CHAPTER IX.

ARGUMENT FROM THE USE OF MYTHOLOGY.

One of the peculiarities of our poet (which I have elsewhere compared with a similar characteristic in Dante) is his willingness to appropriate mythic forms of expression from heathendom. This willingness was certainly not due to a feeble grasp of his own religion; it was rather due partly to the poet’s craving for imaginative ornament, partly to his sympathy with his less developed readers, and a sense that some of these forms were admirably adapted to give reality to the conception of the ‘living God.’ Several of these points of contact with heathendom have been indicated in my analysis of the poem. I need not again refer to these, but the semi-mythological allusions to supernatural beings who had once been in conflict with Jehovah (xxi. 22, xxv. 2), and the cognate references to the dangerous cloud-dragon (see below) ought not to be overlooked. Both in Egypt and in Assyria and Babylonia, we find these very myths in a fully developed form. The ‘leviathan’ of iii. 8, the dragon probably of vii. 12 (_tannīn_) and certainly of xxvi. 13 (_nākhāsh_), and the ‘rahab’ of ix. 13, xxvi. 12, remind us of the evil serpent Apap, whose struggle with the sun-god Ra is described in chap. xxxix. of the Book of the Dead and elsewhere. ‘A battle took place,’ says M. Maspero, ‘between the gods of light and fertility and the “sons of rebellion,” the enemies of light and life. The former were victorious, but the monsters were not destroyed. They constantly menace the order of nature, and, in order to resist their destructive action, God must, so to speak, create the world anew every day.’[98] An equally close parallel is furnished by the fourth tablet of the Babylonian creation-story, which describes the struggle between the god Marduk (Merodach) and the dragon Tiamat or Tiamtu (a fem. corresponding to the Heb. masc. form _t’hom_ ‘the deep’), for which see Delitzsch’s _Assyrische Lesestücke_, 3rd edition, Smith and Sayce’s _Chaldæan Genesis_, p. 107 &c., and Budge in _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, Nov. 6, 1883.

Nor must I forget the ‘fool-hardy’ giant (K’sīl = Orion) in ix. 9,