No
doubt the Greek mythology is in some particulars tinged with
Phoenician conceptions. Aphrodite was originally a purely
Greek divinity, but in course of time she acquired some of the
attributes of the Semitic Astarte, and was hardly improved by
the change. Adonis is simply a Semitic divinity, imported into
Greece. But the same cannot be proved of Poseidon;[154] far
less of Hermes, who is identical with the Vedic Sarameyas, the
rising wind, the son of Sarama the dawn, the lying, tricksome
wind-god, who invented music, and conducts the souls of dead
men to the house of Hades, even as his counterpart the Norse
Odin rushes over the tree-tops leading the host of the
departed. When one sees Iris, the messenger of Zeus, referred
to a Hebrew original, because of Jehovah's promise to Noah,
one is at a loss to understand the relationship between the
two conceptions. Nothing could be more natural to the Greeks
than to call the rainbow the messenger of the sky-god to
earth-dwelling men; to call it a token set in the sky by
Jehovah, as the Hebrews did, was a very different thing. We
may admit the very close resemblance between the myth of
Bellerophon and Anteia, and that of Joseph and Zuleikha; but
the fact that the Greek story is explicable from Aryan
antecedents, while the Hebrew story is isolated, might perhaps
suggest the inference that the Hebrews were the borrowers, as
they undoubtedly were in the case of the myth of Eden.
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