************************************ 1 Compare Onugnathos and the camel’s jawbone in Vakidi, op. cit. p. 298, note 2:  Jakut iv. 353, 9 seq.  R)Y is an obsolete name of an animal.  For HLM, Genesis xvi. 15, we should read )LHYM (cf. 1Samuel iii. 13), and before )XRY we should probably insert W)XY. ************************************

The original motive of the legend, however, as we have now indicated it, appears in the Jehovist always and everywhere covered over with the many-coloured robe of fancy.  The longer a story was spread by oral tradition among the people, the more was its root concealed by the shoots springing from it.  For example, we may assume with regard to the story of Joseph that, just because it has almost grown into a romance, its origin stretches back to a remote antiquity.  The popular fancy plays as it will; yet it does not make such leaps as to make it impossible to trace its course.  Miracles, angels, theophanies, dreams, are never absent from the palette.  When Rachel eats the mandrakes which Reuben had found, and which Leah had given up to her, and they remove her barrenness so that she becomes the mother of Joseph, we have a story based on a vulgar superstition.  Purely mythical elements are found isolated in the story of Jacob’s wrestling with the Deity at the ford of the Jabbok.  Etymology and proverbs are a favourite motive, and often give rise to lively and diversified tales.  Even in pieces which we should be inclined to attribute to the art of individuals, old and characteristic themes may be involved.  The story of Jacob and Laban, for example, is entirely composed of such materials.  The courtship at the well is twice repeated with no great variation.  The trait of the father-in-law’s wish to get his oldest daughter first off his hands and craftily bringing her to the son-in-law after the wedding-feast, is scarcely due to the invention of an individual.  The shepherd’s tricks, by which Jacob colours the sheep as he likes, have quite the flavour of a popular jest.  The observance of hospitality or transgressions against it, occupy a prominent place in the Genesis of the Jehovist; Lot’s entertainment, and the Sodomites’ insulting maltreatment, of the Deity who comes among them in disguise, is an incident that appears in the legends of many races.  There is little psychological embellishment, little actual making-up; for the most part we have the product of a countless number of narrators, unconsciously modifying each other’s work.  How plastic and living the materials must have been even in the ninth and eighth century, we see from the manifold variants and repetitions of the same stories, which, however, scarcely change the essential character of the themes.