man's immortality.[1]
Both figures, that of the phoenix and that of the palm, are equally appropriate and pleasing in the mouth of Job; but apart from the fact that the palm everywhere, where it otherwise occurs, is called תּמר, this would be the only passage where it occurs in the book of Job, which, in spite of its richness in figures taken from plants, nowhere mentions the palm, - a fact which is perhaps not accidental.[2]
On the contrary, we must immediately welcome a reference to the Arabico-Egyptian myth of the phoenix, that can be proved, in a book which also otherwise thoroughly blends things Egyptian with Arabian, and the more so since (6) even the Egyptian language itself supports חול or חוּל as a name of the phoenix; for ΑΛΛΩΗ ΑΛΛΟΗ is explained in the Coptico-Arabic glossaries by es-semendel (the Arab. name of the phoenix, or at least a phoenix-like bird, that, like the salamander, semendar, cannot be burned), and in Kircher by avis Indica, species Phoenicis.[3] חול is Hebraized from this Egyptian name of the
- ↑ Not without reference to Clemens Romanus, in his I. Ep. ad Corinth. c. xxv., according to which the phoenix is an Arabian bird, which lives five hundred years, then dies in a nest which it builds of incense, myrrh, and spices, and leaves behind it the larva of a young bird, which, when grown up, brings the nest with the bones of its father and places it upon the altar of the sun at the Egyptian Heliopolis. The source of this is Herodotus ii. 73) who, however, has an egg of myrrh instead of a nest of myrrh); and Tacitus, Ann. vi. 28, gives a similar narrative. Lactantius gives a different version in his poem on the phoenix, according to which this, the only one of its race, “built its nest in a country that remained untouched by the deluge.” The Jewish tragedy writer, Ezekiêlos, agrees more nearly with the statement of Arabia being the home of the phoenix. In his drama Ἐξαγωγή, a spy sent forward before the pilgrim band of Israel, he states that among other things the phoenix was also seen; vid., my Gesch. der jüd. Poesie, S. 219.
- ↑ Without attempting thereby to explain the phenomenon observed above, we nevertheless regard it as worthy of remark, that in general the palm is not a common tree either in Syria or in Palestine. “At present there are not in all Syria five hundred palm-trees; and even in the olden times there was no quantity of palms, except in the valley of the Jordan, and on the sea-coast.” - Wetzst.
- ↑ Vid., G. Seyffarth, Die Phoenix-Periode, Deutsche Morgenländ. Zeitschr. iii. (1849) 63ff., according to which alloê (Hierogl. koli) is the name of the false phoenix without head-feathers; bêne or bêni (Hierogl. bnno) is the name of the true phoenix with head-feathers, and the name of the palm also. Alloê, which accords with חול, is quite secured as a name of the phoenix.
