Page:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu/136

96 (not to the night-sky itself), and to the Lightning, which is even called al-ḍâḥik, 'the Laughing.' In the Romance of ʿAntar there frequently occurs the expression 'the Lightning laughed' (al-barḳ yaḍḥak, e.g. XXIV. 65. 6). Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî, an excellent Arabic poet, says in an elegy 011 the death of his father:

We have in passing treated the words 'He who sits in heaven laughs' in the second Psalm as a mythical reminiscence, which originally referred to the Sun, but then, like similar instances which we shall see, was employed by the poet in another sense. But there is nothing to exclude the possibility that the Laughter of him who sits in heaven may refer in this passage not to the sweet smile of the bright sunny sky, but to the wild raging of the Thunderer, pictured in the myths as scornful laughter, as F. L. W. Schwartz shows by many examples from classical antiquity. This conception would also be more suitable to the context of the passage in question in the second Psalm, where mention is made of derisive laughter. However this be, the 'Smiling one' whom the 'High Father' intends to slay, is the smiling day, or more closely defined the smiling sunset, which gets the worst of the contest with the night-sky and disappears.

§2. The same myth is also given as follows: ' Jephthah sacrifices or kills his daughter. In its later ethical or religious transformation given in Judges XI. 29–40, it is known to everyone. This story is especially worthy of consideration in connexion with the science of Mythology,