514 HAUPT— AN ANCIENT PROTEST [April 22, 



on Genesis (1910) : It is quite conceivable that in the early days of 

 the settlement in Canaan the view was maintained among the 

 Hebrews that the animal offerings of their nomadic religion were 

 superior to the vegetable oft'erings made to the Canaanite Baals. 



"" Cain may be connected with the Ethiopic taqdnya which means 

 to till the ground; cf. the Pachomian rules in Dillmann's Ethiopic 

 chrestomathy, p. 60, 1. 4. Taqdnya means also to zvorship God; cf. 

 Arab, qdnata (quniit) and Lat. colere. Stems tertice y and medico y 

 often interchange ; cf. Ethiopic qdndya, to sing, and Arab, qdinah, 

 songstress, Heb. qindli, elegy. For Ethiopic qent%y, servant, we 

 have in Arabic: qain-, plur. qiydn. In Arabic, qain means also 

 smith, metal-zvorker, Syr. qaindyd. Some scholars, therefore, be- 

 lieve that the Kenites were a tribe of wandering smiths. Sayce 

 says (in Hastings' Dietionary of the Bible, vol. ii., p. 834'') that the 

 Kenites resembled the gipsies of modern Europe as well as tne 

 traveling tinkers or blacksmiths of the ^Middle Ages. Skinxer 

 states (on p. 113 of his commentary on Genesis) that there are some 

 low-caste tribes among the Arabs, who live partly by hunting, partly 

 by coarse smith-work and other gipsy labor in the Arab encamp- 

 ments ; they are forbidden to be cattle-keepers and are excluded 

 from intermarriage with the regular Bedouins, though on friendly 

 terms with them; they are the only tribes of the Arabian desert 

 that are free to travel where they will, ranging practically over the 

 whole peninsula from Syria to Yemen. 



The legend of Cain and Abel may have connected the name Cain 

 with the allied stem qinnc, to be jealous, envious, passionate, just 

 as the name Abel (see n. 24) was combined with hdbl (for hdbil) 

 breath, transitoriness. The saying of Ecclesiastes, Vanity of vani- 

 ties (that is, How utterly transitory is everything!) is in Hebrew 

 hdbcl hdbalim; see Haupt, Koheleth (Leipzig, 1905), p. i; Ec- 

 clesiastes (Baltimore, 1905), p. 34, n. 2. 



'* Lit. icith Jhvh. Also we use xvith in the sense of like, an- 

 alogously to. Shakespeare says. As if icith Circe she zvould change 

 my shape. Cf. the Critical Notes on the Heb. text of Genesis, 

 in the Polychrome Bible, p. 118. My interpretation of this diffi- 

 cult passage has been adopted by Cheyne, Encyclopccdia Biblica, 



