understanding of the vast field of popular beliefs, customs and traditions, the Bible was at once drawn into the midst of these investigations and researches. It is not here the place to follow up in detail the successive phases through which this comparative study has passed and is still passing. For whatever theory had been applied to the elucidation of those ancient myths and legends with the help of the popular beliefs and superstitions, was sure to be applied to the Bible. To the euhemeristic, allegorical and mystical interpretation, to the Astral, the theory of the reproductive powers of nature was added. The whole Biblical narrative with its heroes and legends became the personification of these natural phenomena. It is sufficient to mention at the one end of the chain Nork, with his confused learning and great imagination, Buttmann, etc., and Steinthal and Goldziher at the other, as representing the Sun and Moon and Wind theories.
Modern commentators of the Bible have gone a step further. One has only to look at the works of Bousset, and especially Gunkel in his great commentary on Genesis, not to speak of other scholars, to see them delight in the attempt of comparing Biblical incidents with similar ones in popular legends and fairy tales as if they had made a most wonderful discovery. The student of Folk-lore has only a smile for such "discoveries." Commentators of the Bible often live in a narrow world of their own, like philologists of an older school. What Folk-lorists have seen long ago comes upon them with the suddenness of a revelation. These vagaries of the modern students of the Bible, and especially of the votaries of the cult of Higher Criticism, are often so extraordinary and so full of imagination that one is tempted to look upon them as so many tales—with or without the fairies.
It is refreshing to find now a master in the science of Folk-lore trying his hand and bringing Folk-lore to the Bible and not making the Bible Folk-lore. The foremost
