Note 380 — Chapter V · THE MOST PROMINENT FIGURES IN HEBREW MYTHOLOGY.

I am fully aware that in Hebrew poetry arrows are frequently, indeed most frequently, to be understood of lightning. ‘He sends out his arrows and scatters them; lightnings in great number and discomfits them’ (Ps. XVIII. 15 [14]). But the arrows of Joseph’s adversaries must from the very nature of the myth be rays of the sun. If the hunter is the Sun, then the rays can only be something which the hunter in that ancient time used for shooting. Mythology is not the product of a well-thought-out consistent system, and so nothing is more likely than that two different things should be treated in the same way by virtue of some feature common to both. Thus the solar ray and the lightning are the same in mythology—an Arrow.