Thus we see how the Hebrews in Canaan learned much as to religion as well as to politics from the conquered neighbouring aborigines. The religious ideas produced on the nomadic stage from the nomadic mythology were wiped away, and only a few relics of the old nomadic religion remained to a late age, either actual residues or mere memories. Spiritually poor, the nation was handed over to the powerful influence of the already formed culture of Canaan, and thus condemned to mere receptivity. Accordingly, they never had an opportunity of further developing their myths on the agricultural stage and converting them into elements of a religion. Hence comes the remarkable fact that from this point the myths of the Hebrews cease to grow, in the way in which those of the Aryan nations grew. Only a small cycle of myths of the Sun and of Civilisation were formed at this time; and the regular advance of the Mythical to the Religious was arrested by that religious influence which pressed in with full force from outside. The most complete and rounded-off solar myth extant in Hebrew is that of Shimshôn (Samson), a cycle of mythical conceptions fully comparable with the Greek myth of Herakles. But Samson never got so far as to be admitted, like Herakles, into the society of the gods. Those who say that mythologies have converted Samson to a _deus solaris_ make a malicious perversion of the truth, merely because they set themselves against any mythological investigation on Semitic ground.[632] Whilst the Hebrews were thus taking in from the Canaanites things quite new to them, by which the regular further growth of their own was arrested, a considerable portion of their own store of legends must naturally have been starved out. For whatever ceases to grow, falls into slow decay, and at last disappears and leaves no sign behind. Here is discovered the origin of the defectiveness and fragmentary nature which strikes us in reconstructing the old Hebrew myths, when compared with the richness and variety of the Aryan myths among those nations which have passed through all stages of civilisation regularly and without obstruction or perverting influence from foreign forces.