The entire materials of legend are clothed in a national garb. The Hebrews in Canaan retained the nomadic tribe-divisions. Every tribe was provided with an ancestor, and every one of these ancestors was made a son of Jacob, who was at the same time identified with Israel. The twelve stars of the nightly sky descended upon the new people of Canaan, and took on themselves the duties of Eponymi. The history of each of these fathers of tribes became the tribe’s historical reminiscence. The national passion, the revived consciousness of individuality, blew the glimmering sparks of story-building into a clear flame, and determined the direction or tendency of the stories. The history of this epoch suggests a motive for the prevailingly _national_ development of the Hebrew materials of legend. Hence it comes to pass that the individualised figures of the Hebrew myth appear as national ancestors and fathers of tribes, some as fathers of the Hebrew people with a negative spirit of exclusiveness towards everything foreign, some as fathers of the hostile tribes, combating the ancestors of the Hebrews. Thus the ancestors reflect in a dim primitive age their own fortunes and relation to the tribes of Canaan. The same psychological process which in later time caused the Agadic interpreters to declare the principle: maʿasê âbhôth sîmân lebhânîm ‘the deeds of the Patriarchs are types for their descendants,’[640] was, inverted, the creative cause of the legends of the fathers and their doings.