Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development

Helios is called by the Greeks the yellow-haired; and in Greek poetry χρυσοκόμης or ἀκερσοκόμης is a frequent epithet of solar gods and heroes. A Latin poet also calls the sun’s rays Crines Phoebi.[381] In an American legend the Sun-god Bocsika is introduced as an old man with a long beard; the Viracochaya of the Peruvians, the Quetzalcoatl of the Toltecs, the Coxcox of the Chichimecs, solar figures all of them, possess this strongly emphasized characteristic of the long beard.[382] Indeed, this feature is sometimes ascribed in popular fancy to historical personages, as e.g. to Julius Caesar, who was imagined to have been born with long hair; and his name was popularly explained from this circumstance—caesaries.

We must here consider a point in the history of Art, which occupied archeologists about the years 1820–30, and especially the meritorious numismatist Ekhel. I refer to the representation of Janus as biceps, vultu uno barbato, altero imberbi, which some regarded as the old traditional conception of Janus, while others thought it comparatively modern; the question of age is, however, not a question of principle at all.[383] In any case it may be assumed as probable that this picture of the two-headed ‘Opener,’[384] is not an accidental idea, devoid of all mythical import; but that on the contrary, the two bearded and beardless representations of the Sun-god express two points in the Sun’s life; he appears in the morning and evening (as ‘Opener’ and ‘Closer,’ Janus Patulcius and Janus Clusius) with smooth, beardless face, i.e. without powerful rays, but in the middle of the day with a large beard and hairy face.[385]

When the Sun sets and leaves his place to the darkness, or when the powerful summer sun is succeeded by the weak rays of the winter sun, then Samson’s long locks,[386] in which alone his strength lies, are cut off through the treachery of his deceitful concubine Delilah, the ‘languishing,[387] languid,’ according to the meaning of the name (Delîlâ).[388] The Beaming Apollo, moreover, is called the Unshaven; and Minos cannot conquer the solar hero Nisos, till the latter loses his golden hair.[389]

It is then clear what the description of Esau as a man born hairy in contradistinction to the smooth Jacob denotes—the same as the epithet îsh baʿal sêʿâr ‘hairy man’ (2 Kings I. 8) in the description of Elijah: the rays of the sun, whose mythical representative Esau is. It is a more difficult question whether the solar character of this hero is capable of proof from his name. If, not to have recourse to non-Hebraic languages, we derive ʿÊsâv from the Hebrew verb ʿâsâ ‘to do, accomplish,’ and explain it as the ‘Accomplisher, Worker,’ or the like, then this description of a solar hero is suitable enough for a legend of civilisation, which sees in the sun the power that brings to perfection the corn and fruit, and produces in human society a legally secured condition of social life, in short, the Perfecting Agent. But such a description is less consonant with the sense possible to the ancient myth, in which the ideas and conceptions just mentioned were not yet developed. If then the name ʿÊsâv cannot be etymologically explained in the spirit of the oldest mythical circle of ideas, we are necessarily driven to conjecture that the appellation does not belong to the oldest stratum of the materials of Hebrew legends, but was introduced by a legend of civilisation. This conjecture appears all the more probable when we remember that Jacob’s hostile brother in the Bible itself bears another name besides Esau, much more expressive and suited to the earliest period of the formation of legends; namely, Edôm ‘the Red.’

In later times, when the original signification of the myths was entirely forgotten, these two names Esau and Edom were found in the story of the brothers’ quarrel, as appellations of the brother with whom Jacob fights. Attempts were made to harmonise them; and the name ‘the Red’ was connected with the red pottage (Gen. XXV. 30), as well as with the more characteristic feature belonging to the old mythic stage, that the hostile brother was admônî, ‘of a reddish colour.’ But the name Esau also can be rescued for the old myth, if we connect this name with the Arabic aʿtha ‘hairy,’ which is etymologically related to the name Esau.[390] Thus the name Esau would come in contact with the above-discussed mythic characteristic of the Solar hero, that he is an îsh sêʿâr, a hairy man.[391] In the Phenician mythology the antagonist of Usov (whom those who do not utterly reject the authenticity of the statements of Sanchuniathon identify with Esau) lives in tents and is called Shâmînrûm ‘the high heaven,’[392] i.e. the dark night-sky. The identity of the conceptions Abh-râm and Yaʿakôbh would find further confirmation here. We are led to a different series of solar characteristics by the name Edôm, an unquestionably ancient designation of the Solar hero. We will consider together the names Edôm and Lâbhân, both appellations of hostile brothers of the Night-Sky. But before we begin this, I will mention another contest of Jacob’s, to which the original writer devotes only a few lines: ‘Then Jacob remained behind alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the morning rose.

And he saw that he could not do anything to him, so he knocked his thigh-socket, and Jacob’s thigh-socket was dislocated in wrestling with him. And he said, Let me go, for the morning has risen’ (Gen. XXXII. 25–27 [24–26]). Thus Jacob fights with a man who cannot conquer him, but whom he must let off at the rise of the morning. This is the Dawn, who wrestles with the end of the night, and in the end breaks loose, so as to go up to the sky. The Night is a limping figure (ver. 32 [31]). This again is a feature in the myth of the hero of darkness, which we meet with also in classical mythology, e.g. in Hermes, κυλλοποδύων.[393] It probably indicates the opposite to the swiftness and the rapid never-ceasing course of the day, the sun and the dawn.

§ 11. Jacob is pursued and made to fight by the Red and by the White. Both words are designations of the same thing, i.e. the Sun. It strikes us as very strange that the myth should call the same object now red, now white. To appreciate this fact, we must think of the various stages which the sense of colour has to pass through in old times, until it is fully developed. Even in much later times we come across extraordinary fluctuations of language on Semitic ground in the designation of colours for solar phenomena. As the demonstration of this fact appears important to our present subject and things in connexion with it, the reader will excuse me for pausing longer than usual at this point and taking some excursions from the centre of our investigations. The names of colours were in ancient times very vague; the primitive man could not elevate himself to make any sharply defined distinction and classification of colours. Red and white are therefore here not exactly red and white, according to our modern distinction of these colours, but rather light or bright-coloured.

It is a great merit of the late Lazarus Geiger, too early called home, to have most clearly exhibited this phase of the history of the development of ideas and their expression in language, and illustrated it with the light of psychology and comparative philology.[394] His ingenious researches have raised to a certainty the theory that the capacity for distinguishing colours has arisen, both in the individual and in the whole race, in the course of history, through gradual general development; that its beginning follows very late after the beginnings of other intellectual capacities; and that, even after man had grasped the distinction of different classes of colour, the fixing of his conceptions of colour made very slow progress, so that he often attributes first one and then another colour to the same object. The shading-off of colours, when once understood, has yet been fixed in the human mind with such difficulty, that we find in many languages the most helpless wavering in the use of names of colours. As this phenomenon, important in man’s mental development, is no less so in relation to the origin and the understanding of the elements of myths, we will pause over Geiger’s disquisitions, to consider still further the fluctuating nature of the designations of colour in language, and especially to notice how far from clear and unsullied a reflexion impressions of colour cast on language, their natural medium of expression. We will however stay in the neighbourhood of the proper subject of investigation, and bring only Semitic words under consideration.

Let us pick out the designations of Gold in this field. We cannot say in general terms of the Semitic languages that in the designation of gold and silver they do not express the optical difference between them, as a scholiast remarks in reference to Homer; for the appellations both of gold as brilliant, shimmering, and of silver as pale, prove that at least the different shine of the two metals was observed at the stage of the formation of language.[395] Far less definite, however, than this distinction of the two according to the general impression made on the sight, is the designation of the sensation made by each separately. The appellations of gold in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, zâhâbh, dahabhâ, ḏahab, denote brilliant in general; whereas the Assyrian and Phenician[396] word for gold, ḥuraṣu (which is the same as the Hebrew chârûṣ), expresses no optical sensation.[397] The former appellations describe an optical sensation; but no definite colour-sensation. Indeed, even a late Arabic poet says of gold: al-ḏahab al-nârî,[398] ‘the fire-like gold,’ which, if a description of colour, is a very vague one. Ruʾbâ b. al-ʿAjjâj, an Arabic poet living in the second century of the Hijrâ, says:[399]

Here gold and sulphur are compared together as similar, at all events in colour, for colour is the only possible tertium comparationis between them; and in fact we also find in Arabic the expression ‘yellow sulphur, as if it were gold’ (kibrît aṣfar kaʾannahu ḏahab).[400] I lay particular stress upon this, because a common phrase among the Arabs is, al-kibrît al-aḥmar ‘red sulphur,’ to denote a peculiar person, one without his equal, inasmuch as there is no red sulphur. Now gold, of all things, is commonly used both in the later literature and in popular speech with the epithet red (al-ḏahab al-aḥmar). This phrase, as Osiander has proved,[401] occurs also in Himyaric, and passed from Arabic into Persian and Turkish (in Persian zeri surch; in Turkish ḳizil altyn), and is used especially when minted gold is opposed to silver coins. The former is red money, the latter white: e.g. wa-malaʾtum aydîkum min al-ḏahab al-aḥmar wal-fiḍḍâ al-beyḍâ ‘you have filled your hands with red gold and white silver;’[402] dihhezâr dînâr zeri surch, ‘ten thousand dînârs of red gold.’[403] In a very noteworthy essay, Belin has shown with reference to Turkish that in the Ottoman Empire the metal money is divided into white, ‘aḳ,’ and red, ‘ḳizil’;[404] and in Egypt at the present day the silver piaster is called abyaḍ ‘white,’ to distinguish it from the copper money chorde. Muʿâwiyyâ said to Ṣaʿṣaʿâ, ‘Thou Red one;’ and he answered, ‘Gold is red.’[405] Thus we see that red has become the constant designation of the colour of gold.

Ethiopic designates gold, not by a derivative of the root ‘ḏhb,’ like the other languages of the same stock, but by the word waraḳ. We cannot decide a priori whether in its origin this word expresses a colour-sensation or not. In Arabic also we find waraḳ or wariḳ in a similar signification, and I can scarcely believe that it must be thrown out of the original treasury of the Arabic vocabulary. Von Kremer classifies it with the Arabic words borrowed from the Persian stock, and refers it to the Huzwâresh warg.[406] In old time it was equivalent to ‘property, goods.’[407] The poet Suḥeym, an elder contemporary of Moḥammed, says in a little poem, ‘The poems of the slave of the Banû-l-Ḥasḥâs on the day of competition are worth as much as noble birth and waraḳ (property);[408] and in some of the traditional sayings of Moḥammed a collateral form of the same word, riḳâ, denotes 'money.’[409] The Arabic lexicographers give the signification of both forms as al-darâhim al-maḍrûbâ ‘stamped coins,’ drachmas. In the more general signification we find waraḳ used by Abû Nuwâs in a poem of youth or rather childhood. The poet Ibn Munâdir, finding little Abû Nuwâs leaning against a pillar in the mosque, took a great fancy to him, and addressed an erotic poem to him; upon which the boy extemporised the following verses, and wrote them on the back of the letter:

We see clearly from this example how general the meaning of waraḳ is in Arabic; even a pair of shoes and a dress are included in it. It is, however, probable that the word, which certainly comes from the south of Arabia, originally denoted specially gold, but being supplanted in this narrow sense by ḏahab in ordinary Arabic, was applied first to gold-money, then to money generally (even of silver), and lastly by a further generalisation to goods and objects of value of all kinds. Its South-Arabic origin is also confirmed by the fact that it occurs in Himyarite,[411] beside ḏahab and kethem; and there is no reason for supposing, with Halévy, that it denotes specially de l’or en feuilles, contrasted with de l’or en poudre.[412] On the other hand, it must be noticed that the root waraḳ in the Semitic languages designates a colour, either green or yellow, and that it is probably owing to this circumstance that gold is in Ethiopic called waraḳ. But this word of colour itself is very fluctuating. Whilst in Ethiopic it designates the colour of gold, in Hebrew it gives a name to grass (yereḳ), and similarly in Arabic the green leaves are called waraḳ, notwithstanding which its diminutive urayyiḳ[413] (from auraḳ) denotes a dark brown camel; in irḳân it returns again to the notion yellow or reddish. The Hebrew of the Talmûd and the Targûm employs yârôḳ (which in Biblical Hebrew is mostly used for green, but sometimes of a pale face for yellow, e.g. yêrâḳôn ‘jaundice’) chiefly for a green colour, of vegetables and precious stones;[414] nevertheless, we find in the Talmûd (Bab.

Nedârîm, 32. a) hôrîḳân bezâhâbh ‘he made it yârôḳ with gold,’ i.e. made it yellow, gilded it. We have in Ps. LXVIII. 14 [13] yeraḳraḳ chârûṣ, flavedo auri. There is a noteworthy passage in Berêshîth rabbâ (sect. 4 near the end), in which the various colours of the sky are mentioned: red, black, white, and also yârôḳ.

The above remarks show how little consistency and distinctness there is in the relation of the names derived from colour to the various types of colour. The same result is reached when we inquire, with what designations of colour other objects are combined. For we find almost everywhere the greatest fluctuation, whether we consider the etymological value of the names themselves, or study the adjectives attached to them. In the most favourable cases only the class of colour—light or dark—is observed; but within the class nothing definite is found. Arabic especially is a field offering abundant matter for observation and demonstration, on which the excellent labours of Lazarus Geiger might be corroborated, completed and extended; but I cannot undertake such a task at this place. We will now limit our observations to the point which has to be established here: the views of colour which were attached to day and night, the sunny sky and the night-sky, the grey of the morning and the red of the evening.

In the Vedas, when day and night, sun and darkness, are opposed to each other, the one is designated red, the other black. ‘The gods have made the night and the dawn of different hue, and given them black and red colours’ (Rigveda, I. 73. 7). ‘The red mother of the red calf comes; the black leaves his place to her’ (Rigveda, I., 113. 2). ‘The dawn comes forward, driving off black night’ (Rigveda, I. 92. 5: compare VI. 64. 3).[415] In Hebrew poetry we find no similar case, in which the opposite colours of the antagonistic forces are thus clearly set against one another. Indeed, we do not even find that a separate colour-epithet is given to each. Still it seems certain that at least Night was brought into connexion with the colour black;[416] otherwise a sentence such as ‘Darker than Blackness (châshakh mish-shechôr) is their form’ (Lam. IV. 8) would be impossible. We may infer from this that the notions of chôshekh ‘Darkness’ and shechôr ‘Blackness’ were closely connected together. This is in Arabic one of the commonest combinations. The dark night is sometimes called al-leyl al-ḥâlik—a word denoting the deepest shade of blackness. To the same class also belongs adʿaj (in leyl adʿaj ‘black night’), another adjective denoting black. Chudârîyya is an Arabic word which denotes both raven[417] and night (one cannot help thinking of the Hebrew ʿerebh ‘evening’ and ʿôrêbh ‘raven’). The verb iktaḥal is used of Night: ‘She has coloured herself with the black dye[418] al-kuḥl, e.g. wa-l-ẓalâm iḏa-ktaḥal (Rom. of ʿAntar, VI. 53. 12).

Poetry gives the same evidence as language itself. As in other literatures, so in Arabic, darkness is the term of comparison for everything black. The black hero of the best loved Arabic popular romance is pictured as 'black as the colour of darkness, riding on a horse which resembles the darkness of night’ (aswad kalaun al-ẓalâm ʿala jawâd min al-cheyl yaḥkî ẓalâm al-leyl: Rom. of ʿAntar, IV. 183. 14). This is the source of a poetic figure much used by Arabic poets in application to a mistress with light features and dark hair. So Bekr b. al-Naṭṭâḥ says (Ḥamâsâ, p. 566): ‘She is as white as if she were herself the brilliant noonday-sky, as if her black hair were the night which darkens it.’ The black hero ʿAntar, contrasting his own colour and that of his beloved ʿAblâ, compares himself regularly with the night, and her with the dawn (e.g. ʿAntar, VII. 136 penult.). She herself once addressed him thus, ‘Go, in the name of God, thou colour of night’ (sir fî âmâni-llâhi yâ laun al-duja, VI. 162. 4), and he often repeats the idea that his colour and that of night are the same. Thus (XVIII. 66. 12):

As a black man is compared to night, so, inversely, the latter is likened to a black gipsy. Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî, who is remarkable for accurate pictures of nature, says of the sky dazzling with stars, ‘This night is a Gipsy’s bride, decked out with pearls:’[419]

And one of the most ordinary descriptions of darkening is that ‘Night put on her black adornments.’[421] From all this it is seen that it is perfectly usual and matter-of-course to associate Night with the colour Black.[422] Indeed, by the Black the poet understands par excellence Night. Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî, the poet so frequently quoted in this section, says at one place (ibid. I. 131.2): ‘The Black one, whose father is unknown to men, has shrouded me in clothes from himself (i.e. in black or dark ones).’ Nevertheless, we can convince ourselves here too, that even this point of the conception of colour is not devoid of fluctuation. For the blackness of night is not nearly so distinct a conception as ours when we speak of a black night. On the contrary, it is not yet separated from the general category of dark colour, to which green and blue also belong. When the land of the Banû Madhij was visited with drought, the tribe sent out three explorers (ruwwâd, from the singular râʾid), to look for suitable pasturage. One of them says in his report in praise of the splendid green meadows of the land he recommends, that the surface of the land is like night, so green is it.[423] Al-Afwah, a Preislamite Arabic poet and sage,[424] in a verse quoted by the lexicographer al-Jauharî (under the root sds), associates Night with the colour of sudûs. So also Abû Nucheylâ,[425] a later poet who lived under the Abbasid dynasty as their laureate, says ‘Put on as thy shirt Night, black and dark like the colour of sundus’:

But sudûs and sundus denote a garment the colour of which is regularly mentioned as achḍar ‘greenish.’ So, e.g., twice in the Ḳorân (Sûr. XVIII. 30, LXXVI. 21), where the joys and delights of Paradise are described, green sundus garments are promised to the faithful; and similarly in a tradition mentioned by al-Ġazâli[428] we find it said of men who become brethren in God, ‘Their beauty shines like the sun, and they are clothed in green sundus garments’ (wa-ʿaleyhim thiâb sundus chuḍr).