The task of the following chapter will therefore be to find a place in the category of what is _common_ to the _whole_ of human kind for the myth of the Hebrews; in other words, to prove the existence of the myth-plots on Hebrew ground. As it is not my object to exhaust all the materials, to present a system already perfectly worked out on every side, or to erect a building with all its rooms and stories stuffed full, I shall confine myself to that which, after competent and sober philological criticism, can be acknowledged as certain and indubitable. I hope that other investigators, who will gain from the method pursued here a rich treasury of material, will then follow up these safe results by gleanings of their own. § 1. In the designation of the Heaven the Semite starts from the sensuous impression of _height_, and therefore forms the names denoting it from the roots _samâ_ (shama) and _râm_, both of which express the idea of ‘being high.’ To the latter group belongs e.g. the Ethiopic rayam,[244] which denotes _heaven_. Both roots are combined in the Phenician Shâmîn-rûm. One of the most prominent figures of Hebrew mythology belongs to this category: Abh-râm the _High Father_, with his innumerable host of descendants.[245] We have seen above that in his view of nature the nomad begins with the sky at night. The sky by itself is the dark, nightly, or clouded heaven; the sunshine on the sky is an accessory. Hence it comes that in Arabic the word Sky (samâ) is very often used even for ‘Rain;’ and the notions of _rain_ and _sky_ are so closely interwoven that even the traces of rain on the earth are called sky.[246] In the language of the Bongo people there is only one word for sky and rain, hetōrro.[247] On Semitic ground the Assyrian divine name Rammanu or Raman must be mentioned here. If this name has any etymological connexion with the root _râm_ ‘to be high,’ as Hesychius and some modern scholars say, though others derive it from _raʿam_ ‘thunder,’ Raʿamân ‘the Thunderer,’[248] then we find here again the primitive mythological idea that the intrinsically High is the dark stormy sky, or, personified, the God of Storms. So also in the old Hebrew myth the ‘High’ is the nightly or rainy sky. The best known myth that the Hebrews told of their Abh-râm is the story of the intended sacrifice of his only son Yiṣchâḳ, commonly called Isaac. But what is Yiṣchâḳ? Literally translated, the word denotes ‘he laughs,’ or ‘the Laughing.’ In the Semitic languages, especially in proper names and epithets, the use of the aorist[249] (even in the second person, e.g. in the Arabic name Tazîd) is very frequent where we should employ a participle.[250] So here. Now who is the ‘He laughs,’ the ‘Smiling one'? No other but 'He who sits in heaven and laughs’ (Ps. II. 4), whom the mythology of almost all nations and their later poetry too likes to call the Laughing or Smiling one. When, as Plutarch tells in his Life of