour, leaving the white to the Moon, as more appropriate. Lâbhân, ‘the white,’ has not fixed itself in the language as a name of the Sun, whereas its feminine Lebhânâ has, as a name of the Moon. The conception of colour which the myth atta

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K. (Page 155.) Colour of the Sun.

The following is a literal translation of a passage in the Talmûd, which shows what speculations there were in a late age on the colour of the Sun, and how, even when the technical terms of language were far advanced towards settlement, people were by no means clear what idea of colour was to be attached to the Sun. The passage occurs in the tract Bâbhâ Bathrâ, fol. 84 a. of the Babylonian Talmûd. To enable the reader to understand it, I need only premise that it is a discussion on a word expres

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L. (Page 189.) Transformation of Foreign Stories in Mohammedan Legends.

The Mohammedan legends and popular traditions present instances of borrowing stories which in some foreign cycle of legends are connected with favourite heroes of that cycle, by substituting for the foreign heroes those who are well known in Mohammedan tradition. In this manner many Iranian local traditions and stories were changed and interpreted in a Mohammedan sense after the subjection of the mind of Îrân to the dominion of Islâm. This phenomenon meets us at every step in the history of the

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M. (Page 212.) The Origins.

As an example of this, I may mention that, in opposition to the Biblical Myth of Civilisation, which brings the planting of the vine into connexion with Noah, the Rabbinical Agâdâ makes even Adam enjoy the fruit of the vine, which was the forbidden fruit of Paradise. [774] The Mohammedan legend names the Canaanitish king Daramshil, contemporary with Noah, as the first wine-drinker, saying that he was the first who pressed and drank wine: auwal man-iʿtaṣar-al-chamr washaribahâ. [775] I also obser

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N. (Page 254.) Influence of National Passion on Genealogical Statements.

The same tendency which among the Hebrews caused the origin of the Ammonites and Moabites to be referred to the incestuous intercourse of Lot’s daughters with their father, produced exactly the same result many centuries later in a different yet related sphere. It is known to students of the history of the civilisation of Islâm that the best Persians, despite their subjection to the sceptre of Islâm, strove long and actively against Arabisation, which they regarded as quite unworthy of the Persi

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TWO ESSAYS BY H. STEINTHAL,

The soundness of a new discovery is attested in various ways, but especially by the circumstance that the new thought is no sooner uttered in speech than it is seized upon and worked out by others besides its author; for the thought in question is thus proved to be really the subject which the intellect of the time is best prepared to take up, and which will lead on the Past to the Future. This is found to be the case with Comparative Mythology, Kuhn’s new creation. When a large number of Vedic

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