old blind 'Smiling' one, with a large family, and prepared to take up again his old quarrel with his hairy brother Esau, the hunter. The living myth does not treat these events as following one after the other. To work up together the various members of the group of myths which assemble round a common centre or a common name, is not the business of the myth proper. The epic impulse first begins to act in this direction, and gives the first incitement to the harmonising of myths.
We will linger a few minutes longer with Isaac.
He loves and marries Rebekah, or as she is called in the Hebrew text, Ribhḳâ. The Dutch historian of religions C. P. Tiele sees in this name an appellation of the fruitful, rich earth,[1] a view which is partially supported by the etymology of the word. 'The laughing sky of day or the Sun-god (surely originally only the Sun?) is united in marriage with the fatness and fruitfulness of the earth.' This conception of the myth, notwithstanding its etymological correctness, has little to recommend it to my feeling, but I cannot propose any better in its stead. I only add, that if Tiele's conception is correct, we shall certainly understand better the feature of the myth which makes 'the Laughing one' (Isaac) of his two sons prefer Esau (who will be proved to be a solar character), while the mother's love attached itself more to Jacob. Esau is a mythical figure homogeneous with Isaac; but the fruitful earth is more closely connected with the dark rainy sky, as a kindred and homogeneous phenomenon.
Another notable point in the myth of Isaac is blindness. 'And when Isaac was old, his eyes became too dim to see' (Gen. XXVII. 1). It is an idea peculiarly mythical (which found an echo in poetry), to regard the Sun as an Eye, which looks down with its sharp sight upon the earth. In the Egyptian monuments and in the Book of the Dead the Sun is often represented as an eye, provided
- ↑ Vergelijkende geschiedenis van de egyptische en mesopotamische Godsdiensten, Amsterdam 1872, p. 434.
