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 historian any fixed points for the construction of his picture. There is scarcely any other nomad people that has had greater vicissitudes in its changeful life than the Arabic tribes: yet they scarcely afford any fixed points when we try to survey their history. For it is not tied to any definite limited soil; no geographical unity runs throughout it. A true national history is inseparable from one country, which in peace presents the conditions necessary for the development of civilisation, and in war offers an object for the enthusiasm of assailants and defenders. There can be no history without a definite land to which the events of history cling. The nomad cares less for a particular territory than for his goods and chattels, when he goes to war.[605] The Desert, and the roamer who roves over its broad surface, have no history proper. Only isolated vague memories, such as can attach themselves to a great geographical territory, are at our command as points of support for the history of the Hebrew nomads. Their proper history begins with the conquest of Canaan. This conquest was by no means, as is still often assumed, a program of political reorganisation, long nourished in the mind of the people. On the contrary, the fact that we find the tribes on coming from Egypt (whence it cannot be seriously doubted that they came) engaged in roaming about on the left side of the Jordan before they entered Palestine, proves that the Hebrews did not dream of the prospect of exchanging their nomadic life for one in towns. In case they had any such intention, a way from Egypt to Palestine was always open to the people, independently of the route by sea, which could scarcely be thought of from the want of means and adequate preparation. They would have traversed the northern part of the desert al-Tîh, aiming directly at Hebron, on nearly the same track as that taken by the Patriarch’s family according to the Biblical narrative in going from Canaan to Egypt. The theocratic historian himself finds a difficulty here, and ascribes to Moses strategic reasons for adopting another course: ‘And Elôhîm led them not by the [regular] road to the land of the Philistines, because it is near; for, thought Elôhîm, [there is danger] lest the people should repent when they see war, and return to Egypt’ (Ex. XIII. 17).

But the fact is really that on leaving Egypt the people wished to continue in their old mode of life, roving from desert to desert, seeking out one pasture after another; they were indifferent to the cultivated side of the Jordan, and chose by preference the wild eastern side, that is to this day the scene of that restless Beduin life which runs continuously from the bank of the Euphrates to the Sherra mountains. Nomadism is the most conservative life imaginable. For hundreds and thousands of years this plain has been occupied by the same tribes, alternately binding themselves for mutual support against a common foe—often even in modern times the townsmen, and quarrelling among themselves on the slightest provocation. A perfectly new tribe entering from other parts would have great difficulty in holding its ground there; and there is no wonder that the nomadic Hebrews in the desert east of the Jordan were driven by constant struggles further and further to the north, and, having at last discovered their self-protection to be impossible there, resolved to cross the Jordan and try their fortune in the towns. Another circumstance pressed this decision upon them. The further they pushed northwards, the nearer they came to the great northern power which stopped further advance. Great kingdoms whose territories are bounded by deserts have never left these deserts and their inhabitants alone, but have always been diligently engaged in the subjection of the desert tribes: it was so ages ago, and is so still. The wars of the Grand Turk against the Beduin-tribes in Syria, Palestine and Arabia, those of the North-African powers against the nomadic tribes which form their boundaries, are historical continuations of political events of the very oldest times. The remark of Manetho, the Egyptian priest and historian, is therefore very good: ‘According to the agreement they travelled from Egypt through the desert to Syria with their whole households and possessions, not less than 240,000 souls. But in fear of the Empire of the Assyrians—for these were then masters of Asia—they built a city in the land now called Judea,’ etc.[606]

Here comes that remarkable turning-point in the life of the Hebrew people—the abandonment of nomadic life and transition to the civilised life of towns. The passage of the Jordan marks this turning-point. That river is still the boundary-line of two stages of civilisation, nomad-life and town-life. Not the entire mass of the nation submitted to these changes; we know that a large portion of it, remaining at a half-nomadic stage, declared itself averse to the removal, and preferred to stay on the left bank of the Jordan, which is the Nomad’s paradise—a plain blessed with splendid pasture and fine woods, of which the Bedawî even now says ‘Thou wilt find no land like Belḳâ.’ The Biblical document gives the exact name of the portion of the people which resisted the transition to town-life; they are described as the sons of Reuben, the sons of Gad, and a part of the tribe of Manasseh. We have no right to decide how much historical truth there is in the contract between the two sections of the nation, by which the larger only gave its consent to the practice of cattle-breeding east of the Jordan by the smaller on condition that the latter would render all possible service to their martial brethren at the conquest (Num. XXXII). Enough that after many long-protracted struggles with the people of the land the advancing Hebrews got a large part of Canaan into their power. The details and the chronology of these wars lie outside my present scheme. The history of the civilisation of the Hebrews in Canaan has here to be considered only on one side—with reference to the history of Religion. In the previous chapter we left the nomadic people wandering in the desert, and worshipping those beneficent powers which provide the nomad with his conditions of life and protect him from the scorching heat so hostile to wanderers—the Rain, his mother the Cloud, and the luminous smile of the cloud, the Lightning. The commencement of religion does not kill off the whole myth at one blow. For the mental activity required for the creation and propagation of myths does not cease when polyonomy vanishes, but only has its full vivaciousness abridged by that process of language. But the process goes on very gradually; on domains not yet fully attacked by it, accordingly, the telling of myths continues for long. One part may remain when another has been converted into religion. Now the law described in Chapter IV. would require, that, after settlement in towns and adoption of agricultural life, the part of the Hebrew myth which was not yet turned into religion should be subject to a development corresponding to the transition from nomadic to agricultural life, by which the solar figures, the victors over Darkness and Storm, take up the position of honour and sympathy always accorded to them by the agriculturist.

§ 2. Here, however, we have to notice a peculiarity of Hebrew development resulting from the occupation of Canaan.

Politically, the Hebrew nation on settling in Canaan had power to annihilate a few small tribes which before the occupation had held the middle of the land. But they brought with them a minimum of civilisation and mental endowments, and intellectually had nothing to oppose to the long-established civilisation of the old inhabitants,[607] and especially of the neighbouring Phenicians, who even then were the ancient occupiers of a great historical position. In mercantile and industrial respects, especially, they were very dependent on that nation, which was the chief bearer of the commerce and industry of antiquity.[608] How should the Hebrews have risen above such dependence? for the Phenicians exerted a powerful intellectual influence not only upon the mentally inferior tribes of Canaan, but also upon the western nations with which they held intercourse; as in recent times Ewald has again strongly asserted.[609] Notwithstanding the contradiction of some scholars who depreciate Phenician civilisation,[610] this seems to be tolerably well established.

There is a phenomenon which has been repeated countless times in the history of the world. A conquered people intellectually superior to its conquerors may, any political dependence notwithstanding, enforce its intellectual preeminence by assimilating to itself the nation which has succeeded to its dominion. The political victor has no power to incorporate the mind of the subjugated, if the latter possesses a higher civilisation than his own. For example, the Hyksôs, who were strong enough to annihilate the rule of the Egyptians in the Delta, could found no independent civilisation in the conquered land, but made the Egyptian culture entirely their own. And when the Aztecs, or more strictly the second horde of the Chichimecs (Northmen), coming from Aztlan and California, overwhelmed Anahuac in the twelfth century, and subjugated the Toltecs, a people which had already attained a certain degree of civilisation, it was again the conquered that imparted their culture to the conquerors. All the elements of civilisation—arts, manners, rights, usages, writing, etc.—which the Spanish conquerors found existing among the Aztecs, had been received by them from the conquered Toltecs, to whose intellectual influence they were forced to accommodate themselves, not having anything more potent of their own to impart.[611] The same is seen in China, first in the tenth and again in the seventeenth century. The victorious Khitem dynasty, as later the Manchu dynasty, which still holds the sceptre of the Middle Kingdom, could only accept and advance the native civilisation and the peculiarities of the old Chinese nation. And who can help thinking of the often-quoted instance of the Franks as conquerors of Gaul? And the relation of the Normans to the population of France conquered by them is most curious. The conquerors lost their mother-tongue in favour of the French, took to themselves French institutions, laws and customs, and actually transplanted subsequently the French language to England.[612] The same phenomenon is also encountered on the domain of Religion.[613] For the Phenicians, to whom we recur, it was the easier to establish their system, as they came as conquerors to places where they found a population intellectually inferior to themselves. When by the foundation of Carthage they gained an establishment in Northern Africa, they exerted an influence on the Libyans which almost suppressed everything native. ‘Phenician civilisation prevailed in Libya just as Greek in Asia Minor and Syria after Alexander’s campaigns, if not with equal force. At the courts of the nomad Sheikhs Phenician was spoken and written, and the civilised native tribes took the Phenician alphabet for their languages; but it was neither the spirit of the Phenicians nor the policy of Carthage to Phenicise them entirely.’[614] But this very Phenician language, which as bearer of a higher civilisation suppressed the language of surrounding tribes and the civilisation connected with them, had in its turn to step into the background. A civilisation of superior force and intensity, the Arabian, assailed it, and put the Arabic language of the conquerors of North Africa in the place of that of the Carthaginian colonies. Renan is wrong in asserting, ‘L’arabe n’absorba que les dialectes qui lui étaient congénères, tels que le syriaque, le chaldéen, le samaritain. Partout ailleurs, il ne put effacer les idiomes établis.’[615] We will not here enter on an enquiry, to what extent Arabic in the middle ages and in modern times has supplanted other idioms. But two considerations must be suggested in answer to Renan’s thesis.

The first is, that it is difficult to see what power a relationship of language like that between Arabic and Phenician can possess to cause the weaker civilisation connected with one of the languages in question to be supplanted by the stronger civilisation belonging to the other; when the relationship is so remote as to be clearly understood only by linguists, and neither known to ordinary people speaking either tongue, nor even instinctively felt by the popular mind (if any such instinct can be allowed in psychology). Indeed Semitic philologists themselves, even with the knowledge of one or more of the Semitic dialects besides their mother-tongue, arrived comparatively late at acknowledgment of this relationship.[616] It is easy to understand how within the bounds of the Arabic tongue the Northern dialect supplanted the Southern, when the Northern tribes, especially that of Kureysh, gained the political and social hegemony over Arabia, and their dialect was written down and introduced into literature. Here, to say nothing of political and religious causes, the extraordinary similarity of the two shades of the Arabic language, of which the commonest Arab could not but be conscious, made the suppression of the one in favour of the other easy; we have frequent opportunities of observing the same in the dialects of European languages. But it is not so easy to conceive that a relationship in language which is only to be discovered by learned research can promote the process of suppression of dialects. To the Arab, Syriac is as foreign as French or any perfectly strange tongue. Botrus al-Bustâni, an eminent savant at Beyrût, the compiler of a dictionary of his native language and active editor of several Arabic journals, had no fewer difficulties to overcome when he devoted himself to the study of the Syriac language in the Maronite convents of Lebanon, than when he learned English by intercourse with Dr. Van Dijk at the American Protestant Mission; perhaps even greater, as in the latter case mouth-to-mouth intercourse removed many difficulties. A Maronite priest at Damascus assured me that the acquisition of the Italian language gave him but few hard nuts to crack, whilst in the language of his Syriac Church he could not get further than the elements which were indispensable to his office. The Fin found no special difficulty in becoming Swedish, because Swedish is a Teutonic and Finnish a Ugrian language. In Hungary, during a long subjection to the Turks, Turkish had no appreciable effect on the language, except in lending a few words, although Hungarian and Turkish belong to one and the same group of languages. Hence when one language ousts another, it is not their relationship, but solely the superiority of the one people in intellect and matters of culture that determines the result.

The second answer to Renan is that it is historically untrue that Arabic could conquer only cognate idioms, but elsewhere had no power to oust the native tongues. Where is the Coptic now? a once powerful language having no connexion with Arabic, the vernacular use of which in Egypt was totally annihilated by the Arabic. The dialects of the Negro countries are beginning to give place more and more to the Arabic, and their ultimate defeat in the contest with that language will be hastened by the advances of the power of the Viceroy over the equatorial regions.

This is the great struggle for existence on the domain of Mind—a struggle which the Hebrews, with the small amount of culture that they brought to Canaan, could not sustain, nor even attempt, against the settled population and the neighbouring powerful Canaanites of the coast. On this a basis could be found for a hypothesis which has never had any other foundation of the least firmness. It is now revived by Professor J.G. Müller of Basle.[617] The Hebrews, we are told, originally spoke a different language not connected with that of Canaan; but, not being able to bring it into general use in their new country, gave it up, and took over from the Canaanites the language that we call Hebrew, which really possesses a far more palpable similarity to all known relics of the old idioms of Canaan than is the case with languages which though connected, are intrinsically distinct. And assuredly the consideration of the lately found Moabitish monument, the column of victory of King Mesha, which shows us a form of language perfectly intelligible by the aid of the Hebrew grammar and the Hebrew lexicon, and an historical style indistinguishable from that of the Hebrews, involuntarily suggests the thought that we ought to speak rather of identity than of connexion of languages. Even the Phenician language, though not, as many erroneously suppose, absolutely identical with Hebrew, nor even so near to it as the more Southern language of Moab, exhibits a far closer relationship with the latter than is generally found between different languages of the same family.[618] Phenician was certainly not an idiom unintelligible to the Hebrews; and indeed a Hebrew prophet even calls his mother-tongue the ‘language of Canaan’ (sephath Kenaʿan, Is. XIX. 18). The idea that the Hebrews changed their language in Canaan possesses, indeed, no high degree of probability, especially in so extreme and violent a form as is given to it by J.G. Müller—least of all for us, inasmuch as the nomadic myth of the Hebrews, which was created quite independently of Canaan, never contains any but Hebrew names. But in matters of culture and manners, in which the Hebrews, only just working their way up out of the nomadic stage, still held a very primitive position at their entrance into Canaan, they were most certainly influenced by the conquered original inhabitants and by their powerful neighbours. These influences were immediately perceptible in the form given to Religion and to social and political institutions. The Hebrews did not possess sufficient resistant force of mind to work the solar elements of _their own_ myth into a religion suitable to an agricultural people, and had no strength to repel the Canaanitish Solar religion, which must have been already long growing into completeness from an old Canaanitish Solar myth; they could not accept the challenge, but yielded. With general notions of religion they also adopted its forms and institutes—the Temples, which bear the same relation to the Sukkôth used for Divine worship as the fixed house of the townsman to the hut of the nomad; the High places;[619] the sacred Trees and Woods; the Human Sacrifices; the Priesthood, whose relation to the Sons of Levi among the nomads again resembles that of a powerful dynasty to the family of a Bedawî Sheikh; the Ritual of Sacrifice, and much besides. With the religion and religious institutions of the Canaanites, their religious terminology was also naturalised among the Hebrews. The Phenician title of the Priest, Kôhên—Κοίης (Hellenised from Κοίην) ἱερεὺς Καβείρων ὁ καθαίρων φονέα· ὁι δὲ κοής (Hesychius)—became among the Hebrews also the official name of the public sacrificers; and the fact that a derivative verb was formed from it proves it to have become completely naturalised in ordinary speech.[620] The extant monuments of the sacrificial ritual of the Phenicians, viz., the so-called Sacrificial Tablet of Marseilles, discovered in 1845, and the Carthaginian Sacrificial documents published more recently by Davis,[621] place before our eyes much the same as we have in part of the Book of Leviticus; and it is to be assumed that, although, after the profound investigations of Graf[622] and Zunz,[623] the Post-Captivity origin of that book is impressed with increasing urgency on our conviction, still the Sacrificial laws contained in it are only a codification of older regulations which arose and were in force in sacerdotal circles at the time of the Hebrew dominion in Canaan, but were not, and ought not to be, known to the people, as they referred only to priestly functions. It would be inconceivable that a regular sacrificial worship could exist without such arrangements and fixed ritual. Among the Carthaginians the contents of these sacrificial tables, with the ordinances and apportionments to be found on them, had _canonical_ validity, and were not occasional or arbitrary orders. That this is so, is to be inferred from the fact that the sacrificial tariff discovered by Davis in the ruins of Carthage exhibits only an abridged edition of the Marseilles Tablet, which also was derived from Carthage.[624]

Not only religious, but also social and political institutions were introduced from the Phenicians into the public life of the Hebrews. How else could a nation passing suddenly without political experience from nomadic to civil life produce those institutions without which a nation can neither constitute itself as a state nor continue to exist? Thus we find among the Hebrews from the beginning the Shôpheṭîm (Judges), who are known as Suffetes of the Carthaginians from Livy and the Inscriptions. It must be assumed that, although this institution is not distinctly proved to have existed in the mother-country, its root is to be sought there; which harmonises well with the highly developed civic constitution of the Phenicians. To draw an inference from the institutions of the colonies to those of the mother-country must here, as in other cases also, be treated as perfectly justifiable. Let it be remembered that we should have no knowledge even of the elaborate system of priests and sacrifices among the Phenicians, but for two remarkable monuments of antiquity: the Tablets of Marseilles and of Carthage. On one of the most important elements of Phenician religious life, therefore, information is only to be found in the colonies; and the same must certainly be true of social and political questions. In the present case it is sure to be allowable, as the official name Shôphêṭ is found in a Greek translation used of Tyre and Sidon. It must not indeed be supposed that the Shôpheṭîm of the Hebrews can be placed exactly beside the Phenician Suffetes. Whilst the latter is a permanent dignity and a fixed institution, the Shôpheṭîm of the Hebrews are not so much officials as a sort of _duces ex virtute_, ‘who might come and go without any alteration in the legal bases of the state,’ as Ewald says.[625] But if we have to allow that the Hebrew Shôpheṭîm are not holders of so fixed an office as their namesakes in Phenicia, but were only guerilla-chiefs in times of pressure of war, yet Phenician influence cannot be denied, when we see that, just when the nomadic tribal divisions were beginning to grow very loose and to make way for town-life, these chiefs were called by a name identical with the official name of certain Phenician dignitaries of rather different character. It is evident from this that the Hebrews regarded their provisional chiefs as equivalents of these Phenician officers of state; they apperceived them, so to speak, by an idea derived from Phenicia. But, on the other hand, this view of the influence of the Shôpheṭîm rests on the picture of their actions given in the ‘Book of Judges.’ Now it must not be forgotten that many of these Judges’ names are mythical (as Samson, Jephthah, Gideon), used to fill up a period which to posterity was a mere blank with no historical contents, except the bare fact of a continuous contest with the Philistines. This historical frame, as we shall soon see, is filled with myths, which, when reinterpreted in a national sense, yield a supply of national heroes, who then can be introduced as Shôpheṭîm. But the harmonising of national stories was not pushed to a sufficient degree of continuity to form a foundation for a fixed historical picture. It is therefore better, in forming our judgment on the dignity of the so-called Judges, to allow ourselves to be determined more by the name Shôpheṭîm itself than by the nature of the nationalised myths attached to it. Grätz[626] has quite recently renewed the attempt to render doubtful the existence of the Shôpheṭîm-institution among the Hebrews, and especially combated any connexion of the Shôpheṭîm with the Punic Suffetes; and in this the judgment of the most competent professional authorities is on his side. But, not to speak of his view of the Shôpheṭîm as representatives of an institution, he sets up a linguistic conjecture which arouses many a doubt. For it requires strong etymological imagination to deny to the Hebrew word shâphaṭ the signification _judicare_. Sober Biblical students and philologists will not be imposed on by the passages quoted by Grätz in justification and support of his conjecture. Not to mention other passages, compare only the words of Is. I. 17, 23 with the passages of Scripture which, Grätz says, speak of rushing up to the aid of ‘oppressed or injured persons, widows and orphans.’ The word rîbh is not calculated to support this conjecture. But, that the Shôpheṭîm, though not hereditary nor even paid officers of state (as no one would pretend they were), were yet certainly heads of the state, appointed by the voice of the people, is proved by the mere fact that the Shôphêṭ was regarded in the same light as the Melekh, as a species of the same genus. So e.g. in Judges IX. 6, 16, where the instalment of a Shôphêṭ is denoted by hamlîkh, and Judges XVII. 6, XVIII. 1, XXI. 25, where the interregnum between one Shôphêṭ and the next is described as a time ‘in which no melekh (king) reigned over Israel, and every one could do what was right in his own eyes.’ And the consideration of the word Shôphêṭ itself leads to the conviction that the office was an institution suggested by Phenician custom. For it is found in no other Semitic language in the same signification as in these two dialects of Canaan.[627] The Samaritan, in which Shâphâṭ is also found,[628] scarcely requires separate mention. So the Hebrews, as was so often the case, must have borrowed the term shôphêṭ, together with the corresponding institution, from their cultivated neighbours; for it cannot be assumed that the expression for an idea implying so advanced a stage of civilisation as Judge had its origin in the primeval age of ethnological community between Hebrews and Canaanites. And later, when the Hebrews began to appreciate the institution of Kingship, as existing in many neighbouring nations,[629] and wished to be ruled by kings, the theocratic historian himself describes this innovation as borrowed, making the people say to the prophet Samuel, ‘Give us a King to judge us, as all the nations [have a king], that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles’ (1 Sam. VIII. 5, 20). Even concerning the political subjection of the tribes of Canaan, it has long been perceived that this was by no means so complete as is commonly supposed, but that the Canaanitish element in the centre of the Hebrew dominion was powerful enough[630] to nourish exterior religious or civilising influences. A somewhat later didactic poet exclaims, ‘They did not destroy the nations which Jahveh told them [to destroy]; but mixed with the nations and learned their works’ (Ps. CVI. 34 _seq._). To this time belongs the naturalisation of theological terms and consequently of theological conceptions, for the independent working out of which the Hebrews had not passed through the necessary historical experience and continuous religious stages, but in which the history of the religion of the Canaanites found its natural result. At the time when the nomadic nation of the Hebrews entered Canaan, it first, so to speak, produced out of the ancient myth the first elements of a religion; we cannot speak of a _system_ of religion existing in that age. In the Canaanitish peoples, on the other hand, a systematical religion had already been formed. Even independently of the preponderating spiritual influence of the native population, it was particularly natural to the Hebrews to attach themselves to their system, as community of language familiarised them with much of the religious terminology of the Canaanites. Ever since the Hebrews had by their own efforts begun to have any religious ideas, they called every power which they regarded as divine Êl and Shadday ‘the Powerful;’ and as these Powers (which they also called Elôhîm, i.e. ‘the Worshipped’ or ‘the Feared’) were seen by them on the dark sky, Êl was also called ʿElyôn ‘the Highest’ (a synonym of Abh-râm). To the Hebrews these names were not yet exclusively theological, _termini technici_ of religion. Religion itself had not yet grown so stiff and fixed as to have taken from such names their appellative character: and that of Elôhîm and ʿElyôn continued to the latest times. But with the Canaanites even at that early age these ancient Semitic expressions had been already employed long enough in a theological sense to take the step which converted them into a religious terminology. Many synonyms of the terms in question are found among the Phenicians as religious terms, and among the Hebrews (when the words are equally native there) in a completely appellative sense, e.g. Baʿal ‘Lord,’ Kabbîr ‘Great, Powerful.’

This community of language greatly promoted the introduction of Canaanitish religion among the Hebrews. Although the above-mentioned names impressed the Hebrews differently, being not yet limited to a specially religious signification, yet the knowledge of their meaning as words, which was native to the Hebrews, promoted the acquisition of the ritual attached to them by the Canaanites. Thus it came to pass that besides Êl, Elôhîm, ʿElyôn, Shadday, even Baʿal received worship from the Hebrews in Canaan, of which the Biblical documents often speak (and he is not likely to have been the only divine person borrowed from the Phenicians), and that those names which had previously begun to assume a religious sense were, by intellectual as well as practical intercourse with the Canaanites, filled with the force they had to the Canaanites. It is therefore the exact opposite of the real state of things to call the Elôhîm-idea specially Hebrew, and make Jahveism Canaanitish, as some Dutch theologians do. It is equally impossible to suppose the names themselves to have been unknown till then to the Hebrews, as J.G. Müller infers in connexion with his ethnological hypothesis.[631] The names, as component parts of the language, are the property of Canaanites and Hebrews alike; only their theological employment and the worship founded upon them are to be regarded as Canaanitish. But it is especially this employment of the names which has to be considered in relation to the History of Civilisation.

Thus we see how the Hebrews in Canaan learned much as to religion as well as to politics from the conquered neighbouring aborigines. The religious ideas produced on the nomadic stage from the nomadic mythology were wiped away, and only a few relics of the old nomadic religion remained to a late age, either actual residues or mere memories. Spiritually poor, the nation was handed over to the powerful influence of the already formed culture of Canaan, and thus condemned to mere receptivity. Accordingly, they never had an opportunity of further developing their myths on the agricultural stage and converting them into elements of a religion. Hence comes the remarkable fact that from this point the myths of the Hebrews cease to grow, in the way in which those of the Aryan nations grew. Only a small cycle of myths of the Sun and of Civilisation were formed at this time; and the regular advance of the Mythical to the Religious was arrested by that religious influence which pressed in with full force from outside. The most complete and rounded-off solar myth extant in Hebrew is that of Shimshôn (Samson), a cycle of mythical conceptions fully comparable with the Greek myth of Herakles. But Samson never got so far as to be admitted, like Herakles, into the society of the gods. Those who say that mythologies have converted Samson to a _deus solaris_ make a malicious perversion of the truth, merely because they set themselves against any mythological investigation on Semitic ground.[632] Whilst the Hebrews were thus taking in from the Canaanites things quite new to them, by which the regular further growth of their own was arrested, a considerable portion of their own store of legends must naturally have been starved out. For whatever ceases to grow, falls into slow decay, and at last disappears and leaves no sign behind. Here is discovered the origin of the defectiveness and fragmentary nature which strikes us in reconstructing the old Hebrew myths, when compared with the richness and variety of the Aryan myths among those nations which have passed through all stages of civilisation regularly and without obstruction or perverting influence from foreign forces.

The Myth is converted either into Religion or into History; the figures of the myth become either Gods and god-born Heroes, or Ancestors of the nation to which the myth belonged. What part of the myth cannot be converted, or has not been converted, into religion, and what has ceased to be religious without ceasing to exist in the popular mind, is converted into history; for all that remains in the human consciousness as a living portion of it must have a distinct impress; no meaningless vegetating is possible. Nothing is without an impressed form; when an old impress has lost its meaning, a new one is made. It is these new impressions that keep the elements of the ancient myth alive in the mind of the people far beyond the mythical age. Among the Hebrews this new force worked more powerfully than elsewhere in changing the form and impress of the still living elements of the myth, converting almost all myth into history.[633] This result was attained with the cooperation of an important factor in the History of Civilisation, which also determined the _direction_ which the myth should take in being transformed into history. We must now consider this factor.

§ 3. Though the Hebrews were intellectually dependent on the older inhabitants of Canaan, and had to take up a receptive position towards them in matters of civilisation and religion, it was nevertheless inevitable that a strong antagonism should grow up between the two sides. The Hebrews edged themselves in like an unbidden guest into the midst of the Canaanitish system of tribes. As they could gain their political position in that system only by conquest and repression, so also they could maintain, protect, and confirm it only by continuous defensive wars. We find Philistines, Moabites, and Edomites the constant deadly foes of the existence of the Hebrew state, and the history of Israel in Canaan is filled up with incessant struggles of greater or less magnitude, in which the Hebrews, themselves scarcely settled in a home, were forced to engage against the repressed old inhabitants on the one hand, and the menaced neighbouring peoples on the other. Moreover, the nomadic characteristic, still preserved by the Hebrews, of faithfully maintaining the memory of their national individuality, could not be entirely obscured by their new spiritual life, which was only borrowed from strangers, especially as the constant wars in which they were necessarily involved against those strangers were calculated to heighten and confirm it. Indeed, the spirit of tribe and race, the repelling and exclusive tendency which characterised the Canaanitish peoples,[634] nourished in the Hebrews the desire to insist on the enforcement and development of individuality on their side too. This exclusiveness, this consciousness of individual peculiarity which lived in the mind of the people, could not now find expression in religion. When even modern Biblical criticism, coming into the inheritance of a conception which obtained acceptance from religious animosity, still continues to insist on the ‘National God of the Hebrews,’ it commits a decided error, at least in reference to the age of which we are now speaking, and especially with regard to the Elôhîm. The consciousness of national peculiarity could not, at this stage of religion among the Hebrews, find any expression on the domain of religion. Yet it must perforce gain expression somewhere, and could not do so anywhere except on a domain on which the most original impress of their own mind was still visible—in the myths, insofar as they were not yet swept away by foreign influence.

The awaking of National Consciousness plays a very prominent part in the history of the development of the Myth. From the moment when in ancient times this idea began to fill the soul of a great national community, it seized on and transformed the whole material of which its mythology was made. The fact that this noble consciousness gives a distinct direction of its own to everything that fills the human soul, is another proof of its power to transform the spiritual life. In modern times the kindling of national self-consciousness, advanced by the arousing of spiritual opposition to foreign influences which had previously repressed national individuality, causes the production of documents to prove the awakening of this national opposition, documents which belong to the best part of literature and intellectual labour. Similarly, in ancient times before literature, this consciousness of opposition impressed its image especially on the myth, and made that subservient to its purpose. And on considering the relation of the myth to the idea of nationality, we see on many sides, how closely and inseparably the two are connected together, how the idea operates to transform the myth, and how it needs the myth as a support; for the myth, going back to the earliest times, confers on the new idea something like an historical title, and gives a broad basis to the intenseness of its force by furnishing a justification of it. Hence it comes to pass that nations which have preserved no great stock of original myths on which the awakened national consciousness could fall back, instinctively create similar stories, and this even in relatively modern times, in which a system of religion hardened into crystal on every side, combined with the corresponding stage of intellectual development, would leave no room for the revival of mythical activity. Of this there are two noteworthy instances, one in the middle ages (the twelfth or thirteenth century), the other in this century. The Cymry of Wales, becoming alive to the opposition in nationality between themselves and the English, felt the need of finding a justification of this opposition in the oldest prehistoric times. It was then first suggested to them that they were descendants of the ancient renowned Celtic nation; and to keep alive this Celtic national pride they introduced an institution of New Druids, a sort of secret society like the Freemasons. The New Druids, like the old ones, taught a sort of national religion, which however, the people having long become Christian and preserved no independent national traditions, they had mostly to invent themselves. Thus arose the so-called Celtic mythology of the god Hu and the goddess Ceridolu, etc., mere poetical fictions, which never lived in popular belief.[635] The other instance is furnished by the Hungarian national literature of the time when, to revive the ‘ancient glory,’ Andrew Horváth and Michael Vörösmarty created new myths, mythic figures and a national epic, in place of the mere fragments remaining of the old Hungarian cycle of myths, with the view of reviving national feeling and consciousness in their fellow countrymen. And a few of these new creations have in a course of a few decads of years penetrated so deep into the national mind as to be treated as something primitive and aboriginal; so e.g. Hadúr, the god of war, etc.[636]

Far more organic and natural is the effect produced by the national sentiment and national opposition on the form of the myth wherever copious mythic materials exist, which it can influence and transform. The entire contents of the myths—the mythological figures and all that is told of them—are apperceived by the national movement and receive from it a new interpretation. This may be seen clearly in the case of the old Persian myth, mentioned briefly above (pp. 15, 16), where I showed that all that it told of the contests and mutual relations of the Sun and Night was, at the stage of the rising national consciousness, converted into contests between Îrân and Tûrân—the heroes of mythology became national heroes, the victorious Sun became a victorious helper and saviour of the nation, and the malicious intriguing Darkness the cunning hero of the hostile people. This national interpretation of the myth is only another side of the process which resulted in individualising the mythical figures and created personalities of theological significance. I have already insisted on the fact that another set of the mythical figures when converted into individuals assume an historical character. This comes to pass in various ways: either the myth which is turned into history first passes through the stage of religion, and then becomes history; or secondly, the historical transformation is effected in immediate sequence upon the old mythological stage; or lastly, the mythological figures assume a meaning which is at the same time both religious and historical, like the Greek Heroes. On the development of the Hebrew myth also the awakening of the national spirit exercised a great influence. The consciousness of national individuality gave a new direction to all the ideas of the Hebrews, and so also to their mythology. Among the Greeks and Indians the chief figures of mythology—not to speak of occasional localisation—preserved a cosmopolitan character; for Zeus, Indra, and others have no special national character. But the figures of the Hebrew myths at this period became the national progenitors of the Hebrew people, and the mythology itself the national primeval history of the Hebrews before their settlement in the land of Canaan. Abhrâm, the ‘High Father,’ is converted into Abhrâhâm, the abh hamôn gôyîm, ‘Father of a mass of Nations,’ and at the same time into hâ-ʿIbhrî, ‘the Hebrew’ (Gen. XVII. 4, 5, XIV. 13); and all other figures of the myth are made to subserve the national idea. On the one hand, they are eager to have documentary proof of their nation’s noble origin and glorious past; on the other, they nourish a feeling of opposition towards other nationalities, on which they cast shame. The nation of Edom receives Esau as ancestor: and the reminiscence of nomadic conceptions which draws their sympathy towards Jacob, the persecuted brother, and turns with antipathy away from the red solar hunter, is again revived in the service of the formation of a national myth which paints Esau in the most repulsive colours. The old mythological incest of Lot’s daughters is made the cause of the origin of two Canaanitish tribes, the Ammonites and the Moabites.[637] The Philistines also are dragged through this story-making process of national antagonism. The primeval heavenly ‘Father-King’ Abimelek, who conceives a warm love for the wife of the Morning-sky and thinks to carry her off, is made a king of the Philistines, and Shechem, the Early Morning, the seducer of Dinah, is converted into a prince of the Hivvites. In the story of Dinah, as given in Genesis, we have an especially eloquent testimony to the national animosity to which this conversion of the myth owes its origin. This aspect of the story has been very fully proved by a Dutch scholar, Dr. Oort. It exhibits in the people newly awakened to national self-consciousness a tendency to abominate all connexion with the Canaanites, and introduces as representatives or types of this tendency the brothers Simeon and Levi, the zealots for the purity of the Hebrew family.[638] Thus we see that the national treatment of the myth is not merely of the nature of narrative, but at the same time also instructive or didactic. Ham, the unworthy son who reveals the nakedness of the solar hero, is regarded as the denier of his father and made the ancestor of all the Canaanites, and visited by his father’s curse. ‘And Noah awoke from his wine and learned what his youngest son had done to him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan, let him be a slave of slaves to his brethren. And he said, Blessed be Jahveh, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be a slave to them’ (Gen. IX. 24–26). We see that the national passion turns especially on Canaan: for the story makes the offended father curse, not the offender Ham, but Canaan, who is in the ethnographical genealogy only his grandson. It is impossible to be blind to the factors which are concealed behind such a conception. In the case of Esau too, the national story makes him choose his wives from the daughters of Canaan, to whom Isaac, the patriarch of the Hebrews, and Rebekah the mother of the tribe, strongly object (Gen. XXVII. 46, XXVIII. 1, 6, 8); so much so that the mother would rather die than that her favourite son Jacob should also take one of them to wife, and the father repeatedly urges on him to have nothing to do with that people. On this very occasion it is mentioned with emphasis that Esau is identical with Edom, or according to another version is the father of Edom (Gen. XXXVI. 1, 43).

The national pride of a people roused to a consciousness of its worth must be strengthened by the memories of national heroes, and find nourishment and life in such memories; and this impulse works with a revived force even in later times, in which historical reminiscences of the olden time are beginning to fade. The Hebrew people found heroes even in some mythical figures; they were turned into Hebrew national heroes, and their celestial contest became a national war against the Philistines, and was removed to the age of the Shôpheṭîm or Judges, which was in memory connected with the hardest struggles and fiercest wars against the Philistines. The blinded Shimshôn, Samson, the setting sun robbed of his locks and his eyesight, is brought forward as a victim of the perfidious cunning of the Canaanites. The Goat Yâʿêl (Jael), and the Lightning Bârâḳ, the Smasher Gideʿôn, mere mythical expressions (clearly exhibited as such by Steinthal), are sent to battle against the Philistines; and the attractive part of the handsome ruddy sharp-eyed youth who slays the monster of darkness by throwing stones, is assigned as a piece of biography to the historical hero-king David, who slays the Philistine giant Goliath in single combat, and delivers the Hebrew people from their dangerous enemy.[639] From the last example we see that, besides mythical figures becoming historic personages in the service of the national idea, historical figures also may receive biographical features proper to mythic heroes. Not only are the figures of the myth converted into historical ones by assigning to them a part in historical events, but events of mythology are shifted into historical times by fastening them on to historical persons.

The entire materials of legend are clothed in a national garb. The Hebrews in Canaan retained the nomadic tribe-divisions. Every tribe was provided with an ancestor, and every one of these ancestors was made a son of Jacob, who was at the same time identified with Israel. The twelve stars of the nightly sky descended upon the new people of Canaan, and took on themselves the duties of Eponymi. The history of each of these fathers of tribes became the tribe’s historical reminiscence. The national passion, the revived consciousness of individuality, blew the glimmering sparks of story-building into a clear flame, and determined the direction or tendency of the stories. The history of this epoch suggests a motive for the prevailingly _national_ development of the Hebrew materials of legend. Hence it comes to pass that the individualised figures of the Hebrew myth appear as national ancestors and fathers of tribes, some as fathers of the Hebrew people with a negative spirit of exclusiveness towards everything foreign, some as fathers of the hostile tribes, combating the ancestors of the Hebrews. Thus the ancestors reflect in a dim primitive age their own fortunes and relation to the tribes of Canaan. The same psychological process which in later time caused the Agadic interpreters to declare the principle: maʿasê âbhôth sîmân lebhânîm ‘the deeds of the Patriarchs are types for their descendants,’[640] was, inverted, the creative cause of the legends of the fathers and their doings.

In such wise did the Hebrew people find expression for the consciousness of their individuality, which they might easily have utterly lost in their spiritual dependence upon their neighbours; namely, in a new interpretation of their ancient myths. When they were becoming quite Canaanitish through what they borrowed from others in religion and culture, their whole soul was again electrified, and a new spirit aroused by the feeling of self-dependence confirmed by severe contests. What it could not put into the religion, which it was powerless to create of itself, it put into a glorious series of poetical legends. These expressed both the national consciousness on the one hand, and the national passionateness on the other; and it may be assumed that with the progress of animosities the tone of the legends increased in bitterness. I adduced above the development of the Persian national legend as an instance showing how a national legend grows out of a myth. At the close of this chapter I will again revert to the same region of legend, to show how national animosity can operate in transforming old materials down to the latest times, in which new legends can scarcely be still created. Firdôsî gives the national legends of the contests with Tûrân, formed from the myths. But the lately roused antagonism of the Persians to the Arabs, who had become the dominant power and were extinguishing Iranism, also finds expression in the form which he imparts to the legends. On reading his description of the behaviour of the Arabian ambassadors at the court of Ferîdûn, we observe that the legend here takes a tone of hostility to the Arabs, and criticises the dark side of the Arabian national character; and the sufferings of Irej, the ancestor of the Iranians, are intended to be a type of the subjugation and vicissitudes of the Iranian race. Selm himself (the Shem of the Shâhnâmeh in relation to Îrân and Tûrân) is represented as malicious, passionate, and intriguing.[641]

Footnote 605:

Palgrave gives an excellent picture of this state, in his _Central and Eastern Arabia_, I. 34: ‘The Bedouin does not fight for his home, he has none; nor for his country, that is anywhere; nor for his honour, he never heard of it; nor for his religion, he owns and cares for none. His only object in war is ... the desire to get such a one’s horse or camel into his own possession, etc.’

Footnote 606:

Josephus, _Contra Apionem_, I. 14.

Footnote 607:

See Duncker, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, 1874, I. 253.

Footnote 608:

In Ezek. XXVII. 17, the wares, the export of which made the Hebrews dependent on the Phenicians, are enumerated in detail.

Footnote 609:

_Die Vorurtheile über das alte und neue Morgenland_, in _Abhandl. der königl. Gesellsch. der Wissensch._, Gottingen 1872, XVII. 98.

Footnote 610:

So _e.g._ Jas. Fergusson, _Rude Stone Monuments_, p. 38; Mommsen, _History of Rome_, 1868, II. 18 _et seq._

Footnote 611:

Lenormant, _Essai sur la propagation de l’Alphabet phénicien dans l’ancien monde_, ed. 2, Paris 1875, I. p. 25.

Footnote 612:

W.D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, London 1867, p. 169; cf. F. von Hellwald, _Culturgeschichte_, p. 154.

Footnote 613:

Hellwald, _ibid._, p. 482.

Footnote 614:

Movers, _Die Phönizier_, II. 2. 439 _et seq._

Footnote 615:

_Histoire générale des langues sémitiques_, p. 200.

Footnote 616:

See my _Studien über Tanchûm Jeruschalmi_, Leipzig 1870, p. 12.

Footnote 617:

_Die Semiten in ihrem Verhâltniss zu Chamiten und Japheiten_, Basel 1872, p. 134.

Footnote 618:

This question will be found very satisfactorily discussed in Stade’s article ‘_Erneute Prüfung des zwischen dem Phönicischen und Hebräischen bestehenden Verwandtschaftsverhältnisses_,’ in the _Morgenländische Forschungen_, Leipzig 1875, pp. 169–232.

Footnote 619:

See Merx, _Archiv. f. wissensch. Erforsch. d. A. T._ pt. 1. 1867, p. 108.

Footnote 620:

In late Aramaised Hebrew we find the feminine kehantâ (= kôheneth) for a Priest’s Wife, equivalent to êsheth kôhên; see Levy, _Chald. Wörterb._ I. 356 _a_. It comes thence to be used in a general signification, of an honest, irreproachable woman, in opposition to pundâḳîth, properly an innkeeper, in _Mishnâ Yebhâmôth_, XVI. 7.

Footnote 621:

See Ernst Meier’s essay on the former in _Zeitsch. d. D. M. G._, 1865, XIX., and Nathan Davis, _Carthage and her remains_, London 1861.

Footnote 622:

_Die geschichtlichen Bücher des A. T._, Leipzig 1866.

Footnote 623:

_Bibelkritisches_, in the _Zeitsch. d. D. M. G._, 1873, XXVII. 682–89, especially the theses 22–26. Zunz appears to have laboured independently of Graf, but arrives at almost the same results.

Footnote 624:

Bargés, who has earned great credit for his elucidation of the Marseilles table in several writings, disputes the authenticity of the inscription discovered by Davis (_Examen d’une nouvelle inscription phénicienne découverte récemment dans les ruines de Carthage et analogue à celle de Marseille._ Paris 1868).

Footnote 625:

_History of Israel_, II. 360.

Footnote 626:

_Geschichte der Juden_, Leipzig 1874, I. 407 _et seq._

Footnote 627:

See Stade’s exhaustive exposition in the _Morgenländische Forschungen_, p. 197. But I cannot share the opinion of my respected friend, that the Hebrews could borrow nothing from the Phenicians because the two nations passed through a completely distinct religious and political development.

Footnote 628:

_Shefaṭ-ʿAdad_ in Nabatean, quoted by Ernst Meier in _Zeitsch. d. D. M. G._ 1873, XVII. 609, is also problematical.

Footnote 629:

Duncker, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, I. 371.

Footnote 630:

The data belonging to this subject are lucidly brought together in Kuenen’s _Religion of Israel_, I. 182.

Footnote 631:

_Semiten, Chamiten und Japhetiten_, p. 160 _et seq._

Footnote 632:

Equally exaggerated on the other side, however, is Tiele’s view (_Vergelijk. Geschied._, p. 182), treating the story of Samson as borrowed from the Canaanites. See also Duncker, _l.c._ II. 65.

Footnote 633:

This fact, moreover, refutes Buckle’s thesis (assuming the very opposite course of development), which makes history to be the earlier, and to be subsequently degraded to ‘a mythology full of marvels.’ This thesis has been estimated at its true value by Hermann Cohen in an article entitled _Die dichterische Phantasie und der Mechanismus des Bewusstseins_, in the _Zeitsch. für Völkerpsychologie etc._, 1869, VI. 186–193.

Footnote 634:

Mommsen, _l.c._ book III. chap 1.

Footnote 635:

Holtzmann, _Deutsche Mythologie_, p. 28.

Footnote 636:

Paul Gyulai, _Vörösmarty élete_ [Life of Vörösmarty], Pest 1866, p. 49 _et seq._

Footnote 637:

See Excursus N.

Footnote 638:

_Godgeleerde Bijdragen_, 1866, p. 983 _et seq._ With him Kuenen agrees, _The Religion of Israel_, I. 311 _et seq._

Footnote 639:

Like the Hungarian national hero Nicolas Toldi, who overcomes the Czech (Bohemian) hero in single combat.

Footnote 640:

Compare _Genesis rabbâ_, § 48.

Footnote 641:

See _Shâhnâmeh_ (ed. Mohl), p. 124. vv. 121–29 and pp. 139–40, etc.