An example will make this clear, and show that linguistic investigation and mythology have an equal share in the instruction to be derived from such inquiries.
We often meet in Hebrew with the verb hishkîm, denoting 'to perform some occupation early in the morning' (the occupation itself being determined by a dependent verb), ὀρθρεύειν. It represents the so-called Hiph‘îl-stem, which has regularly the sense of a factitive, but is not unfrequently used to express the entrance into a certain time or place, the doing of an act in certain conditions of time or place. In this case the Hiph‘îl verb is always derived from the noun which describes this place or time. Here the conditions of time concern us most. We say, for instance, he‘erîbh with the sense 'to enter on the evening,' 'to do something in the evening;' e.g. 'the Philistine came near morning and evening,' hashkêm we-ha‘arêbh (I Sam. XVII. 16). The last word is derived from, the noun ‘erebh, 'evening.' From the word shachar, which denotes 'the dawn,' is formed at a late stage of the language hishchîr, 'to do something at that time;' and this Hiph‘îl form of shachar can then appear beside that from ‘erebh exactly like hishkîm in an earlier age.[1] Now of course this verb hishkîm must have a noun for its basis, which would denote 'morning.' But no such is found in the known Hebrew thesaurus, for the nominal form belonging to this root, shekhem, means 'neck,' and etymologists have given themselves much useless labour in trying to find any tolerable connexion between the meaning of this noun and hishkîm. The most bearable which they could give is that one who rises early to go after his business loads his neck with labour.[2] But any one may reply, Does one who does his work after dinner or in the evening load his neck with no labour? Considering the relation in which these Hiph‘il-forms stand to the nouns from which they are derived, we might almost apriori assert that in the ancient language
