xxxviii. 31, nor the dim allusion to the sky-reaching mountain of the

north, rich in gold (comp. Isa. xiv. 13, and Sayce, _Academy_, Jan. 28, 1882, p. 64), and the myth-derived synonyms for Sheól—Death, Abaddon, and ‘the shadow of death’ (or, deep gloom), xxvi. 6, xxviii. 22, xxxviii. 17, also the ‘king of terrors’ (xviii. 14), who like Pluto or Yama rules in the Hebrew Underworld. Observe too the instances in which a primitive myth has died down into a metaphor, e.g. ‘the eyelids of the Dawn’ (iii. 9, xli. 18), and especially that beautiful passage,

Hast thou ever in thy life given charge to the Morning, and shown its place to the Dawn, that it may take hold of the skirts of the earth, so that the wicked are shaken out of it, and the earth changes as clay under a seal, and (all things) stand forth as in a garment, and light is withheld from the wicked, and the arm lifted up is broken? (xxxviii. 12-15).

How very vivid! The personified Dawn seizes the coverlet under which the earth has slept at its four ends and shakes the evil-doers out of it like flies; upon which form and colour return to the earth, as clay (a Babylonian image) receives a definite form from the seal, and as the sad-coloured night-wrapper is exchanged for the bright, embroidered holiday-robe. Could we only transfer the poet to an earlier stage of mythic consciousness, we should find him expressing the same ideas—that morning-light creates all fair things anew, and discomfits the evil-doer—very much in the style of the Vedic hymns to Ushas (the Dawn), from which I quote the following in Grassmann’s translation (Rig Veda, I. 123, 4, 5),—

Die tageshelle kommt zu jedem Hause und jedem Tage gibt sie ihren Namen; zu spenden willig, strablend naht sie immer und theilet aus der Güter allerbestes. Als Bhaga’s Schwester, Varuna’s Verwandte, komm her zuerst, o schöne Morgenröthe; Wer frevel übt, der soll dahinter bleiben, von uns besiegt sein mit der Uschas Wagen.

(There is also an Egyptian parallel in a hymn to the Sun-god, _Records of the Past_, viii. 131, ‘He fells the wicked in his season.’) How far the poet of Job believed in the myths which he has preserved, e.g. in the existence of potentates or potencies corresponding to the ‘dragon’ of which he speaks, we cannot certainly tell. Mr. Budge has suggested that Tiamat, the sky-dragon of the Babylonians, conveyed a distinct symbolic meaning. However this may have been, the ‘leviathan’ of Job was probably to the poet a ‘survival’ from a superstition of his childhood, and little if anything more than the emblem of all evil and disorder.

And now for the bearing of the above on criticism. It is a remarkable fact that there are mythological allusions, very similar to some of those in Job, in the later portions of the Book of Isaiah (Isa. xxiv. 21, xxvii. 1, ii. 9). This evidently suggests a date for the Book of Job not earlier than the Exile. It is not necessary to assume that the authors of these books borrowed either from Egypt or from Babylonia. They drew from the unexhausted store of Jewish popular beliefs. They wrote for a larger public than the older poets and prophets could command, and adapted themselves more completely to the average culture of their people.

Footnote 98:

Maspero, _Histoire ancienne de l’Orient_, ed. 1, p. 30. Comp. Chabas’ translation from the Harris papyrus, _Records of the Past_, x. 142-146.