to the factors which are concealed behind such a conception. In the case of Esau too, the national story makes him choose his wives from the daughters of Canaan, to whom Isaac, the patriarch of the Hebrews, and Rebekah the mother of the tribe, strongly object (Gen. XXVII. 46, XXVIII. 1, 6, 8); so much so that the mother would rather die than that her favourite son Jacob should also take one of them to wife, and the father repeatedly urges on him to have nothing to do with that people. On this very occasion it is mentioned with emphasis that Esau is identical with Edom, or according to another version is the father of Edom (Gen. XXXVI. 1, 43). The national pride of a people roused to a consciousness of its worth must be strengthened by the memories of national heroes, and find nourishment and life in such memories; and this impulse works with a revived force even in later times, in which historical reminiscences of the olden time are beginning to fade. The Hebrew people found heroes even in some mythical figures; they were turned into Hebrew national heroes, and their celestial contest became a national war against the Philistines, and was removed to the age of the Shôpheṭîm or Judges, which was in memory connected with the hardest struggles and fiercest wars against the Philistines. The blinded Shimshôn, Samson, the setting sun robbed of his locks and his eyesight, is brought forward as a victim of the perfidious cunning of the Canaanites. The Goat Yâʿêl (Jael), and the Lightning Bârâḳ, the Smasher Gideʿôn, mere mythical expressions (clearly exhibited as such by Steinthal), are sent to battle against the Philistines; and the attractive part of the handsome ruddy sharp-eyed youth who slays the monster of darkness by throwing stones, is assigned as a piece of biography to the historical hero-king David, who slays the Philistine giant Goliath in single combat, and delivers the Hebrew people from their dangerous enemy.[639] From the last example we see that, besides mythical figures becoming historic personages in the service of the national idea, historical figures also may receive biographical features proper to mythic heroes. Not only are the figures of the myth converted into historical ones by assigning to them a part in historical events, but events of mythology are shifted into historical times by fastening them on to historical persons.