Note 6 — Chapter XII · Strife.

We may regard Esau-Samaël then as the Devil of Strife. His traditional son Cain was like himself a ‘murderer from the beginning;’6 but in that early period the conflict was between the nomad and the huntsman on one side, on the other the agriculturist and the cattle-breeder, who was never regarded as a noble figure among the Semitic tribes. In the course of time some Semitic tribes became agriculturists, and among them, in defiance of his archæological character, Samaël was saddled with the evils that beset them. As an ox he brought rinderpest. But his visible appearance was still more generally that of the raven, the wild ass, the hog which brought scurvy; while in shape of a dog he was so generally believed to bring deadly disease, that it would seem as if ‘hydrophobia’ was specially attributed to him.