Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development

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 attaches to Sun and Moon is well illustrated by a passage in which it is said that both Sun and Moon lose their natural colour through shame, viz., Is. XXIV. 23 wechâpherâ hal-lebhânâ û-bhôshâ ha-chammâ, ‘The moon turns red and the sun pale, for Jahveh of hosts rules on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.’ The distribution of the expressions for shame, bôsh and châphar, which elsewhere also stand in parallelism, is here not arranged haphazard, since the Sun and the Moon are spoken of—objects which are imagined to be provided with distinct colours of their own—but must correspond to the natural colours of each. Of men both verbs are employed without distinction; but ‘making white’ is the prevalent expression for putting to shame, so that in a later age, ‘to make white the face of a neighbour’ became a fixed formula in that sense (ham-malbîn penê chabhêrô or achwâr appê, Bâbhâ Meṣîʿâ fol. 58 b; compare Levy, Chald. Wörterb. I. 245 a; II. 173 a), and drove the ‘causing to blush red’ out of the field. The word bôsh for ‘to be ashamed’ is moreover even in the earlier times commoner than ch-ph-r.

The former denotes ‘to grow white,’ and belongs etymologically to the same group as the Arabic bâḍ, whence abyad ‘white;’ the latter belongs to the group of the Arabic ḥ-m-r (with a change of the labials p and m), whence aḥmar ‘red.’ Accordingly, the expression that the Sun bôshâ ‘turns white,’ and the Moon châpherâ ‘turns red’ presupposes the idea of a reddish sun (Edôm) and a white moon (lebhânâ).

The same relation between the colours of the Sun and the Moon is also assumed by the old Persian poet Asadî in his ‘Rivalry between Day and Night,’ a poem to which we had occasion to refer on p. 95. In it Day says to Night:[772] ‘Although the Sun walks yellow, yet he is better than the Moon; although a gold-piece is yellow, yet it is better than a silver groat.’