[Emptiness of the Sun-god Joshua hypothesis] Now no one nowadays accepts the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history. It is a compilation of older sources, which have already been sifted a good deal, and will undergo yet more sifting in the future. The question before us does not concern its historicity, but is this: Does the Book of Joshua, whether history or not, support the hypothesis that Joshua was ever regarded as God of the Sun and of Fruitfulness? Was ever such a god known of or worshipped in the tribe of Ephraim or in Israel at large? In this old Hebrew epic or saga Joshua is a man of flesh and blood. How did these gentlemen get it into their heads that he was a Sun-god? For this statement there is not a shadow of evidence. They have invented it. As he took the Israelites dryshod over the Jordan, why have they not made a River-god of him? And as, according to Drews, he was so interested in fruitfulness and foreskins, why not suppose he was a Priapic god? They are much too modest. We should at least expect "the composite myth" to include this element, inasmuch as his mystic votaries at Jerusalem were far from seeing eye to eye with Paul in the matter of circumcision. [The Sun-myth stage of comparative mythology] There was years ago a stage in the Comparative History of Religions when the Sun-myth hypothesis was invoked to explain almost everything. The shirt of Nessus, for example, in which Heracles perished, was a parable of the sun setting amidst a wrack of scattered clouds. The Sun-myth was the key which fitted every lock, and was employed unsparingly by pioneers of comparative mythology like F. Max Müller and Sir George Cox. It was taken for granted that early man must have begun by deifying the great cosmic powers, by venerating Sun and Moon, the Heavens, the Mountains, the Sea, as holy and divine beings, because they, rather than humble and homelier objects, impress us moderns by their sublimity and overwhelming force. Man was supposed from the first to have felt his transitoriness, his frailty and weakness, and to have contrasted therewith the infinities of space and time, the majesty of the starry hosts of heaven, the majestic and uniform march of sun and moon, the mighty rumble of the thunder. Max Müller thought that religion began when the cowering savage was crushed by awe of nature and of her stupendous forces, by the infinite lapses of time, by the yawning abysses of space. As a matter of fact, savages do not entertain these sentiments of the dignity and majesty of nature. On the contrary, a primitive man thinks that he can impose his paltry will on the elements; that he knows how to unchain the wind, to oblige the rain to fall; that he can, like the ancient witches of Thessaly, control sun and moon and stars by all sorts of petty magical rites, incantations, and gestures, as Joshua made the sun stand still till his band of brigands had won the battle. It is to the imagination