This is a truly mythic picture of the Sun, pairing at vintage-time with the Vine. The red eyes and white teeth need no further discussion after what has been said in § 11 of this chapter. But a few words are needed in explanation of what is said of the ass and foal. It is sufficient to point to the fact that the reddish-brown ass is one of the animals used in the old mythology to designate the sun.^[507] The point of resemblance must be sought in the reddish colour; and hence in the Semitic languages the ass is called the Red (Hebrew chamôr, ‘ass’; Arabic aḥmar, ‘red’).^[508] It is probably in consequence of the solar significance of the ass, that Shechem’s father is named ‘the Ass’ (Hamor; and in Arabic ‘Ass’ is a very frequent personal name),^[509] and Issachar is described as a bony ass. Therefore to say, as is said in our hymn, that the foal and the colt are bound to the vine is equivalent to saying that ‘the Sun forms a connexion with the Vine;’ it is only a different view of the myth of the connexion of Judah with Tamar. This connexion of the Sun and the Fruit, which is the fundamental thought of the myth of Judah and Tamar, was developed with the aid of other elements into the later form found in the story in Gen. XXXVIII. The same myth was also attached to figures of the historical age in the legend of Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam. XIII. 1–20). David’s son Amnon loves his sister Tamar; and keeping her near him to wait upon him under the pretence of being ill, takes the opportunity to ravish her. Here the myth of the love of the Sun for the Fruit has been transferred to Amnon, a perfect unmythical personage. But Tamar is here quite the same as the personage whose connexion with Judah is described in Genesis; although in the legend of Amnon and Tamar it is Amnon who pursues Tamar, whereas in that of Judah and Tamar the intriguer and seducer is Tamar. When people in ancient times perceived the fruit of the tree gradually change its colour till the autumn-sun shone on it, after which it fell down ripe, they saw in this a love-affair between the Sun and Fruit, which ended with their union. We have here, therefore, to do with that phrase of mythology in which men, as agriculturists, but still standing on the myth-creating stage of intellectual life, speak of vegetation and its causes in terms which later, at the religious stage, will give rise to dualistic religious ideas. Different from the Iranian religious dualism, which sets up two mutually hostile powers, this dualism will put side by side two factors of the course of vegetation (see above, p. 15). This kind of dualism is met with very frequently in the Semitic—especially North and Middle Semitic—religions. Indeed, were we to investigate closely the legends and love-stories which fill the history of the Arabic nation and tribes before Islâm, we should probably discover mythological matter turned into history, which would possess great similarity with the legend of Judah and Tamar. We will select here one only of these stories, which has preserved transparently enough its mythical character. On the mountains Ṣafâ and Marwâ, which still play a part in the pilgrimage to Mekka, there formerly stood two idols named Isâf and Nâʾilâ, who were said to have been two persons of Jurhum who having committed improprieties in the Kaʿbâ were turned into stone in punishment for desecration of the holy place^[510]—which, be it incidentally observed, is no rare offence in modern times. It need scarcely be observed that this conformation of the story is due to a distinct Mohammedan tendency imparted to it, and that the interpreter of the myth has to regard only the germ of the story—the sexual union of Nâʾilâ with Isâf. Now the mere translation of these words give us to understand the meaning of the myth. Isâf means solum sterile, unfruitful ground, and Nâʾilâ, she who presents (a nomen agentis from nâla ‘to present’). No deep acquaintance with Arabic literature is necessary to convince one that the latter name may be simply an epithet of the Rain, which the Arabs can as readily call the Giver as they compare a liberal giver with the rain (compare geshem nedâbhôth, Ps. LXVIII. 10 [9]). Thus the liberal Rain unites with the unfruitful Ground and encourages vegetation. Out of this, as out of most unions of this sort, sexual licence was evolved at a later time.

The names of Judah’s sons, Perez and Zerah,^[511] are solar: the latter denoting ‘the Shining one,’ who comes into the world with a red thread on his hand, and the former ‘he who breaks forth.’ This name is founded on the same idea as is present in the German Tagesanbruch,^[512] the Hungarian Hajnalhasadás, i.e. ‘the breaking through of the dawn’^[513] (exactly the same as Perez), the Arabic, fajar (especially infajar al-ṣubḥ or infajar al-fataḳ ‘erupit aurora’).^[514] The dawn breaks through, or rather tears asunder, the veil of darkness and breaks forth out of it.

After this survey of the solar figures found among Jacob’s sons, we will conclude this section with the consideration of another mythical name belonging to the class of designations of Jacob’s sons which is connected with the dark sky of clouds and night. This is Levi. If we contemplate this name unbiassed by the etymological explanation of it given in the Bible (from lâvâ ‘to cleave to’), I think we shall not be inclined to doubt that Lêvî bears the same relation to the serpent’s name livyâthân, as another serpent’s name nâchâsh bears to the enlarged form nechushtân, which is given as the name of the brazen serpent broken in pieces by King Hezekiah (2 Kings XVIII. 4). The name certainly does not denote ‘brazen;’ for an image is more naturally named from the object it represents than from the matter of which it is made. And the form livyâthân necessarily presupposes a simpler form, from which it could be derived by the addition of the termination âthân (or only ân, if we suppose the original word to have passed through the feminine form livyat), as nechushtân necessitates the preexistence of the simpler nâchâsh. If we have in English a word earthly, then, even if no word earth actually existed at the time in the language, we could with perfect justice assert a priori that the word earth must have once existed, in order to make the formation of earthly possible. Similarly the existence of the form livyâthân justifies the assumption of a simple noun-form, as the basis of that derivative enlarged by suffixes.

Now fortunately this simple form is preserved to us in the name Lêvî, and we may therefore unhesitatingly affirm that Levi means ‘Serpent.’ Mythology speaks of a serpent that devours the sun, of a Storm-Serpent, which the Sun assails with his rays; they are the serpents, dragons and monsters with whom the Solar heroes of the Aryan mythology wage their contests, which Herakles even in his cradle crushes and afterwards overpowers at Lerna and Nemea; the same, which sometimes, on the other hand, keep their ground and come forth victorious from the battle with the Sun, when the Sun, repulsed by a boisterous Storm, is forced to abandon the celestial battle-field.

(Gen. XLIX. 17), they are called in the Hebrew hymn of the battle of the Rain-serpent with the Sun-horse.^[515] It is this same serpent that bears a ‘fiery flying serpent’ (sârâph meʿôphêph, Is. XIV. 29), i.e. the Lightning; that in common with the lightning is called the ‘Flying Serpent’ (nâchâsh bârîach, Is. XXVII. 1), for whose conqueror the Sun, the monotheistic ideas of later times substituted Jahveh ‘who with his might lashes the sea, and who with his intelligence pierces the monster (Rahab); by whose breath the heaven becomes bright, whose hand has stabbed the flying serpent’ (Job XXVI. 12, 13). The hissing of this flying Serpent is said in an American myth to be the Thunder; and the Lightning is called by the Algonquins an immense serpent, which God spat out.^[516] The Rain itself is regarded in mythology as a serpent; the columns of water which fall in a serpentine course to the earth are called the ‘Crooked Serpent’ (nâchâsh ʿaḳallâthôn). The flying Lightning, the crooked Serpent (both livyâthân), and the great Monster in the sea, which tries to devour the Sun when he sinks into the sea in the evening, are assailed by the Sun, and the monotheistic prophet transfers the attack upon them to Jahveh (Is. XXVII. 1; compare Ps. LXXVI. 4 [3]). It is to be noted that, in speaking of night and storms, even the later poetry uses the expression that they ‘bite, wound,’ because the Serpent of darkness and tempest bites and hurts the Sun. ‘I said, Surely the darkness will bite me (yeshûphênî), and the night [will bite] the light near me’ (Ps. CXXXIX. 11); and so of the storm (Job IX. 17). Everywhere here the verb is used which is employed in Gen. III. 15 to denote that the serpent wounds the heel of the man. In these passages of poetry, therefore, we find an echo of the myth which declares that the Serpent of the storm, when victorious, bites, wounds, or even swallows down the hero of the Sun. We encounter the Rain described still more clearly as a serpent in the sacred literature of the Parsees, in the first chapter of the Vendidâd, verse 2, where it is said that Ahuramazdao created Airyana-vaêjô to be the best of all lands, whilst in opposition to his act the Deadly Aegrô mainyus created the ‘flowing serpent’ (azhim raoidhitem) and the snow. Professor Haug was the discoverer of this explanation of the azhim raoidhitem;^[517] nevertheless he translates it ‘a powerful serpent,’ as he thinks that the word ‘flowing’ can be only understood of the ejection of the venom, or of the writer’s remembrance of a warm spring which may have existed in the land Airyana-vaêjô. It is a very obvious conjecture that the flowing serpent means the Rain; the more so because it is mentioned in conjunction with Snow.^[518] The last shoots of this mythological conception are discovered in the system of the Ophites, in which the serpent represents a moist substance.^[519]

Levi (with Simeon, whose etymological value is no longer determinable), is introduced in the Hebrew myth (Gen. XXXIV.) as the slayer of Chamôr ‘the Ass’ and Shekem (see above, p. 125). Of the same two brothers it is said in the fragments of hymns already quoted, sometimes that ‘for their amusement they destroyed the bull’ (XLIX. 6)—the horned solar animal whose horns (rays) the storm-serpents eradicate (ʿiḳḳerû). It is at the same time perfectly clear in this interpretation that no difficulty at all resides in what is always troubling the expounders of these passages—in the fact, namely, that these brothers are said in the hymn (or Blessing) to have killed a bull (shôr), whilst no mention is made in the narrative of any such act.

§ 15. In the Biblical story of the family of Jacob we have met with a few of those myths of Love which the Aryan mythology developed in such variety and richness. One of the best known myths of this kind is the story of Oedipus and Jokaste. The king of Thebes received a sad oracle, declaring that he would be exposed to serious danger from a son who would be born to him by his wife Jokaste. He therefore exposed Oedipus, his new-born son; and the latter, having been marvellously saved from death and educated at Corinth, travelled to Thebes when grown to manhood, but killed his father on the way. Arrived at Thebes, he delivered the city from the terror of the Sphinx, and was proclaimed king, after which he married his mother Jokaste. When he received information of the two horrible crimes that he had unconsciously committed, the murder of his father and the incest with his mother, in despair he put out his own eyes and came to a tragic end. Everyone knows this celebrated Hellenic story, which in the Oedipus-Tragedy was worked out powerfully in its ethical bearings so as to excite the emotions and touch the heart.

Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and dies, a blind and worn-out old man. The hero of the Sun murders the father who begot him—the Darkness; he shares his bed with his mother—the Evening-glow, from whose womb (in the character of the Morning-glow) he had been born; he dies blind—the Sun sets. We have seen above that the setting sun loses the bright light of its eyes.^[520]

What a universal act of the human mind, and how little affected by ethnological distinctions, the production of myths is, and what agreement is consequently discovered in the direction taken by this myth-formation among the most dissimilar peoples and races of the earth, will be most strikingly brought home to us by the discovery that this very myth of marriage with a mother occurs among the Hebrews just as much as among the Aryans. We have already seen that Reuben marries his father’s wife Bilhah. We observe that in the Hebrew myth the hero of Darkness occupies the central position, whereas in the Hellenic it is the Solar hero who shares his mother’s bed. But while the myth of Reuben and Bilhah is only mentioned quite shortly in the Old Testament, there is another myth which has grown into a long story in the Biblical narrative—that of Lot’s daughters. But before we pass to this, I wish to call attention to a concurrence which I believe has never yet been noticed, but which may excite to further meditations. The whole story of Oedipus, quite in the form in which we find it among the Hellenes, occurs also as an Arabic tradition, without change except in the persons. One of the many Nimrods which the Arabic legend seized upon (six Namâridâ ‘Nimrods’ are commonly reckoned),^[521] son of Kenaʿan and Salchâ, is the Oedipus of the Arabic story. In consequence of an intimidating prophecy, he is exposed by his parents, that he may die and not be a source of danger to his father. But he is miraculously suckled by a tigress (whence his name Nimrûd is said to be derived, for nimr is ‘tiger’ in Arabic), and subsequently brought up by the inhabitants of a neighbouring village. When grown to manhood he contrives to bring together a great army, and becomes involved in a war against his father Kenaʿan, whom he slays in the decisive battle. He marches in triumph into his capital, and marries his mother Salchâ. Thus the outlines of the Oedipus-story have been attached to the solar hero of the Semites, Nimrod the hunter. The story is told at full length in the long introduction to the Romance of ʿAntar (I. 13 seq.), and I leave it to readers competent to judge, to decide between two possibilities. Either the Arabs borrowed from the Greeks and simply took to themselves this version of the Oedipus-story; in this case the remarkable fact of such a transference would provoke a searching enquiry into the middle points between Greece and Arabia, which made it possible to borrow mythology, and also into the extent and nature of such borrowings. Or we may assume that the story was independently and gradually formed by the Arabs without external influence, so that the elements of the Arabian as of the Greek story reach back to the primeval age of the creation of myths, and that with the Arabs also it was originally a myth of the war of the Sun with the Night, and his union with the Evening-glow. The latter view is favoured by the circumstance that in the Arabian version the story of Oedipus putting out his eyes is wanting—a feature which would certainly have been taken if the Arabian story were only a borrowed one. But the above-mentioned questions ought to be investigated before any decision in favour of one of these possibilities can be arrived at, however inclined I may be from personal feeling towards the assumption of borrowing.^[522]

The story of Lot and his daughters as told in Genesis in one of the Biblical passages most notorious for its obscenity; let us see, however, what appears to have been its original meaning. When the aged Lôṭ and his family were saved from the Divine judgment on Sodom and Gomorrha, which converted those cities into a sea of bitumen, he left his wife behind him, converted into a pillar of salt, at a point of the coast of the Dead Sea, which is still shown to credulous travellers, and lived in a cave with his two unmarried daughters. These made their old father drunk in two successive nights, and perpetrated with him an act of unchastity which is to us almost unmentionable (Gen. XIX. 30–38). But the science of Mythology has often saved the honour and moral worth of primitive humanity by restoring the original mythological meaning of many a story; and so here we shall be able to prove that the Lôṭ-story, in the form in which we have received it, is only the tradition of the myth of the Sun and the Night, the understanding of which was lost in a later unmythological generation. Through the clever succession of ideas suggested by the solar theory, the science of Mythology on Aryan ground at one blow caused the ideal heights of Olympus to tower in their original purity above the endless chain of scandalous acts which mythology misunderstood attributed to the immoral inhabitants of the mountain of the Gods; and the method which guides us in these studies will aim at the same result on the domain of Hebrew mythology.

We return to Lôṭ. This name (formed from the root lûṭ ‘to cover’) denotes ‘he who covers.’ ‘Darkness covers the earth, and clouds the nations’ (Is. LX. 2). ‘For I did not shrink before the Darkness, when thick darkness covered (everything) before my face’ (Job XXIII. 17). ‘Thou hast pressed us down to the dwelling-place of the sea-monsters, and covered us over with deep shadow’ (Ps. XLIV. 20 [19]). The Semitic designations of darkness are mostly formed from roots denoting ‘to cover’: so e.g. ʿalâṭâ in Hebrew, ʿishâ in Arabic;^[523] and the most prominent Semitic word for Night, layil, laylâ, etymologically means only something that covers.^[524] In Aryan languages also, the Sanskrit Varuṇa and the Greek οὔρανος, which denote the overclouded sky, are formed from the root var ‘to cover,’ in opposition to the bright day-sky, Mitra.^[525] Keeping on Semitic ground, we find in Arabic copious illustrations of this conception. The words ġashiya, damasa, ġatha, saja, etc. (compare ġardaḳat al-leyl, taʾaṭṭam al-leyl), combine the notions of Darkness and Covering-up. Accordingly the coming on of night is expressed by janna al-ẓalâm, literally ‘the darkness has covered up’ (e.g. Romance of ʿAntar, V. 80. 3); and for the simple words ‘of an evening,’ or ‘at night,’ the Arabic expression is taḥt al-leyl ‘under the night,’^[526] or fuller taḥt astâr al-ẓalâm ‘under the veils of the night’ (ʿAntar, X. 70, 1); and the Night is above the day, ‘aleyhâ.’^[527] The Night is a garment or carpet spread out over the Day. ‘It is he,’ it is said in the Ḳorân (Sûr. XXV. v. 49), ‘who made the Night as a garment or veil for you.’ ‘We have made the Night as a clothing’ (Sûr. LXXVIII. v. 10).^[528] The Arabic poet Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî uses the most palpable expression for this conception of the darkness of night. Describing his swift camels, on which he traversed great distances at Night, he says (I. 131. v. 4) ‘in their swift course they tore the mantle of night,’ i.e. they ran so quickly that they unrolled the garment which covers the surface of the earth at night. On this conception of the nature of Night I believe a peculiar expression in the Arabic language to be based. In the old classical Arabic, nights which either have no moonshine at all, or have none at the beginning and only a little quite at the end, are called layâlin durʿun; and when a verb is required, adraʿa al-shahr is said. This adraʿa is unquestionably a denominative verb from dirʿ, which signifies a ‘breast-plate,’ or a breast-covering of any sort. The Arabic expressions just quoted are founded on the idea that the breast (al-ṣadr), i.e. the upper side, the first part, of such nights is dark, covered by a garment, so that only the uncovered lower side or end is visible. In the cosmogony of Mohammedan legends, Night is represented as a curtain, ḥijâb.^[529]

The clothing of the Night is of black colour, leylâ ḥâlikat al-jilbâb, as is said in Arabic,^[530] (compare μελάμπεπλος νύξ^[531]), a ‘pitchy mantle,’ as Shakespeare says,

And in Arabic poetry also we meet with night described as a ‘pitchy mantle.’ For the poet Abû-l-Shibl says in a remarkable elegy^[533]:

The darker the Night, the thicker is the black cloak with which it is provided. Even modern languages have expressions like thick darkness (Hungarian vastag setétség); in Arabic a very dark night is called a night with a heavy covering, leyl murjahinn.^[534]

The name Lôṭ, accordingly, signifies, like the Hellenic female forms Kalyke, Kalypso (from καλύπτω), the Covering Night. It is very significant of the Night that the Greek figures are represented as weaving clothes for the Thunderer:^[535] they weave the cloak with which they cover over the world when they spread darkness over it. Surely no one will after all this doubt that the name Lot is a designation of the Covering Night. Should this be still doubtful, perhaps the following fact from the domain of the Arabic language may bring conviction. Everyone knows the Arabic word kâfir, at least in its usual meaning of Infidel. Even the earlier Arabian philologians, who, notwithstanding frequent amusing whims and hobbies, often exhibit a fine feeling and very sober judgment as to etymology, said that this word received the meaning Infidel only through the dogmatism of Islâm, that it originally denoted the Coverer, and that the transition of meaning was founded on the idea that the Infidel covers up God’s omnipotence. Similarly in Hebrew the verb kâphar is said of God when he forgives (i.e. covers) the sins of men; in Arabic ġafar.^[536] In Arabic the Unthankful is also a kâfir, a ‘Coverer,’ since he covers the blessings he has received: and in late Hebrew he is similarly termed kephûy ṭôbhâ ‘one who covers up the good.’^[537] In short, the kâfir is properly the Coverer. Now the darkness of night is called kâfir by old Arabian poets. We have already (in the Tenth Section of this chapter, p. 134), quoted for another purpose the verse of the poet of the tribe Mâzin: ‘The Shining one stretches his right hand towards him who covers up,’ where the latter is kâfir, the Night. The celebrated poet Lebîd, too, says in his prize-poem (Muʿallaḳâ, v. 65): ‘Until the stars stretch out their hands towards the kâfir, and the weaknesses of the boundaries are covered over by their darkness,’

And the poet al-Ḥumeyd says, ‘They (the camels) go to water before the breaking of the morning, whilst the son of splendour (the dawn) is still hiding in the cloak,’ i.e. before it is yet day,

A very witty use of the application of the epithet kâfir to the Night is make by the poet Behâ al-Dîn Zuheyr. He would fain prolong the duration of the night, which passes away far too soon for all the pleasures that it brings him in the midst of a merry circle, and so he says: ‘To me is due from thee the reward of a Champion of the Faith [in battle against the infidels], if it is true that Night is a kâfir (an infidel, properly a ‘coverer’),

As the Darkness of night is what covers over and hides, so on the other hand the Dawn, or the Sun in general, is that which uncovers and discloses. We have met with this conception before in the case of Noah (p. 131). In Arabic safara or asfara is said of the uncovering of any concealed object, and the same words are used of the breaking-forth of the morning sun. There is no doubt that this latter usage is deduced from the signification ‘to reveal, uncover;’ the instance quoted in the lexicons, ‘The night which removes the cover from the morning of the Friday’ (yusfir ʿan), i.e. which precedes Friday, shews by the preposition ʿan that ‘to uncover’ is the fundamental signification. Thus the Arabic etymologists whom I mentioned in a former work^[540] may be right in a certain sense in tracing back most of the derivations of the root safar to this sense. But in Egyptian and in the Arabic of the desert the word al-sufrâ denotes the Sunset, the reason of which is by no means clear.^[541] No doubt can now be entertained that our Lot is identical with his namesake the Arabic Kâfir the Concealer, the Covering Night. Now we can consider the myth. ‘The daughters of Night form a sexual connexion with their father.’ When the evening glow, which is a daughter of the Night (for, as we have seen, the myth identifies the morning and the evening glow), unites with the shades of night and becomes darker and dimmer, so as at length to lose itself in the night, the myth-creators said, ‘The daughters of Lot, the Coverer, are going to bed with their father.’ From the bright, lively character, which the myth must have attributed to the Glow in comparison with the dark, heavy Night, they would naturally regard the aged Lot as the victim of an intrigue of his lustful daughters; whereas in the Aryan myth it is Prajâpati who uses force against his daughter Ushas. The names of Lot’s daughters are not given in the Old Testament; but we know them from another source. The Arabic legend in which the story of Lot, communicated by Jews, likewise finds a place, tells us their names. It is scarcely credible that these are pure inventions of the Arabs; it is much more probable that they received them, as they did much else, from the traditions of the Jews. But the Jewish tradition itself has lost the names, as it has lost much else that was not written down. In the Arabic statements, however, there occur such various versions of the names as to show clearly that they are instances of the corruption by which foreign names are constantly ruined beyond recognition in Arabic manuscripts. One version gives Rayya as the name of the elder, Zoġar as that of the younger (see Yâḳût, II. 933. 22, 934. 16); and from the latter a town is said to be named, which is mentioned in some ancient Arabic poems. Ibn Badrûn (ed. Dozy, p. 8) calls them something like Rasha and Raʿûsha (or Raʿvasha?); Masʿûdî (Prairies d’or, II. 193) Zaha and Raʿva. Among these differing forms, every one of which is probably based on a corrupt text, Zaha is the only one that may confirm the solar character of Lot’s daughters in the myth. But I think the myth of Lot is clear enough in itself to dispense with any such problematic confirmation.

If the conception of Kerûbhîm (Cherubim) is native to the Hebrews, and not borrowed at a later period from foreign parts—a question which must be regarded as still an open one—then we may find here also the Coverer (compare kerûbh has-sôkhêkh ‘the cherub that covereth,’ Ezek. XXVIII. 14), the covering cloud; and hence may be derived the function of concealing and covering which was given to the cherubim in the later ceremonial, as also their connexion with the curtains.^[542] ‘Jahveh rides on the Cherub,’ says one of the later religious poets (2 Sam. XXII. 11), ‘and appears on the wings of the wind; he makes darkness round about him, tents, collections of water, gloomy clouds.’ Here the dark overclouded rainy sky is described; and when Jahveh sends rain over the earth, he rides on the Cherub, and ‘mists are beneath his feet,’ and the dust which he turns up while riding, forms the shechâḳîm (properly the dust), the overcast sky. Jahveh is described in other passages also as riding on clouds (Is. XIX. 1). Accordingly kerûbh would originally denote the covering cloud, and whatever is connected with the Cherubim in later theological conceptions would be a transformation of ancient mythological ideas.^[543] Now the root krb is used in Himyarite inscriptions in titles of kings, as Mukrib Saba, or Tobbaʿ kerîb, i.e. as Von Kremer explains them,^[544] ‘Protector of Saba,’ ‘Protecting Tobbaʿ.’ This is easily explained by the fact that in the Semitic languages words signifying ‘to protect’ are often derived from the fundamental idea of ‘covering.’ ‘The Cherubim spread forth their wings’ (1 Kings VIII. 7), i.e. they cover. To spread out the wings (kenâphayîm) over some one is in Biblical language the usual expression for the protection which is allotted to him. In Arabic the same word (kanaf) signifies not only a bird’s wing, but also concealment, shade (compare Ps. XCI. 1–4), and protection.^[545]

The opinion that the Cherubim were borrowed from foreign parts is accordingly much less probable than that which maintains that they originated with the Hebrews;^[546] and the latter view receives further support from the fact that the Cherubim can be easily fitted without any violence into the system of Hebrew mythology. It is again supported by the connexion between Cherubim and Seraphim, the latter of which are originally Hebrew. This connexion agrees moreover with the results of our mythological researches. As Kerûbh as ‘Coverer’ belongs to the dark cloudy sky, so the Serâphîm must be a mythological conception pertaining to the same series, if we adopt the correct interpretation of them as Dragons,^[547] and remember the mythological meaning of serpents and dragons (supra, p. 27, 184, sq.). It then becomes probable that the theological significance of Cherubim and Seraphim belongs to the remains of the very earliest form of Hebrew religion, and approximates to the facts of which I shall speak at Chapter VI. § 5, pp. 224, 5.