The rays of the moon also are here designated arrows.
Esau is a hairy man, Jacob a smooth man (Gen. XXVII. 11). ‘The first came out red, quite like a hairy mantle’ (XXV. 25). For the present we will put the redness aside, and pay particular attention to the element of hairiness. Long locks of hair and a long beard are mythological attributes of the Sun. The Sun’s rays are compared with locks or hairs on the face or head of the Sun.
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. Now in what harmony does this stand with the above-quoted designation, ‘sulphur-coloured gold,’ when we consider at the same time the proverbial kibrît aḥmar ‘red sulphur’?
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]
On another occasion the same poet (II. 106. 4) compares the night to black ink:
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’:
Another anonymous poet, or rather verse-monger, says in the same sense ‘Among the nights a dark night, when the sky is 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).
But this uncertainty of the colour which is associated with the Night is far less prominent than the fluctuation which prevails when the colour of the Day has to be described. In the former case, with a few exceptions based on the impression which a certain peculiar night may have made on the mind of the speaker or poet, black is by far the prevailing colour. Not so with the colour-distinctions of the solar phenomena. Here usage wavers among three colours, which are usually connected with the various stages of the Sun himself: golden-yellow, red, and white. The greatest definiteness is found to exist with reference to the first. It refers mostly to the dawn and sunset. In Aramaic the early morning is ṣafrâ. Etymologically this word is capable of many explanations which justify the above-expounded mythical conceptions of the dawn. It may be explained, as the soundest lexicographers on Semitic ground do explain it,[429] to denote curled locks of hair, or one who springs, leaps. Both explanations take us back to mythic attributes of the morning-sun; in the second we see the morning-sun springing up to heaven from behind the hills like a bird (ṣippôr). But I believe that the word ṣafrâ is related to aṣfar, a colour-name in Arabic, which, though like all such it has an extremely vague signification, and may even mean nigredo, prevailingly indicates a golden-yellow colour. Now while the Aramaic ṣafrâ is exclusively the morning-sun (compare Ἢὼς κροκόπεπλος, Iliad, VIII. 1, and μελάμπεπλος of the night), in Arabic the colour-word in question is prevailingly applied to the evening-sun: ‘Until upon him came the end of the day, and the Sun put on the garment of yellowness’ (ila an atâ ʿaleyhi âchir al-nahâr wa-labisat al-shams ḥullat al-iṣfirâr, Rom. of ʿAntar, VI. 244. 1). Another example, in which the succession of time comes out with still greater clearness, is: ‘They had defeated al-Noʿmân at noon; then they took rest till the Sun put on the garment of yellowness, and towards evening dust appeared before them’ (wa-kânû ḳad sabaḳû al-Noʿmân bi-niṣf al-nahâr wa-achaḏû râḥâ ḥatta labisat al-shams ḥullat al-iṣfirâr wa-ʿind al-masâ ṭalaʿ ʿaleyhim ġobâr, Rom. of ʿAntar, VI. 35. 2). It is remarkable that in Egyptian the setting sun is said to throw out rays of tahen—a metal distinguished for its saffron colour, which is frequently contrasted with the colour red.[430] Chabas finds this contrast to constitute a difficulty in the comparison with the setting sun. Semitic analogies, however, show that the association of saffron colour with the sun, especially the evening-sun, is not confined to Egyptian. No case on Arabic ground is as yet known to me in which this yellowish colour, al-iṣfirâr, is attributed to any other stage of the sun’s course except the evening. But there is the word aṣbaḥ (from ṣubḥ ‘the early morning’) ‘morning-coloured,’ used of the lion, which is said to denote a colour near to aṣfar.[431] At all events, the Aramaic ṣafrâ and the Arabic usage teach us that a yellow colour is in Semitic an attribute of both the morning- and the evening-sun. It is very different with the two other colours, white and red. There we meet with greater fluctuations. Sometimes the morning-sun is described as white, in comparison with the sun of the advanced day; sometimes the former is bright red and the latter white:
At its very first appearance the morning-dawn is of saffron colour, then a bright red comes, and the further the day advances, the whiter it becomes. The two daybreaks (al-fajrân), as the scholiast observes on this passage, are al-kâḏib wa-l-ṣâdiḳ—the lying or supposed one, which precedes the true dawn, and the latter itself. The very poet, however, from whom I quote this fragment, at another place exactly inverts the order of colour: representing the white or grey colour as appearing first, and then passing into the reddish or saffron. In a poem to a friend, in which he gives a beautiful description of night, he brings forward Night as in love with the stars. But she grows old—
The idea that the poet intends to express here is, that Night at its latter end becomes grey, when the grey morning begins to appear, and that to preserve the appearance of youth and be still acceptable to her lover she must put on red paint. But even the brightness of the sun by day (ḍiâ al-nahâr) is compared by the same poet to the grey hairs of an old man (II. 226. 2), as is also the brightness of the stars:[434]
We find the same figure, of which we have seen Abû-l-ʿAlâ to be so fond, used by Abû-l-Ḥasan ʿAlî b. Isḥâḳ al-Waddânî, a Maġreb [North African] poet, who says of the morning: ‘It is like the greyness which spreads itself over the black hair of youth (the black night):’
So, inversely, when the hair grows grey it is said ‘The dark night is lighted.’[437]
From all these cases it may be gathered that the progress of the sun from the dawn to the full day is treated sometimes as a transition from a whitish to a reddish colour, sometimes as the reverse. Sometimes the redness of morning begins, and turns into white; sometimes the greyness, which passes into red.[438] But both conceptions are also found combined in a single idea: thus, for instance, al-ʿArjî the poet says:
Some already-cited examples have enabled us to observe that when day is contrasted with night, it is done by calling the night black and the day white. To the former instances I will now add another for clearness’ sake: ‘Till the whiteness of the day became black’ (ḥatta ʿâda bayâḍ al-nahâr sawâdan, Rom. of ʿAntar, XXV. 5. 4). The attribute white, applied to the sun of the advanced day, is especially clear in a passage which I must not omit to mention. The poet al-Mutanabbî says:
A critic[440] remarks on this passage that the writer ought to have spoken of the day rather than of the whiteness of the morning, as the rhetorical law of al-muḳâbalâ ‘antithesis’ demands as the opposite to Night not Dawn, but Day. Thus ‘the whiteness of day’ would be better. Another passage with the antithesis is contained in Ḥarîrî: ‘The white day becomes black’ (iswadda-l-yaum al-abyaḍ).[441] This use of language is characteristically exemplified in the expression sirnâ bayâḍa jauminâ wa-sawâda leylatinâ, ‘we travelled night and day’ (literally, ‘we travelled during the whiteness of our day and the blackness of our night,’ Aġânî, II. 74. 20). But apart from any antithesis, the white colour is attributed to the light of the morning and the day: falamma-rtafaʿat al-shams fabyâḍḍat, ‘after the sun had risen high and become white,’ is said in a tradition.[442] In the Romance of ʿAntar (XXIV. 111. 3), a horse is thus described: ‘he was white in colour, as if he were the day when it breaks, or the moon[443] when it shines with full beams’ (wa-hua abyaḍ al-laun kaʾannahu al-ṣabâḥ iḏa-nfajar wa-l-ḳamar iḏâ badar).
On Assyrian ground also we discover the idea of the whiteness of the sun, expressed, not indeed by a word directly signifying a colour, but yet by an epithet which is undoubtedly founded upon this idea. In the lyrical poem, called by Schrader ‘The Assyrian Royal Psalm’ (line 29), a land with a silver sky,[444] i.e. with a bright shining sunny sky, is desired for the king. So here the bright sunny sky is represented as of silver colour. On the other hand, Ḥomarm, the name of a Himyarite god,[445] has perhaps a solar meaning, equivalent to the Arabic aḥmar ‘Red;’ at all events, the fancy that he may be a sort of Bacchus (chamr ‘wine’) sounds improbable. In Hebrew literature we find no direct indications of the colours which were associated with the sun: an indirect indication is afforded by the passage in Is. XXIV. 23, where it is said that ‘the sun grows pale and the moon red.’[446] In the Talmûd literature, however, we find an incidental discussion of the colour of the sun; to which one of the Excursus is devoted.[447]
I have paused long on the ideas held of the Sun with reference to colour, longer than is consistent with the symmetry of my book, and have especially brought up many examples from the Arabic language, celebrated for its wealth of synonyms and epithets—all with the object of giving probability to my ideas on the mythical character of Esau or Edom and Laban, Jacob’s two hostile kinsmen. We have seen that the sun is called white quite as frequently as red;[448] now is it not certain beyond a doubt that the two foes of Jacob the Night-sky, namely Edom the red and Laban the white, are only names for the Sun, formed by the Hebrew myth on the ground of the sun’s colour? The war of darkness and the stormy sky against the red or white sunny sky is described in the rich language of Mythology, which has devoted such multifarious appellations to this struggle, as a strife of one who follows on the heel of his brother, against the white and the red. Here we will return to a point which was anticipated in the Third Section of this chapter; I mean the fact that the mythic feature which, with other solar characteristics, has fastened itself on the description of David, a perfectly historical person, that he was admônî ‘reddish,’ belongs to the same group of mythic ideas. It is a bit of solar myth: ‘He is red, and of excellent sight and good eyes’ (1 Sam. XVI. 12).
Thus the mythical appellations Jacob, Edom, and Laban appear to be cleared up, and the features belonging to them have discovered to us the nocturnal character of the first-named and the solar of the two latter personages. I have confined myself to the most essential point, the statement of the fact and the identification of the mythic figures in the centre of the story. If we were to use the collateral points also as mythic matter, more abundant results might be attained. But we must limit ourselves to an investigation of the main features, since in the present position of mythological inquiry it would be difficult and dangerous to try to pick out with any confidence from the epic descriptions in the Bible all that belongs to the original myth. It might, for instance, be urged that Jacob is endowed with a deceitful character, since he cheats the one of his blessing and his birthright, and the other of his sheep (Hermes), and this might be treated as characteristic of the night, as the figures of the night-sky are credited elsewhere with a thievish nature. ‘Like thieves,’ said the ancient Indian singer, ‘so the nights stole away with their stars, that Sûrya might become visible’ (Rigveda, I. 50. 2).
In a legend of the Palatinate the King of the Night residing at the Ice-sea stole the Sun;[449] Rachel steals the household-gods of her father Laban (Gen. XXXI. 19); and Jacob himself, as the Scripture expresses it, steals the heart of Laban the Aramean, not telling him of his intention to fly (v. 20).