Ralph Vary Chamberlin

“ It would be truly remarkable if this race, so highly gifted in the poetic faculty, and so intensely religious, had not developed in rich abundance the form of poetry, termed legend— for legends must be classed with poetry, their purpose being to please, to teach, and to inspire or elevate. ”

“ And they all believe the sun moves across the sky and that the earth remains still because their minds act in the same way in interpreting identical phenomena. Similarly, they do not attribute a deity to every spring and stream, to volcano and wind, to the thunder and storm, and think of one back of every natural phenomena because of common origin or tradition; they do so because, it is the nature of the human mind in a certain stage of its development so to interpret causation. ”

“ Diversity in language being obviously a hindrance and an evil among- men would naturally be regarded as brought about by God or by gods in anger at some offense or usurpation among men. The fact that legends concerning a confusion of tongues are widespread and in certain general features similar, is only what might be expected—it is no proof of a common tradition of an actual historical occurrence or of actual physical contacts Correspondence in myths and legends of peoples must be both extensive and detailed to establish community of source or of physical contact. ”

“ The question concerning the origin of differences in tribe and language is one which must necessarily arise and which must necessarily receive some answer among the most diverse peoples and races. Primitive man quite as inevitably regards language as the direct gift of a God as he would look to the same source for the cause of wind or volcano. ”

“ Only after a race has reached a considerably advanced stage in civilization and has become politically organized does objectivity become sufficiently developed and distinct and the interest in leaving accurate records of the great events of a time sufficiently strong to make possible the writing of history. ”

“ The legends are not the product of any one man, or of any one generation, although the artistic form of some of them suggest the final touch of the professional; but rather, in be­ing passed on from generation to generation, they come to be large­ly the product of the race as a whole, clearly reflecting the intel­lect, the ideals, and the hopes of the times from which they have been transmitted. ”

“ Why must woman suf­fer and man toil? What is the rainbow and its meaning? To ask questions is innate in man—the child comes into the world with "Why" on its lips. Ask questions man will; and answer them he will as best he may. It is inevitable that a primitive people should ask the reason for tribal relations and boundaries. The Israelites asked these questions and we have the legends in which the answers came to be given. These were their first ef­forts at a philosophy of history. In these legends the underlying relations are commonly historical ”

“ It was a very natural thing for the Hebrews, in story, to connect it with the confusion of tongues so conspicuous in Babylon — for, with the lapse of time, the ten­dency is ever for legends origin­ ally distinct to become united into larger units and to become asso­ciated with less distant things. The use of such towers for astron­omical purposes would be easily suggestive of the Hebrew and Arabic beliefs that the builders of the great tower were attempting to get near to the star or to reach heaven. ”

“ Any one who has observed the untaught child spontaneously asking the same questions generation after generation, and just as spontaneously reaching the same or closely similar conclusions, will recognize the importance of psychological parallels in bringing about general resemblances between many folktales of different primitive peoples irrespective of any physical contact between them. ”

“ Among various other peoples, legends concerning the origin of languages existed; but these were mostly less suggestive of the Hebrew narrative. Peoples exchange nothing so readily and so persistently as their stories and wherever races, have-had opportunity for contact we find evidences of such interchange. No greater error could be made, however, than to suppose that resemblances between. The stories of different peoples are necessarily to be accounted for on the ground of contact and borrowing, or of common traditions. ”

“ To perceive their presence is not to take a step toward scepticism, but rather is to take a step toward per­ceiving the beauty and under­ standing the significance of the narrative. It is a matter of get­ ting correct knowledge. To one who reads with feeling and some­ thing of an aesthetic sense, to eliminate the poetry existing in the form of these legends would be to take away much that gives the loftiness and perennial inter­ est to the Old Testament. ”

“ He held that there was a Golden Age in which men and animals all spoke a common tongue; but that, finally, Zeus confounded, their speech because men had become arrogant and demanded eternal youth and immortality. ”

“ The traditions of those who do not write inevitably undergo corruption and intermixture in transmission. Such traditions are termed legends. A considerable body of a people never rise to an appreciation of real history ”

“ The cause of resemblances is frequently psychological, for the mind of man is pretty much the same, wherever found, and inclined much to follow the same or closely parallel paths when seeking solutions to identical questions under conditions largely similar. ”

“ Some Early Hebrew Legends
With Special Reference to Babel.
By R. V. Chamberlain.
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The ability to write history is not an innate power of the human mind. Uncivilized races have no impulse or desire to leave to posterity an accurate account of their deeds; nor do they possess naturally the power of reproducing their experiences objectively. As with young children, so with them, fact and fancy mingle quickly and inseparably. Their narratives take on inevitably a poetical form; their historical occurrences are transmitted only in song and story, where art has its due license. ”

“ By such hasty inference, different men have proved to their own satisfactions that the American Indians have descended from the English, from the Welsh, from the Greeks, from the Romans, from the Chinese, and from other peoples. ”

“ Some of the legends of this class are ef­forts at answering questions, such as we are, at times asked even to this day by our children and which, moreover, are often, at bottom, profound questions which science today is still seek­ing to solve. Why does man die? ”

“ From the demand that these popular stories be interest­ing and full of action they be­ come inevitably much altered through such contributions of the imagination. Very frequently they come to relate things that would be regarded as wholly in­ credible according to the ordinary canons of common sense or of his­tory. ”

“ Biblical le­gend and those of various neigh­ boring peoples seems most likely, although not with entire certain­ty, to have been the tower of Borsippa, concerning which an in­scription found on a cylinder re­ covered from the ruins of Baby­lon speaks as follows: "The build­ing named the Stages of the Sev­en Spheres, which was the tower of Borsippa, had been built by a former king. ”