Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development

423. Opuscula arabica, ed. W. Wright, Leyden 1859, p. 30. 11; compare p. 31. 12.

424. Aġânî, XI. 44.

425. Ibid., XVIII. 139.

426. Ibn al-Sikkît, p. 344.

427. Ibn al-Sikkît, p. 345.

428. Iḥyâ ʿulûm al-dîn, II. 148.

429. Gesenius, Thesaurus, p. 1183.

430. Chabas, Etudes sur l’antiquité historique d’après les sources égyptiennes, etc. 2nd edition, Paris 1873, p. 34, where the article by Le Page Renouf is referred to.

431. Ibn al-Sikkît, p. 193, whom I follow as a reliable ancient authority; al-Jauharî and Freytag after him understand aṣbaḥ somewhat differently.

432. Abû-l-ʿAlâ, II. 107. 3–4.

433. Saḳt al-zand, I. 93. 1. These ideas of the relations of colours are found expressed with characteristic energy by the eccentric Persian poet Abû Isḥâḳ Ḥallâjî; he says, ‘When the Sun in the blue vault turns his cheek into yellow, it makes me think of saffron-coloured viands on an azure dish’ (Rückert, Grammatik, Poetik und Rhetorik der Perser, p. 126). The conception of turning grey combines that of both colours—the white appearing beside the black. According to Aġânî, II. 41. 7; those clouds which combine the two colours are called shîb ‘grey’ (al-saḥâʾib allatî fîhâ sawâd wa-bayâd).

434. I will mention here that according to al-Ġazâlî (Iḥjâ, IV. 433) the stars have various colours, some tending towards red, others towards white, others towards leaden: wa-tadabbar ʿadad kawâkibihâ, wachtilâf alwânihâ fabaʿḍuhâ tamîl ila-l-ḥumrâ wa-baʿḍuhâ ila-l-bayâḍ wa-baʿḍuhâ ila launi-r-ruṣâṣ.

435. Abû-l-ʿAlâ, I. 195. 1.

436. In Yâḳût, IV. 911. 7.

437. Ḥarîrî’s Maḳâmâs, p. 675. 7: Istanâra-l-leyl al-bahîm.

438. See Excursus H.

439. Aġânî, I. 158. 23.

440. al-Anṭâḳi, Tazyîn al-aswâḳ, etc., p. 405.

441. Maḳâmâs, p. 128; cf. Mehren, Rhetorik der Araber, p. 99.

442. al-Buchârî, IX. 35.

443. The notion of the white colour of the moon is also the foundation of one of the Hebrew names of the moon. In the verse Ẓabyatun admâʾu mithla-l-hilâlî ‘a gazelle red like the new moon’ (Aġânî, VI. 122. 21) the moon is treated as red. But in the appellation al-layâli al-bîḍ ‘white nights,’ by which are meant nights illumined throughout by the moon, the moonshine is associated with a white colour.

444. Die Höllenfahrt der Istar, p. 75.

445. Halévy, ibid., p. 556.

446. See Excursus I.

447. See Excursus K.

448. Among the Arabic names of the sun, we find the curious appellation al-jaunâ (Ibn al-Sikkît, p. 324), a word of colour, which belongs to the aḍdâd of the Arabic philologians, i.e. words with contradictory signification, and may denote either white or black (see Redslob, Die arab. Wörter mit entgegengesetzter Bedeutung, Göttingen 1873, p. 27). Al-jaunâ is especially the setting sun, e.g. lâ âtîhi ḥatta taġîb al-jaunâ, ‘I cannot come to him till the jaunâ sets;’ and the setting sun is well described by a colour-word which, by its faculty of standing for either white or black, answers to the transition from sunshine to darkness.

449. Communicated by Henne Am Rhyn, Deutsche Volkssagen &c., p. 219. no. 427.

450. Nagyidai Czigányok. In the original Hungarian:

Most az Éj fölvette tolvajköpönyegét,

Eltakará azzal pitykés öltözetét.

451. On Regina coeli, see Jablonski, Opuscula, II. 54 et seq. (ed. Te Water).

452. In Fox Talbot, quoted by Schrader, Die Höllenfahrt der Istar, p. 98.

453. Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., 1873, XXVII. p. 404.

454. G. Rawlinson, History of Herodotus, App. B. I., Essay X. (I. 484).

455. Schwartz, Sonne, Mond und Sterne, 269, 274.

456. See especially Osiander in the Zeitsch, d. D. M. G., 1865, XIX. 242 et seq.

457. In Yâḳût, IV. 406.

458. The constant epithet ‘holding the seed of bulls’ brings to view the idea that the influence of the moon produces fertility in cattle (Spiegel, Die heiligen Schriften der Parsen [in German], III. xxi.). According to Yasht, VII. 5, it is the moon ‘that produces verdure, that produces good things.’ Compare Catullus, XXXII (XXXIV) v. 17–20, where the poet apostrophises the Moon—

Tu cursu, Dea, menstruo

Metiens iter annuum,