‘Esau is a hunter, Jacob a herdsman, dwelling in tents.’ _The Sun is a hunter_: he discharges his arrows, i.e. his rays, and does battle with them against darkness, wind and clouds. Why should I adduce examples from Aryan mythology, where this view occurs in manifold variations and is one of the commonest?[371] The Sun’s arrows are golden, wherefore Apollo is called χρυσότοξος Πύθιος (Pindar, _Ol_. XIV. 15). This mythical idea is frequently reflected in the composition of language. In Egyptian, the combination _st_ denotes ‘flame, ray, and arrow,’ all at once; and the Slavonic strêla, with which the German _Strahl_ ‘ray’ is connected, means ‘arrow.’[372] ‘The Sun can no longer bend his bow’ = he has lost his power, is therefore an expression for the setting of the sun. When Herakles finds himself too weak to bend his bow and shoot his arrows, he feels that his end is approaching. When the Sun regains his powers at the outburst of spring, after a long winter in which his arrows had been at rest, Odysseus (Ulysses), a solar wanderer like Cain, seizes his bow to shoot off his shafts again.[373] We see the same in the myths of the Semites. An epithet of the Sun-god Bêl is Nipru, which, according to Sir Henry Rawlinson, signifies ‘hunter;’[374] and the city Resen, the building of which is attributed in the Bible to Nimrod, is called in the historical cuneiform inscriptions the ‘City of the Hunter.’[375] This Nimrod himself, against whom Abraham the Nomad contends in the same sense in which Jacob the Nomad against Esau the Hunter, is a hunter (Gen. X. 9). The etymological explanation of the name Nimrôd cannot be established until the really primary signification of the root mârad has been satisfactorily traced; for it may be considered certain, that at the myth-creating stage mankind had no sense of the idea of ‘insurrection,’ which could only be formed after some advance in social life, and could not therefore endow a word with that special meaning. This signification can consequently only be secondary and metaphorical.[376] As to the grammatical form of the name Nimrôd, it is not impossible that, like Yiṣchâk ‘Isaac,’ Yiphtâch ‘Jephthah,’ &c., it is a verbal form. If so, it would be the third person of the imperfect, formed by prefixing _n_, as in Aramaic. Schrader[377] regards this prefixed _n_ in Nimrôd as a sound used for the formation of _nouns_. I will also call to mind incidentally that on Babylonian ground we meet also with the name of a god Merôd.[378] The wars of Nimrod with Abraham are not preserved in the Old Testament, but are in Agadic tradition, which has also retained from the Nimrod-myth an expression of a truly solar character; that _three hundred and fifty kings_ sit before Nimrod, to serve him.[379] Similarly against Joseph, the giver of increase, the rainy sky, fight ‘the _men with arrows_’[380] (baʿalê chiṣṣîm, Gen. XLIX. 23), ‘who exasperate him and _shoot_ and persecute him.’ So again Jacob fights against Esau the _hunter_.