furnished by the fourth tablet of the Babylonian creation-story, which describes the struggle between the god Marduk (Merodach) and the dragon Tiamat or Tiamtu (a fem. corresponding to the Heb. masc. form t'hom 'the deep'), for which see Delitzsch's Assyrische Lesestücke, 3rd edition, Smith and Sayce's Chaldæan Genesis, p. 107 &c., and Budge in Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, Nov. 6, 1883.
Nor must I forget the 'fool-hardy' giant (K'sīl = Orion) in ix. 9, xxxviii. 31, nor the dim allusion to the sky-reaching mountain of the north, rich in gold (comp. Isa. xiv. 13, and Sayce, Academy, Jan. 28, 1882, p. 64), and the myth-derived synonyms for Sheól—Death, Abaddon, and 'the shadow of death' (or, deep gloom), xxvi. 6, xxviii. 22, xxxviii. 17, also the 'king of terrors' (xviii. 14), who like Pluto or Yama rules in the Hebrew Underworld. Observe too the instances in which a primitive myth has died down into a metaphor, e.g. 'the eyelids of the Dawn' (iii. 9, xli. 18), and especially that beautiful passage,
Hast thou ever in thy life given charge to the Morning,
and shown its place to the Dawn,
that it may take hold of the skirts of the earth,
so that the wicked are shaken out of it,
and the earth changes as clay under a seal,
and (all things) stand forth as in a garment,
and light is withheld from the wicked,
and the arm lifted up is broken? (xxxviii. 12-15).
How very vivid! The personified Dawn seizes the coverlet under which the earth has slept at its four ends and shakes the evil-doers out of it like flies; upon which form and colour return to the earth, as clay (a Babylonian image) receives a definite form from the seal, and as the sad-coloured night-wrapper is exchanged for the bright, embroidered holiday-robe. Could we only transfer the poet to an earlier stage of mythic consciousness, we should find him expressing the same ideas—that morning-light creates all fair things anew, and discomfits the evil-doer—very much in the style of the Vedic hymns to Ushas (the Dawn), from which I quote
