Page:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu/60

20 of this literature. Other nations have failed to transform their myths into such a wealth of reports about their first progenitors. What meagre accounts the Hellenes give of their national ancestors, in comparison with this rich and varied Patriarchal history! A special peculiarity of the historical development of the Hebrew people was active here, bringing the national idea into the foreground, and exerting its influence in this direction on the transformation of the primitive mythological materials. But instead of this, other nations, among whom our above-named example, the richly endowed Hellenes, are to be reckoned, have chosen rather to transform the figures of their myths into Gods and godborn Heroes.

The figures of Gods, which were developed out of Hebrew myths, very early retired into the background. It was partly the Canaanite influence to which the Hebrew people very early succumbed, and partly the progressing monotheistic tendency, that allowed no theology consistently developed out of mythology to maintain itself for any length of time. Of Heroes, however, there is no want in the memory of the Hebrews. In that region as well as elsewhere, the Heroes had originally borne a different meaning and belonged to mythology; and their heroic character is, on the Hebrew as well as on the Aryan domain, secondary, produced by the psychological and linguistic process which caused the natural meaning of mythological figures to vanish from the mind.

Now although these Heroes are originally gigantic persons bound to no definite place or time, yet they are gradually condensed into individuals and regarded as more and more concrete and definite. What is told of them puts off its generality and indefiniteness. They are conceived as belonging to certain places where their heroic deeds were performed in other words, the legends of Heroes are localised. Their activity is assigned to a definite time, they are inserted in a chronological frame,