Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical DevelopmentGoldziher, Ignác
Religion
Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development
Goldziher, Ignác
Jewish mythology; Judaism -- History -- To 70 A.D.
He is brought into connexion with the building of towns—a solar
feature. He lives exactly three hundred and sixty-five years, the number
of days of the solar year; which cannot be accidental.[358] And even
then he did not die, but ‘Enoch, _walked_ with Elôhîm, and was no more
[to be seen], for Elôhîm took _him away_.’ In the old times when the
figure of Enoch was imagined, this was doubtless called Enoch’s
Ascension to heaven, as in the late traditional legend. Ascensions to
heaven are generally acknowledged to be solar features. Herakles among
the Greeks, Romulus the city-founder among the Latins, and several
heroes of American mythology,[359] agree in this. The same feature also
often attaches itself even to historical persons—e.g. to the legend of
the Prophet Elijah, the ‘hairy man’ who ascends to heaven on ‘a chariot
of fire and horses of fire,’[360] indeed this as well as other mythical
features has been better preserved in the case of this favourite hero of
Israelitish prophecy than in that of the former purely mythical
personage.
Wachsmuth[361] expressed a conjecture that the old Greek god Helios, who
drives round the vault of heaven on a fiery chariot, has a share in the
phenomenon, so frequent in modern Greece, that the prophet Ilias (Elias
or Elijah) is especially venerated on mountain-tops. The temples and
altars of Helios in ancient times were similarly situated on high hills;
and the casual similarity of sound between Ilios and Ilias, together
with the identity of the myths concerning each, in this case caused the
old heathen worship to be preserved and transferred to the name of the
Biblical prophet. But this certainly cannot have taken place, as Otto
Keller lately flippantly declared in a lecture on the ‘Discovery of Troy
by Henry Schliemann,’ 'from a sort of childish attention to the wants of
great Prophet, inasmuch as the people wished to make the fiery journey
as easy as possible for him, and therefore made him mount the chariot at
the nearest point to heaven.[362]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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