It was but gradually that he attained his high position in the Babylonian

pantheon. Ea and Asari were gods of the south; Babylon lay in the northern

half of the country. There must therefore have been some special reason

for the close connection that grew up between them. I know of no other

that would account for it except the one I gave many years ago—that

Babylon was a colony from Eridu. In this case we could understand why its

local deity should have been a son of Ea, and how accordingly it became

possible to identify him with that particular son of the god of Eridu

whose attributes resembled his own.

It is difficult at present to trace the history of Merodach beyond the age

of the dynasty of Khammurabi. It was then that Babylon became an imperial

city, and the power of its god grew with the power of its rulers. The

dynasty was Semitic, though of foreign origin; and we may gather from the

names of the first two kings that the ancestral god of the family had been

Ṡamu(257) or Shem. But with the possession of Babylon the manners and

religion of Babylonia were adopted; the fourth king of the dynasty bears a

Babylonian name,(258) and his grandson ascribes his victories to the god

of Babylon.

Merodach is invested by Khammurabi with all the attributes of a supreme

Semitic Baal. His solar character falls into the background; he becomes

the lord of gods and men, who delivers the weak and punishes the proud.

The office of judge, which belonged to him as the sun-god, is amplified;

the wisdom he had derived from Ea is made part of his original nature; his

quality of mercy is insisted on again and again. Like the Semitic Baal, he

is the father of his people, the mighty king who rules the world and

occupies the foremost place in the council of the gods. Already the son of

Khammurabi declares that the older Bel of Nippur had transferred to

Merodach the sovereignty of the civilised world; the power of Nippur and

its priesthood had passed to Babylon, and its god had to make way for a

younger rival. As long as Babylon remained the capital of the kingdom, the

Bel or “lord” of Babylonia was Merodach. The god followed the fortunes of

his State.

The sanctity that had lingered for so many centuries around the temple of

Nippur now passed to Ê-Saggil, the temple of Merodach. The priests of

Merodach inherited the rights and functions of the priests of En-lil. From

henceforth it was Merodach and his priests who could make and unmake

kings; it was only the prince who had “taken the hand of Bel” of Babylon,

and thereby been adopted as his son, that could claim legitimate rule. The

descendants of the conquerors who had carried Babylonian culture to the

lands of the West, derived their title to dominion not from Nippur, but

from Babylon, and it was forgotten that the title had ever had any other

source. The lordship of the world had indeed been transferred to a new god

and a new city; Zeus had supplanted his father Kronos.

A sort of pæan in praise of Merodach, which is supposed to form part of

the Epic of the Creation, describes how the god of Babylon received the

names, and therewith the attributes and powers, of the older deities. In

the great assembly of the gods he was greeted as their Zi or “Life,”(259)

then as Ea under his name of “god of divine life,” then as Hadad or the

god of “the good wind,”(260) and finally as Sin with “the divine crown,”

in whose name he became “the merciful one who brings back the dead to

life.” The ceremony was not concluded until he had received all “the fifty

names of the great gods,” whose virtues and essence had thus, as it were,

passed into himself. Not only was he their heir, he also absorbed their

whole being, and so became one with his father, who is made to say: “He is

become even as myself, for Ea is (now) his name.”

In these words we are brought very near to the Egyptian doctrine which

transmuted one god into another, and saw in them only so many forms of the

same divinity. But the stage of pantheism was never reached in Babylonia.

The Semitic element in Babylonian religion was too strong to admit of it;

the attributes and character of each deity were too clearly cut and

defined, and the Semitic mind was incapable of transforming the human

figures of the gods into nebulous abstractions. The god was too much of a

man, moving in too well marked a sphere, to be resolved into a mere form

or manifestation. Merodach might receive from the other gods their

attributes and the power to exercise them, but it was delegation and not

absorption. The other gods still retained the attributes that belonged to

them, and the right to use them if they would. Merodach was their

vicegerent and successor rather than themselves under another form.

Hence it is that the human element in the Babylonian god predominated over

the abstract and divine. His solar attributes fell into the background,

and he became more and more the representative of a human king who rules

his people justly, and whose orders all are bound to obey. He became, in

fact, a Semitic Baal, made in human form, and consequently conceived of as

an exaggerated or superhuman man. The other gods are his subjects, not

forms under which he can reveal himself; they retain their

individualities, and constitute his court. There is no nebulosity, no

pantheism, in the religion of Semitic Babylonia; the formless divinity and

the animal worship of Egypt are alike unknown to it. As is the man, so is

the god, for the one has been made in the likeness of the other.

Nevertheless the solar origin of Merodach left its impress upon the

theology of the State. It had much to do with that process of identifying

one god with another, which, as we have seen, tended to approximate the

doctrines of Babylonia to those of Egypt. Though the individual gods were

distinguished and marked off from one another like individual men, it was

yet possible to get as it were behind the individual traits, and find in

certain of them a common element in which their individual peculiarities

were lost. The name, so the Babylonian believed, was the essence of the

person or thing to which it was attached; that which had no name did not

exist, and its existence commenced only when it received its name. A

nameless god could not exist any more than a nameless man, and a knowledge

of his name brought with it a knowledge of his real nature and powers. But

a name was transferable; it could be taken from one object and given to

another, and therewith the essential characteristics which had belonged to

the first would become the property of the other.

When the name was changed, the person or thing was changed along with it.

To give Merodach another name, therefore, was equivalent to changing his

essential characteristics, and endowing him with the nature and properties

of another god. The solar character which belonged to him primitively gave

the first impulse to this transference and change of name. There were

other solar deities in Babylonia, with distinct personalities of their

own, for they were each called by an individual name. But the sun which

they typified and represented was the same everywhere, and the attributes

of the solar divinity differed but little in the various States of Semitic

Babylonia. It was easy, therefore, to assign to the one the name of

another, and the assignment brought with it a change of personality. With

the name came the personality of the god to whom it originally belonged,

and who now, as it were, lost his individual existence. It passed into the

person of the other deity; the two gods were identified together; but it

was not by the absorption of the one into the other but by the loss of

individual existence on the part of one of them. It was no resolution of

two independent beings into a common form, but rather the substitution of

one individual for another.

This process of assimilation was assisted by the Babylonian conception of

the goddess. By the side of the god, the goddess was little more than a

colourless abstraction which owed its origin to the necessities of

grammar. The individual element was absent; all that gave form and

substance to the goddess was the particular name she happened to bear.

Without the name she had no existence, and the name itself was but an

epithet which could be interchanged with another epithet at the will of

the worshipper. The goddesses of Babylonia were thus like the colours of a

kaleidoscope, constantly shifting and passing one into another. As long as

the name existed, indeed, there was an individuality attached to it; but

with the change of name the individuality changed too. The individuality

depended more on the name in the case of the goddess than in the case of

the god; for the goddess possessed nothing but the name which she could

call her own, while the god was conceived of as a human lord and master

with definite powers and attributes. There was, it is true, one goddess,

Istar, who resembled the god in this respect; but it was just the goddess

Istar who retained her independent personality with as much tenacity as

the gods.

When once the various sun-gods of Babylonia had been assimilated, or

identified, one with the other, it was not difficult to extend the process

yet further. As the city of Merodach increased in power, lording it over

the other States of the country, and giving to their inhabitants its own

name, so Merodach himself took precedence over the older gods of

Babylonia, and claimed the authority and the attributes which had belonged

to them. Their names, and therewith their powers, were transferred to him;

the supremacy of En-lil, the wisdom of Ea, the glory of Anu, alike became

his. The “tablets of destiny,” which conferred on their possessor the

government of the visible world, were taken from the older Bel and given

to his younger rival; the wisdom of which Merodach had once been the

interpreter now became his own; and, like Anu, his rule extended to the

farthest regions of the sky. But in thus taking the place of the great

gods of earth and heaven, Merodach was at the same time the inheritor and

owner of their names. If the tablets of destiny had passed into his

possession, it was because he had assumed along with them the name of Bel;

if Ea and Anu had yielded to him their ancient prerogatives, it was

because he had himself been transformed into the Ea and Anu of the new

official theology. The Babylonian hymn in honour of Merodach, when it

declares that the fifty names of the great gods had been conferred upon

him, only expresses in another form the conviction that he had entered

into the heritage of the older gods.

As time went on, and Babylon continued to be the sovereign city of the

kingdom, the position of its god became at once more exalted and more

secure. The solar features in his character passed out of sight; he was

not only the giver of the empire of the world to his adopted son and

vicegerent, the king of Babylon, he was also the divine counterpart and

representative of the king in heaven. The god had made man in his own

image, and he was now transformed into the likeness of men. Two ideas,

consequently, struggled for the mastery in Babylonian religion—the

anthropomorphic conception of the deity, and the belief in his

identification with other gods; and the result was an amalgamation of the

two. Merodach was the divine man, freed from the limitations of our mortal

existence, and therefore able not only to rule over the other gods, but

also, like the magician, to make their natures his own. The other gods

continued to exist indeed, but it was as his subjects who had yielded up

to him their powers, and of whom, accordingly, he could dispose as seemed

to him good. Originally the first among his peers, he ended—at least in

the belief of the native of Babylon—in becoming supreme over them, and

absorbing into himself all the attributes and prerogatives of divinity.

It was not, however, till the closing days of Babylonian independence that

an attempt was made to give outward and visible expression to the fact.

Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon and the nominee of its priesthood,

took the images of the gods from their ancient shrines and carried them to

Babylon. There, in the temple of Merodach, they formed as it were his

court, bowing in reverence before him, when, on the festival of the New

Year, he announced the destinies of the future. It was an effort to

centralise the religion of the country, and give public proof of the

supremacy of the god of Babylon. Like the parallel endeavour of Hezekiah

in Judah, the attempt of Nabonidos naturally aroused the hostility of the

local priesthoods; and, when Cyrus invaded the country, there was already

a party in it ready to welcome him as a deliverer, and to maintain that

Merodach himself had been angered by the sacrilegious king. The attempt,

indeed, came too late, and Nabonidos was too superstitious and full of

respect for the older sanctuaries and gods of Babylonia to carry it out in

other than a half-hearted way. But it indicated the tendency of religious

thought, and the direction in which the official worship of Merodach was

irresistibly bearing its adherents. Merodach, like his city, was supreme,

and the older gods were surely passing away.

The tendency was checked, however, by the long continuity of Babylonian

history. Babylonian records went back far beyond the days when Babylon had

become the capital of the kingdom. It was remembered that there had been

other centres of power, in ages when as yet Babylon was but an obscure

village. It was never forgotten that the god of Nippur had once made and

unmade kings, that Akkad had been the seat of an empire, or that Ur had

preceded Babylon as the capital of the ruling dynasty. Babylonian history

did not begin with the rise of Babylon to power, much as the priests of

Babylon wished to make it do so; and the chronological schemes which made

a native of Babylon the first ruler of mankind, or traced to Babylon the

first observations of astronomy, were but fictions which a little

acquaintance with history could easily refute. The earlier cities of the

land were proud of their traditions and their temples, and were not

inclined to give them up in favour of the _parvenu_ city of Merodach;

their religious corporations were still wealthy, and their sanctuaries

still commanded the reverence of the people. Wholly to displace and efface

them was impossible, as long as history continued to be written and the

past to be remembered. The sun-god of Sippara, the moon-god of Ur or

Harran, even En-lil of Nippur, all remained the rivals of Merodach down to

the latest days of Babylonian existence. Nabonidos himself was forced to

conform to the prevailing sentiment; he bestowed almost as much care on

the temple of the moon-god at Harran, and the temple of the sun-god at

Sippara, as upon that of Merodach at Babylon, though, it is true, he tells

us that it was Merodach who bade him restore the sanctuary of Sin, while

the sun-god of Sippara might be considered to be Merodach himself under

another name.(261)

It was thus history which prevented the rise of anything like monotheism

in Babylonia. It was impossible to break with the past, and the past was

bound up with polytheism and with the existence of great cities, each with

its separate god and sanctuary and the minor divinities who revolved

around them. At the same time the tendency to monotheism existed; and

could the Babylonian have blotted out the past, it might have ended in the

worship of but one god. As it was, the language of the later inscriptions

sometimes approaches very nearly that of the monotheist. When

Nebuchadrezzar prays to Merodach, his words might often have been those of

a Jew; and even at an earlier date the moon-god is called by his

worshipper “supreme” in earth and heaven, omnipotent and creator of all

things; while an old religious poem refers, in the abstract, to “the god”

who confers lordship on men. As was long ago pointed out by Sir H.

Rawlinson, Anu, whose written name became synonymous with “god,” is

identified with various cosmic deities, both male and female, in a

theological list;(262) and Dr. Pinches has published a tablet in which the

chief divinities of the Babylonian pantheon are resolved into forms of

Merodach.(263) En-lil becomes “the Merodach of sovereignty,” Nebo “the

Merodach of earthly possessions,” Nergal “the Merodach of war.” This is

but another way of expressing that identification of the god of Babylon

with the other deities of Babylonian belief which, as we have seen, placed

him at the head of the divine hierarchy, and, by depriving them of their

attributes and powers, tended to reduce them into mere angel-ministers of

a supreme god.

There was yet another cause which prevented the religion of Babylonia from

assuming a monotheistic form. As we have seen, the majority of the

Babylonian goddesses followed the usual Semitic type, and were little else

than reflections of the male divinity. But there was one goddess who

retained her independence, and claimed equal rank with the gods. Against

her power and prerogatives the influence of Semitic theology contended in

vain. The Sumerian element continued to exist in the mixed Babylonian

nation, and, like the woman who held a position in it which was denied her

where the Semite was alone dominant, the goddess Istar remained the equal

of the gods. Even her name never assumed the feminine termination which

denoted the Semitic goddess; Semitised though she might be, she continued

to be essentially a Sumerian deity.

Many years ago, in my Hibbert Lectures, I first drew attention to the fact

that Istar belonged to the non-Semitic part of the Babylonian population,

and in both name and attributes was foreign to Semitic modes of thought.

The best proof of this is to be found in the transformations she underwent

when her worship was carried by Babylonian culture to the more purely

Semitic peoples of the West. In Arabia and Moab she became a male deity;

the ideas and functions connected with her were incompatible in the

Semitic mind with the conception of a female divinity. Even in Babylonia

itself there were those who believed in a male Istar;(264) and the

official theology itself spoke of an androgynous deity, of an Istar who

was at once a goddess and a god.(265) In Canaan, where her female nature

was accepted, she was changed into a Semitic goddess; the feminine suffix

was attached to her name, and her attributes were assimilated to those of

the native goddess Ashêrah. In Assyria, too, we can see the same process

going on. The name of Istar with the feminine termination of Semitic

grammar becomes a mere synonym of “goddess,” and, as in Canaan, the

Istars, or rather the Ashtoreths, mean merely the goddesses of the popular

cult, the female counterparts of the Baalim or “Baals.” It was only the

State religion, which had its roots in Babylonia, that prevented Istar of

Nineveh or Istar of Arbela from becoming a Canaanitish Ashtoreth.

This was the fate that had actually befallen some of the old Sumerian

deities. In the Sippara of Semitic days, for example, the wife of the

sun-god was the goddess Â. But  had once been the sun-god himself, and

texts exist in which he is still regarded as a god. Sumerian grammar was

genderless; there was no distinction in it between masculine and feminine,

and the divine names of the Sumerian pantheon could consequently be

classified by the Semite as he would. He had only to apply a feminine

epithet to one of them, and it forthwith became the name of a goddess.

Sippara already had its sun-god Samas: there was no room for another, and

 accordingly became his wife. But in becoming his wife she lost her

individuality; her attributes and powers were absorbed by Samas, and in

the later Semitic theology she serves only to complete the divine family

or triad.

Istar succeeded in escaping any such effacement or degradation. Her

worship was too deeply rooted in Babylonia, and too intimately associated

with the religious traditions of the past. The same historical reasons

which prevented monotheism from developing out of Babylonian polytheism

prevented Istar from degenerating into an Ashtoreth. At times she came

perilously near to such a fate: in the penitential psalms we find the

beginnings of it; and, when Babylon became the head of the kingdom, the

supremacy of Merodach threatened the independence and authority of Istar

even more than it threatened those of the other “great gods.” But the cult

of Istar had been fixed and established long before Merodach was more than

a petty provincial god; she was the goddess and patroness of Erech, and

Erech had once been the capital of a Babylonian empire. It was needful

that that fact should be forgotten before Istar could be dethroned from

the position she held in the religion of Babylonia, whether official or

popular.

All attempts to find a Semitic etymology for the name of Istar have been a

failure. We must be content to leave it unexplained, and to recognise the

foreign character both of the name and of the goddess whom it represented.

In Babylonia the name was never Semitised; the character of the goddess,

on the other hand, was adapted, though imperfectly, to Semitic modes of

thought. She took upon her the attributes of a Baal, and presided over war

as well as over love. One result of this mingling of Semitic and Sumerian

ideas was the difficulty of fitting her into the family system of Semitic

theology. She could not have a wife, for she was a goddess; it was equally

difficult to assign to her her shadow and counterpart, which was contrary

to all the preconceptions of the Semitic mind. Generally, therefore, if

not officially, she was conceived of as a virgin, or at all events as a

goddess who might indulge in amours so long as they did not lead to

regular marriage. Even Tammuz was the bridegroom rather than the husband

of her youth, and he too had been banished to the darkness of the

underground world long before Istar herself had interfered with the

affairs of men. She has been described as the female principle

corresponding with the male principle in the world: but the description is

incorrect; she was rather the male principle in female form.

Istar at the outset was the spirit of the evening star. In days, however,

when astronomy was as yet in its infancy, the evening and the morning

stars were believed to be the same. It was only in aftertimes that an

endeavour was made to distinguish between the Istar of the evening and the

Istar of the morning. Originally they were one and the same, the herald at

once of night and day. It was on this account that Istar was associated

with Ana, the sky. The sky was her father, for she was born from it at

sunset and dawn; and if other traditions or myths made her the daughter of

the moon-god, they were not accepted at Erech, the centre and source of

her cult.

In virtue of her origin she formed a triad with Samas and Sin. The sun,

the moon, and the evening star divided, as it were, the heavens between

them, and presided over its destinies. They were the luminaries that

regulated the seasons of the year and determined the orderly course of the

present creation. Istar represents “the stars ” of Genesis that were made

with the sun and moon. But in the Babylonian system the triad of Istar,

Sin, and Samas was not made, they were deities that were born. Before them

was the older and higher triad of Anu, Bel, and Ea,—the sky, the earth,

and the water,—the three elements of which the whole universe was formed.

How the spirit of the evening star came in time to be the goddess of love,

is not difficult to understand. Even modern poets have sung of the evening

as the season of lovers, when the work and business of the day are over,

and words of love can be whispered under the pale light of the evening

star. But this alone will not explain the licentious worship that was

carried on at Erech in the name of Istar. It was essentially Semitic in

its character, and illustrates that intensity of belief which made the

Semite sacrifice all he possessed to the deity whom he adored. The

prostitution that was practised in the name of Istar had the same origin

as the sacrifice of the firstborn, or the orgies that were celebrated in

the temples of the sun-god.

At Erech, Istar was served by organised bands of unmarried maidens who

prostituted themselves in honour of the goddess. The prostitution was

strictly religious, as much so as the ceremonial cannibalism formerly

prevalent among the South Sea Islanders. In return for the lives they led,

the “handmaids of Istar” were independent and free from the control of

men. They formed a religious community, the distinguishing feature of

which was the power of indulging the passions of womanhood without the

disabilities which amongst a Semitic population these would otherwise have

brought. The “handmaid of Istar” owned allegiance only to the goddess she

served. Her freedom was dependent on her priesthood, but in return for

this freedom she had to give up all the pleasures of family life. It was a

self-surrender which placed the priestess outside the restrictions of the

family code, and was yet for the sake of a principle which made that

family code possible. Baal, the lord of the Semitic family, claimed the

firstborn as his right, and Istar or Ashtoreth similarly demanded the

service of its daughters.

It was the same in Canaan as at Erech. Did the rites, and the beliefs on

which the rites were based, migrate from Babylonia to the West along with

Babylonian culture, or were they a common Semitic heritage in which Erech

and Phœnicia shared alike? It is difficult to give a precise answer to the

question. On the one hand, we know that the Ashtoreth of Canaan was of

Babylonian birth, and that in days far remote the theology of the

Canaanite was profoundly influenced by that of Babylonia; on the other

hand, the rites with which Istar was worshipped were confined in Babylonia

to Erech; it was there only that her “handmaids” and eunuch-priests were

organised into communities, and that unspeakable abominations were

practised in her name. The Istar who was adored elsewhere was a chaste and

passionless goddess, the mother of her people whom she had begotten, or

their stern leader in war. It does not seem likely that a cult which was

unable to spread in Babylonia or Assyria should nevertheless have taken

deep root in Phœnicia, had there not already been there a soil prepared to

receive it. Erech was essentially a Semitic city; its supreme god Anu had

all the features of the Semitic Baal, “the lord of heaven”; and its

goddess Istar, Sumerian though she may have been in origin, like Anu

himself, had clothed herself in a Semitic dress.

Moreover, there was another side to the worship of Istar which bears

indirect testimony to the Semitic origin of her cult at Erech. By the side

of the Istar of the official faith there was another Istar, who presided

over magic and witchcraft. Her priestesses were the witches who plied

their unholy calling under the shadow of night, and mixed the poisonous

philtres which drained away the strength of their hapless victims. The

black Istar, as we may call her, was a parody of the goddess of love; and

the rites with which she was adored, and the ministers by whom she was

served, were equally parodies of the cult that was carried on at Erech.

But the black Istar was not only a parody of the goddess of the State

religion, she was also the Istar of the popular creed, of the creed of

that part of the population, in fact, which was least intermixed with

Semitic elements and least influenced by Semitic beliefs. It was amongst

this portion of the nation that the old Sumerian animism lingered longest

and resisted the purer teaching of the educated class. The Semitic

conceptions which underlay the worship of Istar at Erech were never

thoroughly assimilated by it; all that it could do was to create a parody

and caricature of the official cult, adapting it to those older beliefs

and ideas which bad found their centre in the temple of En-lil. The black

Istar was a Sumerian ghost masquerading in Semitic garb.

As Bel attracted to himself the other gods, appropriating their names and

therewith their essence and attributes, so Istar attracted the

unsubstantial goddesses of the Babylonian pantheon. They became mere

epithets of the one female divinity who maintained her independent

existence by the side of the male gods. One by one they were identified

with her person, and passed into the Istarât, or Istars, of the later

creed. Like the Baalim, the Istarât owed what separate individuality they

possessed to geography. On the theological side the Istar of Nineveh was

identical with the Istar of Arbela; what distinguished them was the local

sphere over which they held jurisdiction. The difference between them was

purely geographical: the one was attached to a particular area over which

her power extended, and where she was adored, while the other was the

goddess of another city—that was all. It was the same goddess, but a

different local cult. The deity remained the same, but her relations, both

to her worshippers and to the other gods, were changed. There is no

transmutation of form as in Egypt, but a change of relations, which have

their origin in geographical variety.

In Babylonia, however, Istar was not so completely without a rival as she

was in Assyria. There was another city of ancient fame which, like Erech,

was under the protection of a goddess rather than of a god. This was one

of the two Sipparas on the banks of the Euphrates, which is distinguished

in the inscriptions from the Sippara of Samas as the Sippara of Anunit.

The feminine termination of the name of Anunit indicates that here again

we have a goddess who, in the form in which we know her, is essentially

Semitic. But it is only in the form in which we know her that such is the

case. The origin of Anunit goes back to Sumerian times. She was in the

beginning merely an Anunna or “spirit” of the earth, as sexless as the

other spirits of Sumerian belief, and lacking all the characteristics of a

Semitic divinity.(266) It was not till Sippara became the seat of a

Semitic empire that the Anunna or Sumerian “spirit” was transformed into

Anunit the goddess. The transformation here was accompanied by the same

outward change as that which turned the Babylonian Istar into the

Ashtoreth of Canaan. For a time it seemed as though Anunit rather than

Istar would become the supreme goddess of Semitic cult; but the political

predominance of Sippara passed away with the fall of the empire of Sargon

of Akkad, and historical conservatism alone preserved the name and

influence of its goddess. As time went on, Anunit tended more and more to

sink into the common herd of Babylonian goddesses, or to be identified

with Istar. As long as the Sumerian element continued to be strong in the

Babylonian people and their religion, Anunit retained the position which

the mixture of the Semite and Sumerian had created for her; with the

growing dominance of the Semitic spirit, her independence and

individuality departed, and she became, like Beltis or Gula, merely the

female complement of the god. Perhaps the process was hastened by the

grammatical termination that had been added to her name.

Wherever, in fact, Semitic influence prevailed, the goddess, as opposed to

the god, tended to disappear. It was but a step from the conception of a

god with a colourless counterpart, whose very existence seemed to be due

to the necessities of grammar, to that of a deity who absorbed within

himself the female as well as the male principles of the universe, and who

stood alone and unmated. A goddess who depended for her existence on a

grammatical accident could have no profound or permanent hold on the

belief of the people; she necessarily fell into the background, and the

prerogatives which had belonged to her were transferred to the god. Istar

herself, thanks to the masculine form of her name, became a god in

Southern Arabia, and was identified with Chemosh in Moab, while even in

Babylonia and Assyria she assumed the attributes of a male divinity, and

was adored as the goddess of war as well as of love.(267) In Assyria,

indeed, her warlike character predominated: she took the place of the

war-gods of Babylonia, and armed herself with the falchion and bow.

I shall have hereafter to point out how this tendency on the part of the

goddess to vanish, as it were, out of sight, leaving the god alone in

possession, resulted in Assyria in raising its supreme god Assur to

something of the position occupied by Yahveh in Israel. Assur is wifeless;

now and again, it is true, a wife is assigned to him by the pedantry of

the scribes, but who it should be was never settled; and that he needed a

wife at all, was never acknowledged generally. Like Chemosh in Moab, Assur

reigns alone; and though the immemorial influence of Babylonia kept alive

the worship of Istar by the side of him, it was Assur and Assur only who

led the Assyrian armies to victory, and in whose name they subdued the

disobedient. It was not until the kings of Assyria became kings also of

Babylon that Istar encroached on the rights of Assur, or that an Assyrian

monarch betook himself to her rather than to the god of his fathers in the

hour of his necessity. As long as the capital remained at the old city of

Assur, none but the god Assur might direct the counsels and campaigns of

its princes, or confer upon them the crown of sovereignty. When

Tiglath-pileser III. acknowledged himself the son of Bel-Merodach, and

received from his hands the right to rule, it was a sign that the older

Assyrian dynasty had passed away, that the kingdom had become a

cosmopolitan empire, and that the venerable traditions of Babylon had

subjugated its conquerors from the north. The mixed races of Babylonia had

overcome the purer Semites of Assyria, Istar had prevailed against Assur,

and Semitic monotheism sought a home in the further West.

Lecture V. Sumerian And Semitic Conceptions Of The Divine: Assur And

Monotheism.

In the preceding lectures I have assumed that the conception of the deity

which we find in the later historical monuments of Babylonia and Assyria

was of Semitic origin, differing radically from that formed of the godhead

by the earlier Sumerian population. But it will doubtless be asked what

basis there is for such an assumption; why may we not suppose that the

later conception has developed naturally and without any violent break

from older beliefs which were equally Semitic? Why, in short, must we

regard the animism which underlay the religion of Babylonia as Sumerian,

and not rather as the earliest form of Semitic faith?

The first and most obvious answer to the question would be, the fact that

the older names of the superhuman beings who became the gods of the later

creed are not Semitic, but Sumerian. En-lil of Nippur is the Sumerian

En-lila, “lord of the ghost(s)”; when he becomes a Semitic god he receives

the Semitic title of Bilu, Baal, “the lord.” And the further fact that in

many cases the Sumerian name continued to be used in Semitic times,

sometimes slightly changed, sometimes adapted to the needs of Semitic

grammar, proves not only that the Sumerian preceded the Semitic, but also

that the Sumerian cult on its literary and philological side was

assimilated by the Semitic settlers in Babylonia. The gods and goddesses

of Babylonia were Sumerian before they were Semitic; though they wear a

Semitic dress, we have to seek their ancestry outside the Semitic world of

ideas.

As we know them, they are clothed in human form. The deities whose figures

are found on the seal-cylinders of Babylonia or engraved on the walls of

the Assyrian palaces are all alike in “the likeness of man.” Bel-Merodach

is as much a man as the king whom he adopted as his son; the sun-god who

rises between the twin mountains of the dawn steps forth as a human giant

to run his course; and Istar is a woman in mind and thought as well as in

outward form. There are no animal gods in Babylonia, no monstrous

combinations of man and beast such as meet us in the theology of Egypt.

Not but that such combinations were known to the Babylonians. But they

belonged to the primeval world of chaos; they were the brood of Tiamât,

the dragon of lawlessness and night, the demons who had been banished into

outer darkness beyond the world of light and of god-fearing men. Like the

devils of medieval belief, they were the divine beings of an alien faith

which the gods of the new-comers had exiled to the limbo of a dead past.

Even the subterranean Hades of Semitic Babylonia recognised them not. The

gods worshipped by the Semite were Baalim or “Lords,” like the men whom

they protected, and whose creators they were believed to be.

Wherever the pure Semite is found, this belief in the anthropomorphic

character of the deity is found also. Perhaps it is connected with that

distinguishing characteristic of his grammar which divides the world into

the masculine and the feminine, the male and the female. At any rate the

Semite made his god in the likeness of men, and taught, conversely, that

men had been made in the likeness of the gods. The two beliefs are but the

counter sides of the same shield; the theomorphic man implies an

anthropomorphic god. The god, in fact, was but an amplified man with

amplified human powers; his shape was human, so too were his passions and

his thoughts. Even the life that was in man was itself the breath of the

god. That man was not immortal like the gods, was but an accident; he had

failed to eat of the food of immortality or to drink of the waters of

life, and death therefore reigned in this lower world. The gods themselves

might die; Tammuz, the spouse of Istar, had been slain by the boar’s tusk

of angry summer, and carried into the realm of Hades,(268) and the temple

of Merodach at Babylon was also known as his tomb. As the gods were born,

so could they die; they could marry also and beget children, and they

needed meat and drink like the sons of men. Indeed, the world of the gods

was a duplicate and counterpart of the world of mankind. On “the mountain

of the world,” the Babylonian Olympos, the supreme god held his court;

around him were ranged his subjects and servants, for there were servants

in heaven as there were on earth; celestial armies went forth at his

bidding, and there were wars among the gods as among men. Even theft was

not unknown among them; a legend tells us, for instance, how the god Zu

stole the tablets of destiny which were hung like the Urim and Thummim on

the breast of “father Bel,” and therewith acquired for awhile the right

and power to control the fate of the universe. As far back as we can trace

the history of Semitic religion, whether in Babylonia, in Canaan, or in

Arabia, its fundamental conception is always the same; the gods are human,

and men are divine.

It is not surprising, therefore, that as soon as the Semitic element

becomes paramount in Babylonia, the king becomes a god. At Babylon he was

made the adopted son of Bel-Merodach by taking the hand of the deity, and

thereby became himself a Bel, a ruler of “the people of Bel” over whom he

was henceforth to exercise undisputed lordship. In earlier days, Sargon of

Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic empire in Western Asia, and his

son Naram-Sin, were explicitly deified. Naram-Sin is even addressed as

“the god of Akkad”;(269) and a seal-cylinder found by Gen. di Cesnola in

Cyprus describes its owner as “the servant of the god Naram-Sin.”(270) The

title of “god” is assumed by the Semitic successors of Sargon, to whatever

city or dynasty they belonged; even the Sumerian princes in Southern

Babylonia followed the example of their Semitic suzerains, and Gudea, the

high priest of Lagas, built temples to his own godhead, where for long

centuries his cult continued to be observed, and sacrifices and offerings

to be made to him.(271) The occupation of Babylonia by the Arab or

Canaanite dynasty to which Amraphel belonged, made no difference in the

divine honours paid to the king; he still assumed the title of “god,” and

his subjects adored him by the side of Bel. But a change came with the

conquest of Babylonia by Kassite hordes from the mountains of Elam; the

foreign kings ceased to be divine, and the title of “god” is given to them

no more. As the doctrine of the divine right of kings passed away in

England with the Stuarts, so too the belief in the divinity of the king

disappeared in Babylonia with the fall of the Semitic dynasties. Nothing

could show more plainly its essentially Semitic origin, and the little

hold it possessed upon the non-Semitic part of the population. The king

was a god only so long as he was a Semite, or subject to Semitic influence

and supremacy.

The apotheosis of the king is thus coeval with the rise of Semitic

domination in Babylonia. In the older Sumerian epoch we look in vain for

any traces of it. Man was not yet divine, for the gods were not yet human.

There was as yet no Semitic Bel, and En-lil of Nippur was but a “lord of

ghost(s).”

But we have better testimony to the fact than the ghosts of Nippur. Behind

the human figures of the Semitic gods the primitively pictorial character

of the cuneiform signs enables us to discern the lineaments of figures

that belong to a wholly different sphere of religious thought. They are

the figures not of men, but of brute beasts. The name of En-lil was

denoted by a composite sign which represented the word _elim_, “a

ram”;(272) that of Ea by the ideograph which stood for _dara_, “the

antelope.”(273) En-lil, accordingly, was once a ram; Ea, an antelope.

There are other deities which reveal their first shapes in similar

fashion. The wife of Hadad, for example, was Azaga-ṡuga, “the milch-goat”

of En-lil, from whom the primitive Sumerian shepherd derived his

milk.(274) Merodach himself, or rather his Sumerian prototype at Eridu,

was once Asari-elim, “the princely ram”;(275) a striking title when we

remember that Osiris, too, was addressed in Egypt as Ati, “the prince,”

and identified with the ram of Mendes. Even Zu, the divine thief who stole

the tablets of destiny, was the storm-bird, the forefather alike of the

roc of the _Arabian Nights_ and of the Chinese storm-bird, “which, in

flying, obscures the sun, and of whose quills the water-tuns are made.”

In many cases, however, the original forms of the Babylonian divinities

survived only in the animals upon whose backs they were depicted as

standing, or with whom the gem-cutter associated them on seals.(276) Now

and again an attempt was made to combine them with the human figure. Thus

Ea is at times represented as clothed in the skin of a fish, a fitting

symbol of the relation between the newer and older religions of Babylonia

and the antagonistic views of the godhead entertained by the races that

dwelt there. At other times the animal form is relegated to that great

company of demons and inferior spirits amongst whom room was found for the

multitudinous ghosts of Sumerian belief. Where it is not altogether

excluded from the world of gods and men, it exists only as the humble

retainer of one of the human gods. As Merodach was accompanied by his four

divine dogs, so Ea was attended by sacred bulls. They guarded the approach

to the “field” and “house of Eden,” like the colossal figures, with

bull-like bodies and the heads of men, that guarded the gates of the

palace or temple. They were, in fact, the cherubim who forbade approach to

the tree of life (or knowledge),—that sacred palm which an old Babylonian

hymn tells us was planted beside the pathway of Ea in Eridu, where the god

had his house in the centre of the earth, pouring from his hands the

waters of fertility that flowed down in the twofold streams of the Tigris

and Euphrates.(277) In later art, however, the bull-like form disappeared,

and the guardians of the sacred tree were represented in human shape, but

with the heads of eagles. The change of form was due to the same striving

to humanise the superhuman beings of Sumerian belief as that which had

given a man’s head to the colossal bulls; where the divine being had

become a god in the Semitic sense of the word, all traces of his bestial

origin were swept away; where he remained as it were only on the margin of

the divine world, the bestial element was thrust as far as possible out of

sight, and combined with the features of a man. The cherub was allowed to

retain his bull’s body or his eagle’s head, but it was on condition that

he never rose to the rank of a god, and that human members were combined

with his animal form.

The secondary creatures of the divine world of the Babylonians thus

resembled, in outward form, the gods of Egypt. But whereas in Egypt it was

the gods themselves who joined the head of the beast to the body of the

man, in Babylonia it was only the semi-divine spirits and monsters of the

popular creed who were thus partly bestial and partly human. The official

theology could not banish them altogether; they became accordingly the

servants and followers of the gods, or else the rabble-host of Tiamât, the

impersonation of chaos and sin. Like the devils and angels of medieval

belief, they were included among the three hundred spirits of heaven and

the six hundred spirits of earth.(278) The spirits of heaven formed “the

hosts” of which the supreme deity was lord, and whom he led into battle

against his foes; Nebo was the minister and lieutenant of Merodach and

“the hosts of the heaven and earth,” therefore it was his duty to muster

and drill.(279) The Anunna-ki or “spirits of earth” had their habitation

in the subterranean world of Hades, where they sat on a throne of gold

guarding the waters of life, while the Igigi or angels dwelt rather with

the gods in the heaven of light and blissfulness. It was on this account

that Assur-nazir-pal calls Nin-ip “the champion of the Igigi,” and that

elsewhere the god receives the title of “chief of the angels.” But it was

only in the later ages of Babylonian religion, when the Semitic conception

of divinity had become predominant, that a distinction was made between

the spirits of the earth and the air. It was only for the Semites that

there were spirits of the underworld and angels of heaven; the Sumerian

had known no difference between them; they were all alike Anunnas or

spirits, and Nin-ip had been lord, not of the Igigi alone, but of the

Anunna-ki as well.(280) He had, in fact, been one of them himself; he was

the minister and attendant of En-lil, and it was never forgotten that,

like the Anunna-ki, he was the “offspring of Ê-kur,” the name at once of

the temple of Nippur and of the underground world of Hades. Sometimes he

is said to have sprung from Ê-sarra, “the house of the (spirit)-hosts.” He

had been a ghost in Nippur before he was transformed into a Semitic god.

But he had been a ghost who was associated with the dawn, and he thus

became identified in the early Semitic age with the rising sun. His solar

character raised him to the rank of a Baal, and, consequently, of a god.

His older attributes, however, still clung to him. He was a sun-god who

had risen out of the earth and of the darkness of night, and in him,

therefore, the darker and more violent side of the sun-god was

reflected.(281) He became essentially a god of war, and as such a special

favourite of the Assyrian kings. He it was who carried destruction over

the earth at the time of the Deluge, while the Anunna-ki followed him with

their blazing torches; and he is the brother of En-nugi, the god from

whose hands there is no escape. With the spread of solar worship, the

solar features of Nin-ip naturally grew more marked. At times he was the

god of the noonday as well as of the dawn, for it was at noon that the

rays of the sun were fiercest and most deadly to man; at times he was

assimilated to his fellow sun-god Merodach, and made a son of Ea. The

syncretic epoch of Babylonian religion had truly arrived when Ea and

En-lil were thus interchanged, and the teaching of Nippur and Eridu united

in the solar cult!

But we have glimpses of a time when Nin-ip was not yet a god in human

form, much less a solar Baal. His name is a title merely, and originally

denoted the sexless spirit, who was indifferently “lord” and “lady of the

veil.”(282)

The veil was worn in sign of mourning, for the head was covered in sleep

and death. Like the cloak which enfolded the shade of Samuel, it

symbolised the denizen of the underworld. At first it would seem to have

been merely a veil that covered the head and face, like the _keffîya_ of

the modern Arab; in course of time it was extended to the cloak in which

the sleeper or the dead man could be wrapped. But in either case it was a

symbol of the world below, and as such became in the Semitic age the

garment of the mourner. The god who was “lord of the veil” must once have

dwelt beneath the earth, and been himself one of those spirits of darkness

whose faces were veiled from the sight of the living.

Nin-ip, then, must have been one of the Anunna-ki, a spirit of the earth

and the land of Hades, before he assumed the form of a Semitic Baal, and

clothed himself with the attributes of the sun-god. And the shape in which

he appeared to his worshippers was that of a swine. We are told that

Nin-ip was one with Nin-sakh, “the lord of the swine”(283) and the servant

of El-lil, who was adored at Lagas in Sumerian days, and to whom a temple

was erected even at Erech. That the swine should be connected with the

underground world of the dead, is not surprising. We find the same

connection in Keltic mythology. There, too, the swine are the cattle of

Hades, and it was from the subterranean fields of Hades that they were

transported by Pryderi to the earth above.(284) The swine turns up the

ground in his search for food; even to-day he is used to hunt for

truffles, and primitive man saw in his action an attempt to communicate

with the spirits of the underworld.(285)

From the earth-spirit with the veiled face, who incarnated himself in the

swine, the distance is great to the solar hero and warrior god of the

Semitic age. In fact, the distance is too great to be spanned by any

natural process of evolution. It is a distance in kind and not in degree.

It presupposes fundamentally different conceptions of religion, animism on

the one side and anthropomorphic gods on the other. If we are to listen to

fashionable theories of the origin of religion, we start in the one case

with the fetish, in the other case with the worship of ancestors. The

difference is racial: wherever we find the Semite, in all periods of his

history, his gods are human and not made in the form of the beast.

But the Semite, though he moulded the later religion of Babylonia, could

not transform it altogether. The Sumerian element in the population was

never extirpated, and it is probable that if we knew more of the religion

of the people as opposed to the official theology, we should find that it

remained comparatively little affected by Semitic influence. The

witchcraft and necromancy that flourished is a proof of this; even the

State religion was compelled to recognise it, and, like Brahmanism in the

presence of the native cults of India, to lend it its sanction and

control. It is instructive to observe what a contrast there was in this

respect between the official religion of Babylonia and that of the more

purely Semitic Israelites. Witchcraft and necromancy were practised also

in Israel, but there they were forbidden by the law and suppressed by the

head of the State. In Babylonia, however, the local deities were for the

most part of Sumerian origin, and in spite of their Semitic colouring and

dress not unfrequently retained their old Sumerian names. Babylonian

religion could not wholly repudiate its origin and parentage; the

superstructure might be Semitic, but its basis was Sumerian. Like the

Sumerian words which had been adopted into the language, the names of the

gods remained to testify to the fact that the people and their religion

were alike mixed. And with the names went early beliefs and legends,

fragments of folk-lore and ritual which had descended from a non-Semitic

past. The official creed found a niche for each of them as best it could,

but the assimilation was never more than partial, and from time to time we

meet with practices and conceptions which are alien to the official faith.

There were many expedients for getting rid of the multitudinous spirits of

the ancient creed who had not been transmuted into Semitic deities. They

might, as we have seen, be herded together in the indistinguishable crowd

of spirits of heaven and earth that formed the angel-hosts of the gods of

light, or else be transformed into demons in the train of Tiamât, the

impersonation of chaos. Some of them might be set apart as the special

servants and messengers of the gods, and occupy the place of archangels in

the celestial hierarchy. But it was also possible to call in the aid of

cosmology, and turn them into elemental powers representing successive

stages in the history of creation. They thus continued to belong to that

inchoate period of Babylonian religion when as yet the Semitic gods had

not come into existence, and at the same time they could be identified

with those gods in the exercise of their creative power. In the language

of later metaphysic, they thus became the successive thoughts of the

creator realising themselves in the successive acts of the creation, like

the æons of Gnosticism which emanate one from the other as the realised

thoughts of God. The idea is doubtless a late one, and belongs to an age

of philosophy; but it represents an attempt to grapple with the

difficulties presented by the opposing Sumerian and Semitic elements in

Babylonian religion, and to reconcile them together. It presupposes that

identification of one god with another which the solar cult and the

Semitic conception of the goddess had made possible, and so takes us one

step further in the direction of monotheism. The divine or superhuman

beings of the Sumerian creed are not merely identified with a particular

god, but are even transformed into the male and female principles which

his government of the world or the act of creation compels him to exhibit

in concrete form.(286)

Before Babylonian theosophy could arrive thus far, two things were

necessary. The gods had to be arranged in a divine hierarchy, and the

identification of one with the other had to become possible. The

hierarchical arrangement followed from the Semitic conception of divinity.

If Baal were a counterpart of the human father, there would be a divine

family and a divine court modelled on the pattern of those of his

worshippers. The god would have not only his wife and children, but his

slaves and ministers as well. The deities of heaven would thus fall into

orderly groups of higher and lower rank; the higher gods would tend to

separate themselves more and more from those of subordinate degree, and

the latter to sink into the position of second-rate intelligences, who

stood midway between the gods and men, and depended on “the great gods”

for their offices and existence.

The conception of a divine messenger or angel who carried the orders of

the higher god from heaven to earth and interpreted his will to men, goes

back to an early period in the history of Babylonian religion. We can

trace it to the time when the Sumerian first began to be affected by

Semitic influence. The _sukkal_ or “angel”-minister plays a prominent part

in primitive Babylonian theology, but it is noticeable that he is usually

a son of the god whose messages he conveys to gods and men. Asari or

Merodach is at once the son and the minister of Ea; Nin-ip, of En-lil. The

fact points to an age when Sumerian animism had already been succeeded by

Semitic Baalism; the spirit or ghost had become a god in human shape, who

begat children and required an envoy.

When Merodach became the god of Babylon, and with the rise of his city to

political power entered the circle of the supreme gods, he in his turn

needed a messenger. The latter was found in the god of the neighbouring

city of Borsippa. The growth of Babylon was accompanied by the decay of

Borsippa, which in time was reduced to a mere suburb of the rival town.

The god of the suburb was necessarily annexed by the god of the city which

had absorbed it, and as necessarily became his follower and servant.

Khammurabi, to whom Babylon owed its position and influence, even

transferred the ancient temple of the god of Borsippa to the god of

Babylon, and included him among the inferior deities to whom chapels were

erected in the great sanctuary of Merodach.(287) But the god of Borsippa

had once been as independent and supreme in his own city as Merodach was

at Babylon. He had been addressed as “the maker” of the universe and the

irrigator of the fields, and the origin of the cuneiform system of writing

was ascribed to him. The Semites called him the Nabium or “Prophet,” and

it was under this title of Nabium or Nebo that he became the minister of

Merodach. The name was appropriate in his twofold character of interpreter

of the will of Bel and patron of literature, and was carried by Babylonian

conquest into the distant West. There Moses died in Moab on the summit of

Mount Nebo, and cities bearing the name stood within the borders of Reuben

and Judah.

It was doubtless the association of Nebo with Merodach that caused him,

like Thoth in Egypt, to become the patron of literature and the god of the

scribes. The culture-god was as it were divided into two; while Merodach

retained the functions peculiar to a Semitic Baal, Nebo watched over the

library and school, and encouraged the study of the script which had been

invented by him. The older claims of Ea fell into the background and were

forgotten; it was no longer the god of Eridu, but Nebo, who had written

the first book, and instructed mankind in the elements of culture. The

marshal’s staff, which Nebo had wielded as organiser of “the hosts of

heaven and earth,” now became the rod of the scribe, and a consort was

created for him in the person of Tasmit or “Hearing.” In Assyria, where

the worship of Assur prevented any development of that of his rival

Merodach, Nebo became a special favourite of the literary class, who

derived their knowledge and inspiration from Babylon. Assur-bani-pal never

wearies of telling us how Nebo and Tasmit had “made broad his ears and

enlightened his eyes,” so that he had collected and republished the books

and tablets of the kings who had gone before him.

As minister of Merodach, Nebo passed into the solar circle. In Egypt he

would have been absorbed by the more influential god, but in Babylonia the

Semitic conception of Merodach as a Baal who required his minister and

envoy like an earthly king, stood in the way of any such identification.

He consequently retained his personality, and it was another god who was

identified with him. This was Nusku, once the fire which blazed up into

flame and purified the sacrifice. With the spread of the solar cult Nusku

became a local sun-god, and was regarded as the god of the burning sun of

noon. In Sumerian days, however, while he was still the spirit of the

fire, he had been necessarily the servant and associate of En-lil; and

when En-lil became the Semitic Bel of Nippur, Nusku followed his fortunes

and was made his messenger. After this his identification with Nebo was

easy. Nebo, too, was the messenger and interpreter of Bel, though it was

the younger Bel of Babylon who had supplanted the older Bel of Nippur. As

Bel-Merodach took the place of En-lil, so too did Nebo take the place of

Nusku. The priests of Babylon knew of one Bel only, and the minister of

Bel must be one and the same whether his name were Nusku or Nebo. That

Nusku had originally been an independent deity was, however, never

forgotten. The past history and religion of the country could not be

ignored, and the priesthood were forced to erect a separate shrine to

Nusku within the precincts of the temple of Nebo itself. Only thus could

they be certain that the god would not avenge himself for being defrauded

of his dues.

The history of Nebo is an instructive illustration of the successive

changes that passed over the religion of Babylonia. We first have the

ghost of Sumerian times, who becomes the god of a special city in the days

when Semitic influence began to make itself felt. Then the god is

transformed into a Semitic Baal, and with the political rise of the

neighbouring city of Babylon is degraded into an attendant and retainer of

the mightier god. As interpreter of the will of the culture-god he

deprives Ea of his ancient prerogatives, and his title of “Prophet”

becomes his name. Henceforth he is a purely Semitic divinity, and a wife

is found for him in the shadowy abstraction “Hearing.” Under the

influences of the solar cult, he is identified with the ancient Sumerian

fire-spirit who had himself become a sun-god, and eventually he is adopted

in Assyria as the patron of the learned class, and the divine

representative of Babylonian learning.

But the history of Nebo also illustrates one of the directions in which

the striving after a monotheistic faith displayed itself. Not only was a

separate god, Nusku, amalgamated with Nebo, Nebo himself, while still

keeping his independent personality, sank into a subordinate position

which may be compared with that of an archangel in Christian belief.

Babylonian religion came to distinguish between a limited number of “great

gods” and the inferior deities who formed their court. Indeed, it went

even further than this. From the days of Khammurabi onward there was a

tendency to exalt Bel-Merodach at the expense of all his brother gods. The

development of Babylonian religion, in fact, went hand in hand with that

of the Babylonian State. The foundation of an empire had made the

Babylonian familiar with the conception of a supreme sovereign, under whom

there were vassal kings, and under them again a dependent nobility. The

same conception was extended to the celestial hierarchy. Here, too,

Bel-Merodach sat supreme, while the other gods “bowed reverently before

him,” retaining, indeed, their ancestral rights and power within the

limits of their respective sanctuaries, but acknowledging the supremacy of

the one sovereign Bel. It was no longer in honour of En-lil that the

inhabitants of Babylonia were called “the people of Bel,” but because they

were all alike the children and adorers of Bel of Babylon.

But Babylonian religion never advanced further. It is true that the tablet

published by Dr. Pinches, to which I have already alluded in the last

lecture, identifies the chief gods of the pantheon with Merodach in his

various phases and functions; it is also true that Nabonidos, the last

Babylonian king, shocked the consciences and violated the rights of the

local priesthoods by bringing the images of their gods into the central

sanctuary; but such speculations and efforts remained isolated and without

effect. It was otherwise, however, in Assyria. There the deities for the

most part, like the culture and language, had been imported from the

south; there were no time-honoured temples and venerable traditions to

contend against; and, above all, there was a national god who represented

the State rather than a Semitic Baal, and was therefore a symbol of the

unity which bound the State together.

The supreme god of Assyria was Assur; the other gods were of Babylonian

origin. And in the name of Assur we have the name of the country itself

and its primitive capital. Assur, in short, was the deified city of Assur,

the divine State which from the days of its successful revolt from

Babylonia was predominantly military, with all the union and discipline of

a military organisation. Such at least was the view taken of the god in

the historical age of Assyria, though some modern scholars have doubted

whether, like Nineveh, which derived its name from the goddess Ninâ, it

was not originally rather the city that took its name from the god than

the god from the city.

Such doubts, however, are set at rest by an examination of the proper

names found in the Babylonian contracts of the early Semitic period, more

especially in those of the age of Khammurabi. Many of them are compounded

with the names of cities which are treated as deities, and are preceded by

the prefix of divinity. Thus we have Sumu-Upi (Bu. 91-5-9. 2182. 16), like

Ṡumu-Rakh or Sumu-Râ and Samuel, as well as Upi-rabi (Bu. 91-5-9. 377.

25), where the deified Upi or Opis plays exactly the same part as the

deified rivers Euphrates and Tigris in other similarly compounded names.

Between the deified city and the deified river no distinction was drawn.

Both alike were impersonations of the god. So too in the second tablet of

the _Surpu_ series (_WAI._ iv. 59. 35, 38), Eridu and Babylon are invoked

to deliver the sick man by the side of Ea and Merodach and various other

gods, as well as certain of the stars. Between the ordinary gods of

Babylonia and the deified city no distinction is made.(288)

Had the city taken its name from the god, it would be difficult to find a

satisfactory etymology for it. The spelling of the name is against our

connecting it with the word _asiru_, “he who blesses” or “consecrates,”

from which the Assyrian _asirtu_, “sanctuary,” is derived, like the name

of the Canaanitish goddess Ashêrah.(289) On the other hand, the native

Assyrian etymology is as inadmissible as the endeavours of our eighteenth

century lexicographers to find Greek or Latin derivations for Anglo-Saxon

words. The Assyrian scribes saw in Assur merely the old elemental deity

Ansar, “the firmament,” who was himself nothing more than the Sumerian

spirit of the “heavenly host.” It is wisest not to imitate them, but, as

in the case of Merodach and Istar, to leave the origin of the name Assur

unexplained.

The kings of Assyria were originally high priests of Assur. In other parts

of the Semitic world the high priest similarly preceded the king. The

father-in-law of Moses was high priest of Midian, and the high priests of

Saba in Southern Arabia developed into kings.(290) There were high priests

also in Babylonia, who took their titles not only from the gods they

served, but also from the cities over which they ruled. The peculiarity in

the case of Assyria, however, was that there the god and the city were one

and the same. When, therefore, the high priest of Assur assumed the title

of king, he still retained his priestly functions under another title. He

was priest, but no longer high priest. Assyria was a monarchy, not a

theocracy; it was founded on military force, not on priestly influence.

The king accordingly was not a representative and vicegerent of the god,

like a Babylonian prince; he represented the god Assur only because he

represented the city of Assur. It was through the city of Assur that the

god manifested himself as it were to men.

One of the consequences of this fact was that Assur was a national as

opposed to a merely local god. Wherever the power of the city extended,

there the power of the god necessarily extended as well. When Assur became

the capital of a kingdom, the whole land which owned its authority

received its name and accepted the supremacy of its god. The local cults

made way for the national cults; it was not only in Assur itself that the

god had his temple; wherever a city called itself Assyrian, the worship of

Assur held the first place. There were no old sanctuaries and cults to

displace, as in Babylonia; the deities who were adored in the cities of

Assyria were of Babylonian origin, like Ninâ and Istar; and when once

Assyria had achieved its independence, and realised that it had a national

life of its own, they were unable to maintain themselves against the

national god.

This national god had given his people their freedom and right to rule. He

it was who had led their armies to victory, and had vanquished the hostile

deities of Babylonia. He was thus identified with the army to which

Assyria owed its existence, and with the king who was its leader in war.

Wherever the army went or the king established himself, Assur went also.

He lost, therefore, the last relics of his association with a particular

locality, and became the god of the whole people. From every point of view

he was national and not local.

Freed from the limitations of locality, he was consequently freed from the

limitations of form. Bel-Merodach was necessarily human in form, with all

the limitations of humanity; it was only where his image was that he could

be present in visible shape. But Assur was not confined to the human image

that represented him. He could also be represented by a symbol, and where

the symbol was he was too. The symbol was a standard, on which an archer

was depicted rising from a winged sun. It was carried with the armies of

Assyria from place to place, like the ark in which the Israelites of the

age of Samuel saw a symbol of the presence of their national God. The

winged sun refers us to Egypt; so too does the standard on which the

emblem of Assur was borne. The Asiatic conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty

had brought Egypt and Assyria into contact; the Assyrian king paid tribute

to the Pharaoh, and doubtless depended on him for support against

Babylonia. It was the period when Assyria was first feeling itself an

independent nation; the authority of Babylonia had been shaken off, and

the god of Babylon had been supplanted by Assur. We need not be surprised,

therefore, if Assur consented to borrow from Egypt the symbol which

henceforth distinguished him from the Babylonian gods, and with the symbol

went the theological ideas of which it was the expression.

These theological ideas were already deeply tinctured by the theories of

the solar cult. The winged solar disc is evidence that Assur was

assimilated to Amon-Ra of Egypt. But the assimilation stopped there. The

Assyrians were too purely Semitic even to comprehend the nebulous

pantheism of the Egyptian solar school; Assur remained an anthropomorphic

god, with very definite attributes and sharply-cut features. The archer

who rises above the disc of the sun significantly indicates the contrast

between the theology of Egypt and Assyria. Above the sun-god is the human

warrior, the lord of hosts, the god of battles, the divine leader of the

armies of Assur. There was no room in the practical Assyrian mind for a

formless divinity, with its infinite transformations and elusive shape.

The Assyrian needed a soldier’s god, at once human and clearly defined.

Nevertheless this human god was recognised as one with the sun-god. Or

rather, perhaps, the sun was regarded as his visible manifestation, the

mark or symbol under which he displayed himself. Assur was thus

essentially a Semitic Baal, but a warlike Baal, who was the god of a

nation and not of a particular place.

Where the nation and its army were, accordingly, their god was as well.

And when Assyria claimed to rule the whole civilised world, the power and

authority of its god became world-wide. It was in his name that the

Assyrian troops went forth to fight, and it was “through trust in” him

that they gained their victories. Those who resisted them were his

enemies, those who submitted were incorporated into his empire, and became

his subjects and worshippers. All other gods had to yield to him; he was

not only paramount over them, but to worship them instead of him was an

act of impiety. The sacrifice might continue to be made to them and the

prayer offered, but it was on condition that the first-fruits of both

sacrifice and prayer were given to Assur.

This, however, was not all. Assur was not only jealous of other gods,

there was no goddess who could share with him his power. In the eyes of

the Assyrian people he was wifeless, like Yahveh of Israel or Chemosh of

Moab. It is true that some Assyriologists, with more zeal than knowledge,

have found for him a wife, but they are not agreed as to who she was.

Sometimes we have been told it was Serua, sometimes Istar, sometimes

Belit. The very fact that such a difference of opinion exists is

sufficient to condemn the whole supposition. It is based on the pedantry

of certain of the Assyrian scribes, who, educated in the literature and

religion of Babylonia, were naturally anxious to fit their national god

into the Babylonian system of theology. The gods of Babylonia had each his

wife; they were each the head of a divine family, and consequently the

chief god of Assyria must be the same. But it was difficult to find for

him a female consort. Once or twice the help of the grammar is invoked,

and the feminine Assurit is made to take her place by the side of Assur.

But she was too evidently an artificial creation, and accordingly Belit

was borrowed from Bel-Merodach, or Nin-lil from Bel of Nippur, and boldly

claimed as the wife of Assur. But this too was acceptable neither to

Babylonians nor to Assyrians, and, as a last resource, Istar, the virgin

goddess, was transformed into a married wife. It might have been thought

that the idea, once started, would have met with ready acceptance; for

Istar was the goddess of Nineveh, as Assur was of the older capital which

was superseded by Nineveh in the later days of the Assyrian empire. That

it did not do so is a proof how firmly rooted was the wifelessness of

Assur in the Assyrian mind; he was no Babylonian Bel who needed a

helpmeet, but a warrior’s god, who entered the battle wifeless and alone.

I can but repeat again of him what I said years ago in my Hibbert

Lectures: “Assur consequently differs from the Babylonian gods, not only

in the less narrowly local character that belongs to him, but also in his

solitary nature. He is ‘king of all the gods’ in a sense in which none of

the deities of Babylonia were. He is like the king of Assyria himself,

brooking no rival, allowing neither wife nor son to share in the honours

which he claims for himself alone. He is essentially a jealous god, and as

such sends forth his Assyrian adorers to destroy his unbelieving foes.

Wifeless, childless, he is mightier than the Babylonian Baalim; less

kindly, perhaps, less near to his worshippers than they were, but more

awe-inspiring and more powerful. We can, in fact, trace in him all the

lineaments upon which, under other conditions, there might have been built

up as pure a faith as that of the God of Israel.” That none such was ever

built, may be accepted as a sign and token that between the Semites of

Assyria and those of Israel there lay a difference which no theories of

evolution are able to explain.

Lecture VI. Cosmologies.

Man was made in the likeness of the gods, and, conversely, the gods are in

the likeness of man. This belief lies at the root of the theology of

Semitic Babylonia, and characterises its conception of divinity. It

follows from it that the world which we see has come into existence like

the successive generations of mankind or the products of human art. It has

either been begotten by the creator, or it has been formed out of

pre-existing materials. It did not come into being of itself; it is no

fortuitous concurrence of atoms; no self-evolved product out of nothing,

or the result of continuous development and evolution. The doctrines of

spontaneous generation and of development are alike foreign to Babylonian

religious thought. That demanded a creator who was human in his attributes

and mode of work, who could even make mistakes and experiments, and so

call into existence imperfect or monstrous forms which further experience

was needed to rectify. There was an earlier as well as a later creation,

the unshapely brood of chaos as well as the more perfect creations of the

gods of light.

As we have seen, the culture of primitive Babylonia radiated from two main

centres, the sanctuary of Nippur in the north, and the seaport of Eridu in

the south. The one was inland, the other maritime; and what I may term the

geographical setting of the two streams of culture varied accordingly. The

great temple of Nippur was known as Ê-kur, “the house of the

mountain-land”; it was a model of the earth, which those who built it

believed to be similarly shaped, and to have the form of a mountain whose

peak penetrated the clouds. Its supreme god was the lord of the nether

earth, his subjects were the demons of the underworld, and the theology of

his priests was associated with sorcery and witchcraft, and with

invocations to the spirits who ruled over the world of the dead.

Eridu, on the contrary, was the dwelling-place of the god of the deep. Its

temple, Ê-Saggila, “the house of the high head,” was, we are told, “in the

midst” of the encircling ocean on which the whole earth rested, and in it

was the home of Ea, “the lord of the holy mound.”(291) Its god was the

author of Babylonian writing and civilisation, and his son and interpreter

was Aṡari, “the benefactor of man.” While the theology of Nippur concerned

itself with the dead, that of Eridu was pre-eminently occupied with the

living. Asari is invoked as the god who raised the dead to life, and the

arts which make life pleasant were the gifts of Ea himself. It is perhaps

not without reason that, while En-lil of Nippur appears as the destroyer

of mankind, Ea is their creator and instructor. He not only created them,

but he taught them how to live, and provided for them the spells and

remedies which could heal the sick and ward off death.

Like Khnum of Egypt, he was called “the potter,” for he had moulded

mankind from the clay which his waters formed on the shores of the Persian

Gulf.(292) Nor was it mankind only that was thus made. The whole world of

created things had been similarly moulded; the earth and all that dwelt

upon it had risen out of the sea. The cosmology of Eridu thus made water

the origin of all things; the world we inhabit has sprung from the deep,

which still encircles it like a serpent with its coils.

But the deep over which the creator-god presided was a deep which formed

part of that orderly framework of nature wherein the gods of light bear

rule, and which obeys laws that may not be broken. It is not the deep

where the spirit of chaos held sway, and of which she was an

impersonation; that was a deep without limits or law, whose only progeny

was a brood of monsters. Between the deep of Ea and the chaos of Tiamât

the cosmology of historical Babylonia drew a sharp line of distinction;

the one excluded the other, and it was not until the deep of Tiamât had

been, as it were, overcome and placed within bounds, that the deep wherein

Ea dwelt was able to take its place.

The two conceptions are antagonistic one to the other, and can hardly be

explained, except on the supposition that they belong to two different

schools of thought. The brood of Tiamât, it must be remembered, were once

the subjects of En-lil of Nippur, and the Anunna-ki, or “spirits of the

earth,” though they became the orderly ministers of the gods of light,

nevertheless continued to have their dwelling-place in the underground

world, and to serve its mistress Allat. The motley host that followed

Tiamât in her contest with Bel-Merodach were essentially the ghosts and

goblins of the theology of Nippur; and it is with the latter, therefore,

that we must associate the theory of the divine world with which they are

connected. The world of Nippur was a world from which the sea was

excluded; it was a world of plain and mountain, and of the hollow depths

which lay beneath the surface of the earth. The cosmology of Nippur would

naturally concern itself with the land rather than with the sea; the earth

and not the water would have been the first in order of existence, and

habitation of the gods would be sought on the summit of a Mount Olympus

rather than in the depths of an encircling ocean.(293)

In the chaos of Tiamât, accordingly, I see the last relics of a cosmology

which emanated from Nippur, and was accepted wherever the influence of

Nippur prevailed. It has been modified by the cosmological ideas of Eridu;

and in the story of the struggle between Tiamât and Merodach an attempt

has been made to harmonise the two conflicting conceptions of the

universe, and to weld them into a compact whole. The world of Tiamât has

first been transformed into a watery abyss like that which the theologians

of Eridu believed to be the origin of the universe, and then has been

absorbed by the deep over which Ea held sway. The creator Ea has taken the

place of the spirit of destruction, the culture-god of the dragon of

darkness.

But a curious legend, which has been much misunderstood, still preserves

traces of the old cosmology of the great sanctuary of Northern Babylonia.

It describes the war made against a king of Babylonia by the powers of

darkness, the gnome-like beings who dwelt “in the ground,” where Tiamât

had suckled them, and where they had multiplied in the cavernous depths of

a mountain land. They were, we are told, composite monsters, “warriors

with the bodies of birds, men with the faces of ravens,” over whom ruled a

king and his wife and their seven sons.(294) Year after year the war

continued, and, in spite of charms and incantations, host after host sent

forth from Akkad was annihilated by the unclean and superhuman enemy. The

Babylonian king was in despair; in vain he appealed to the gods, and

declared how “terror and night, death and plague, earthquake, fear and

horror, hunger, famine, and destruction,” had come upon his unfortunate

people. “The plain of Akkad” seemed about to become the prey of the demons

of the night. How it was rescued from the danger that threatened it we do

not know; the story is unfortunately broken, and the end of it has not

been found. But the origin and character of the superhuman enemy is not

difficult to discover; their dwelling-place is in the tomb-like recesses

of the mountains, their mother was Tiamât herself, and they have the

monstrous shapes of the ghosts and spirits of the ancient animism of

Nippur.(295)

The legend was fitly preserved in the sanctuary of Nergal, the god of the

dead, at Kutha. It too has undergone the harmonising process of later

times: the cosmologies of Nippur and Eridu are again set in antagonism,

one against the other, and there is a first creation as well as a second

engaged in the same struggle as that which under a different form is

described in the legends of Eridu and Babylon. But the antagonists in it

are alike the inhabitants of the dry land; there is no watery abyss from

which they have sprung, whether it be the chaotic deep of Tiamât or the

ocean home of the god of culture. The conceptions on which it rests belong

to the inland plain of Babylonia rather than to the shores of the sea.

Influenced though it has been by the cosmology of Eridu, the elements of

which it is composed go back to an inland and not to a maritime State.

It will be seen that our knowledge of the cosmology of Nippur is still

scanty and uncertain. The world which it presupposed had the form of a

mountain, on the peak of which the gods lived among the clouds of heaven,

while the cavernous depths below it were peopled with hosts of spirits and

demons, the shades of the dead and the ghosts of a primitive animism.

There was no encircling ocean, no abysmal deep on which it floated, and

from which it had been produced. What its origin, however, was believed to

be we do not yet know, or to what creative _Zi_ or _Lil_ it was held to

owe its existence. For an answer to these questions we must wait until the

ancient libraries of Nippur have been thoroughly excavated and

explored.(296)

It is otherwise with the cosmology of Eridu. We know a good deal about it,

thanks to the theologians of Babylon, whose god Merodach was the successor

and representative of the god of Eridu. It is true that its form has been

changed and modified in part for the greater glory of Merodach and his

city, that Merodach has even taken the place of Ea as the creator, and

that the cosmology of Nippur—or at all events of a similar school of

thought—has been combined with that of Eridu, with the result that there

are two creations, the first chaotic, and the second that of the present

world. But it is still easy to disentangle the earlier from the later

elements in the story, and to separate what is purely Babylonian from what

belongs to Eridu.

One of the versions of the story that have come down to us has been

preserved in a spell, of which, like verses of the Bible in modern times,

it has been used to form a part. Its antiquity is shown by the fact that

it is written in the ancient language of Sumer. It is thus that it begins—

“No holy house, no house of the gods in a holy place had as yet

been built,

no reed had grown, no tree been planted,

no bricks had been made, no structure formed,

no house had been built, no city founded,

no city built where living things could dwell.

Nippur was unbuilt, its temple of Ê-kur was unerected;

Erech was unbuilt, its temple of Ê-ana was unerected;(297)

the deep sea was uncreated, Eridu unbuilt.

The site of (its) holy house, the house of the gods, existed not,

all the earth was sea,

while in the midst of the sea was a water-course.

In those days was Eridu built and the temple of Ê-Saggil founded,

Ê-Saggil wherein dwells the divine king of the holy mound in the

midst of the deep;—

Babylon was built, Ê-Saggil completed;—

the spirits of the earth were created together,

they called it by the mighty name of the holy city, the seat of

their well-being.(298)

Merodach(299) tied (reeds) together to form a weir in the water,

he made dust and mixed it with the reeds of the weir,

that the gods might dwell in the seat of (their) well-being.(300)

Mankind he created,—

the goddess Aruru created the seed of mankind with him,(301)—

the cattle of the field, the living creatures in the field, he

created;

the Tigris and Euphrates he made, and set them in their place,

giving them good names.

Moss and seed-plant of the marsh, reed and rush he created,

he created the green herb of the field,

the earth, the marsh, the jungle,

the cow and its young, the calf, the sheep and its young, the lamb

of the fold,

the grove and the forest,

the goat, (and) the gazelle multiplied (?) for him.

Bel-Merodach(302) filled a space at the edge of the sea,

[there] he made an enclosure of reeds,

he constructed [a site?],

he created [the reeds], he created the trees,

he laid [a platform] in the place,

[he moulded bricks], the structure he formed;

[he built houses], he founded cities,

[cities he founded and] filled them with living things;

Nippur he built, Ê-kur he erected,

Erech he built, Ê-ana he erected,(303)

[the deep he created, Eridu he built].”

It is evident that the poem was written by one who lived on the marshy

shores of the Persian Gulf, and had watched how land could be formed by

tying the reeds in bundles and building with them a weir. It was in this

way that the first cultivators of Eridu protected their fields from the

tide, or reclaimed the land from the sea. None but those who had actually

seen the process could have devised a cosmology which thus applied it to

the creation of the world. To the question—“How did this world come into

existence?” the primitive inhabitant of Eridu seemed to have a ready

answer: he too was able to create new land, out of which the rush and the

herb could grow, where the cattle could be pastured, and the house built.

What he could do, the gods had doubtless done at the beginning of time;

all things must have come from the primeval deep, and the earth itself was

but an islet rescued from the tides and created by obstructing their ebb

and flow.

But it is also evident that the old poem has been revised and re-edited by

the priesthood of Babylon. Ê-Saggil, the temple of Bel-Merodach of

Babylon, has been confounded with the earlier Ê-Saggil of Eridu, and the

creator-god Ea has been supplanted by Merodach. The supplanter, however,

cannot conceal his foreign origin. The “enclosure” or “dwelling-place,”

“at the edge of the sea,” must have been made in the first instance by the

god of the deep, not by the sun-god of Babylon. Merodach had nothing to do

with the sea and marshland, with cities that stood on the margin of the

ocean, or reeds that grew by its shores. He was the god of an inland city,

and he symbolised the sun and not the sea.

It is possible that even before its alteration at the hands of the

theologians of Babylon, the old cosmological poem of Eridu had been

modified in accordance with the requirements of a theology which resulted

from a fusion of Sumerian and Semitic ideas. The doctrine of the triad is

already presupposed by it; Nippur, Erech, and Eridu, with their

sanctuaries of Bel, Anu, and Ea, already represent Babylonia, and the

temples of Bel and Anu even take precedence of that of Ea. At the same

time the parallelism between Nippur and Erech on the one side, and Eridu

on the other, is imperfect. The uncreated “deep,” on the margin of which

Eridu stood, has nothing corresponding with it in the two preceding lines,

while the place of the temples of Nippur and Erech is occupied by the name

of the city of Eridu. It seems clear, that the reference to the two great

sanctuary-cities of Northern and Central Babylonia is an interpolation,

which breaks and injures the sense. Originally, we may conclude, the poem

named Eridu only; its author knew nothing of the other shrines of

Babylonia; for him the temple of Ea at Eridu was the house of all “the

gods.”

Ea, under the mask of Merodach, is the creator of mankind, as of all

things else. In this act of creation the goddess Aruru is coupled with

him; we have no materials at present for explaining why she should have

been introduced, or whether the introduction formed part of the original

legend. It is not the only passage, however, in which she appears as a

creatress. According to the Epic of Gilgames, she had created the great

hero of Babylonia, and it was she also who moulded Ea-bani, the companion

of Gilgames, out of clay which she had kneaded with her hands. Like Ea,

therefore, she was a modeller in clay, and there was good reason for

associating her with the divine potter who had made man. Had she been a

god she would doubtless have been identified with him; as it was, she had

to remain his companion and associate, whose name could not be forgotten

even by a worshipper of Ea. Probably she was the goddess of some

Babylonian city where she played the part that Ea played at Eridu; it may

be that her sanctuary was at Marad, which claimed, as it would seem, to be

the birthplace of Gilgames.

The name of the first man was Adapa, “the son of Eridu.” Ea had created

him without a helpmeet; he had endowed him with wisdom and knowledge, but

had denied to him the gift of immortality. Each day he baked the bread and

poured pure water into the bowl; at night he drew the bolts of the gates

of Eridu, and at dawn he sailed forth in his bark to fish in the waters of

the Persian Gulf. Once, so the story ran, the south wind upset his skiff,

and in revenge he broke its wings. But the south wind was a servant of

Anu, and the god of the sky demanded the punishment of the daring mortal.

Ea, however, intervened to save the man he had created. He clad Adapa in a

mourner’s robe, and showed him the road to heaven, telling him what he was

to do in the realm of Anu, but forbidding him to eat or drink there. The

gate of heaven was guarded by the gods Tammuz and Nin-gis-zida, who asked

him the meaning of the mourner’s garment which he wore.(304) When he

answered that it was for their own selves, because they had vanished from

the earth, their hearts were softened, and they became his intercessors

with Anu. Anu listened, and forgave; but that a mortal man should behold

the secrets of heaven and earth was so contrary to right, that he ordered

the food and water of life to be offered him. Adapa, however, remembered

the commands of Ea, and, unlike the biblical Adam, refused the food of

immortality. Man remained mortal, and it was never again in his power to

eat of the tree of life. But in return, sovereignty and dominion were

bestowed upon him, and Adapa became the father of mankind.

The legend is a Babylonian attempt to explain the existence of death. It

is like, and yet unlike, the story in Genesis. The biblical Adam lost the

gift of immortality because his desire to become as God, knowing good and

evil, had caused him to be driven from the Paradise in which grew the tree

of life. Adapa, on the other hand, was already endowed with knowledge by

his creator Ea, and his loss of immortality was due, not to his

disobedience, but to his obedience to the commands of the god. Adam was

banished from the Garden of Eden, “lest he should put forth his hand and

take of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”; while in the

Babylonian legend it was Anu himself who was reluctant that one who had

entered the gate of heaven should remain a mere mortal man. Babylonian

polytheism allowed the existence of divided counsels among the gods; the

monotheism of Israel made this impossible. There was no second Yahveh to

act in contradiction to the first; Yahveh was at once the creator of man

and the God of heaven, and there was none to dispute His will. There is no

room for Anu in the Book of Genesis; and as Ea, the creator of Adapa, was

unwilling that the man he had created should become an immortal god, so

Yahveh, the creator of Adam, similarly denied to him the food of immortal

life.

That there is a connection between the Biblical story and the Babylonian

legend is, however, rendered certain by the geography of the Biblical

Paradise. It was a garden in the land of Eden, and Edin was the Sumerian

name of the “plain” of Babylonia in which Eridu stood. Two of the rivers

which watered it were the Tigris and Euphrates, the two streams, in fact,

which we are specially told had been created and named by Ea at the

beginning of time. Indeed, the name that is given to the Tigris in the

Book of Genesis is its old Sumerian title, which survived in later days

only in the religious literature. Even the strange statement that “a river

went out of Eden,” which “was parted and became into four heads,” is

explained by the cuneiform texts. The Persian Gulf was called “the Salt

River,” and, thanks to its tides, was regarded as the source of the four

streams which flowed into it from their “heads” or springs in the north.

On early Babylonian seals, Ea, the god of the sea, is depicted as pouring

sometimes the four rivers, sometimes only the Tigris and Euphrates, from a

vase that he holds in his hands. Years ago I drew attention to a Sumerian

hymn in which reference is made to the garden and sacred tree of Eridu,

the Babylonian Paradise in the plain of Eden. Dr. Pinches has since

discovered the last line of the hymn, in which the picture is completed by

a mention of the rivers which watered the garden on either side. It is

thus that the text reads—

“In Eridu a vine(305) grew over-shadowing; in a holy place was it

brought forth;

its root was of bright lapis, set in the world beneath.

The path of Ea was in Eridu,(306) teeming with fertility.

His seat (there) is the centre of the earth;

his couch is the bed of the primeval mother.(307)

Into the heart of its holy house, which spreads its shade like a

forest, hath no man entered.

In its midst is Tammuz,

between the mouths of the rivers on both sides.”(308)

The sacred tree of the garden of Eridu was, however, not the tree of life.

It was rather the tree of knowledge. This is shown by an inscription of

Eri-Aku or Arioch, in which he describes himself as “the executor of the

oracle of the sacred tree of Eridu.” Perhaps it is to the same tree that

reference is made in a magical text, in which a man possessed of “the

seven evil spirits” is healed with the help of “the tree which shatters

the power of the incubus, and upon whose core the name of Ea is

recorded.”(309) But Ea was not only the god of wisdom, he was also the god

of “life,” and the trees of both wisdom and life might therefore be fitly

placed under his protection.

When Babylon became the supreme head of Babylonia under Khammurabi and his

successors, the creative functions of Ea were usurped by Merodach. A long

poem celebrating the glories and power of Merodach, his struggle with

chaos and creation of the world, and, finally, his formal investiture with

the names and prerogatives of Ea, has been preserved to us in part. Ever

since its discovery by Mr. George Smith it has been known as the Epic of

the Creation, and the parallelism between the first tablet composing it

and the first chapter of Genesis has long attracted attention. But the

poem is of late date. It belongs to an age of religious syncretism and

materialistic philosophy; the mythological beings of popular belief are

resolved into cosmological principles, and the mythological dress in which

they appear has a theatrical effect. The whole poem reminds us of the

stilted and soulless productions of the eighteenth century, in which

commonplace ideas and a prosaic philosophy masquerade as Greek nymphs or

Roman gods. It is only here and there, as in the description of the

contest with Tiamât, or in the concluding lines,—if, indeed, they belong

to the poem at all,—that it rises above the level of dull mediocrity.

But mediocre as it may be from a literary point of view, it is of

considerable value to the student of Babylonian cosmology. The author is

fortunately not original, and his materials, therefore, have been drawn

from the folk-lore or the theology of the past. A welcome commentary on

the first tablet has been preserved, moreover, in the _Problems and

Solutions of First Principles_, written by the philosopher Damascius, the

contemporary of Justinian, whose accuracy and acquaintance with Babylonian

sources it proves. Unfortunately the tablet is broken, and the final lines

of it are consequently lost—

“When above unnamed was the heaven,

the earth below by a name was uncalled,

the primeval deep was their begetter,

the chaos of Tiamât was the mother of them all.

Their waters were embosomed in one place,

the corn-stalk was ungathered, the marsh-plant ungrown.

At that time the gods had not appeared, any one of them,

by no name were they called, no destiny [had they fixed].

Then were the [primeval] gods created,

Lakhmu and Lakhamu came forth [the first].

Until they grew up ...

Ansar and Kisar were created ...

Long were the days ...

Anu [Bel and Ea were made].”

To the Babylonian, name and existence were one and the same. Nothing could

exist unless it had a name, and whatever had a name necessarily existed.

That the heaven and earth were unnamed, therefore, was equivalent to

saying that they were not yet in being. The words with which the Book of

Genesis begins are a curious contradiction of the statement of the

Babylonian cosmologist. But the contradiction illustrates the difference

between the Hebrew and the Babylonian points of view. The Hebrew was not

only a monotheist; he believed also that everything, even from the

beginning, had been made by the one supreme God; the Babylonian, on the

contrary, started with a materialistic philosophy. There are no gods at

the outset; the gods themselves have been created like other things; all

that existed at first was a chaos of waters. The Babylonian cosmology is

that of Genesis without the first verse.

The word I have rendered “chaos” is _mummu_. Damascius explains it as

νοητὸς κόσμος, “the world of thought” or “ideas.” It is a world which has

as yet no outward form or content, a world without matter, or perhaps more

probably a world in which matter is inseparable from thought. And for this

reason it is formless; matter as yet had assumed no shape, there is no

single part of it which is so defined and separated from the rest as to

receive a name and thereby to exist. There is nothing but a dark and

formless deep, which can be imagined but not pictured or described.

The chaos, however, is a chaos of waters. Once more, therefore, we are

taken back to Eridu and the shores of the Persian Gulf, and to the

cosmology which saw in the water the origin of all things. But the

cosmology itself has been strangely changed. There is no longer a creator

god, no longer an Ea, who, like Yahveh, existed before creation, and to

whom the earth and its inhabitants owe their existence. He has been swept

aside, and an atheistic philosophy has taken his place. The mythological

garb of the larger part of the poem cannot disguise the materialism of its

preface; in the later tablets of it Tiamât may once more be the dragon of

popular imagination, but the first tablet is careful to explain that this

is but an adaptation to folk-lore and legend, and that Tiamât is really

what her name signifies, the chaos of waters.

The process of creation is conceived of under the Semitic form of

generation. The Deep and the chaos of waters become male and female

principles, from whom other pairs are generated. The process of generation

easily passed into the emanation of the Gnostic systems of theosophy under

the influence of Greek metaphysics. But the poet of Babylon remained true

to his Semitic point of view; for him creation is a process of generation

rather than of emanation; and though the divine or superhuman beings of

the old mythology have become mere primordial elements, they are still

male and female, begetting children like men and gods.

To find the elemental deities or principles that could thus form links in

the chain of evolution, it was necessary to fall back on the spirits or

ghosts of the early Sumerian cult who were essentially material in their

nature, and had nothing in common with the Semitic Baal. Lakhmu and his

consort were part of the monstrous brood of Tiamât; they represented the

first attempts to give form and substance to the universe. But the form

was still chaotic and immature, suitably symbolised by beings, half human

and half bestial, which had descended to Semitic Babylonia from Sumerian

animism, and whose memory was kept alive by religious art.

Lakhmu and Lakhamu were followed by An-sar and Ki-sar, the upper and lower

firmament. The one originally denoted the spirit-world of the sky, the

other the spirit-world of the earth.(310) They were not gods in the

Semitic sense of the term. But the Babylonian theologians transformed them

into abstractions, or rather into Platonic archetypes of the heaven and

earth. Their appearance meant that the world had at last taken form and

substance; the reign of chaos was over, and limits had been set which

should never again be overpassed. The earth and the sky bounded and

defined one another; the age of formlessness was ended, and an orderly

universe was being prepared fit to receive the present creation.

But the work of preparation was a long one, and not until it was finished

could the gods of Semitic Babylonia be born. But even they have ceased to

be gods for the philosophic cosmologist. They are replaced and represented

by the triad of Anu, Bel, and Ea, who thus become mere symbols of the sky,

the earth, and the water, the elements which Babylonian philosophy

regarded as constituting the present world. Doubtless, did we possess the

rest of the tablet, we should read how the other “great gods” were sprung

from them.

The later tablets of the Epic, which are devoted to the glorification of

Merodach, are for the most part of little interest for the cosmologist.

They describe at wearisome length and with tedious reiteration the

challenge of Tiamât to the gods, the arming of Merodach, and his victory

over the dragon. Religions and mythological conceptions of all kinds have

been laid under contribution, and confusedly mingled together. It was

necessary that Merodach, the supreme god of Babylon, should have been the

creator of the world; and it was therefore also necessary that the

creative acts of the other creator gods of Babylonia should be transferred

to him, however diverse they may have been. Hence, in the course of the

poem, Merodach is described as destroying and creating by his word

alone,—a cosmological conception which reminds us of that of the Egyptian

school of Hermopolis, while after the destruction of Tiamât he is said to

have cut her in half like a flat fish, forming the canopy of heaven with

one half, above which the “fountains of the great deep” were kept firmly

barred. This is in flagrant contradiction with the cosmogony of the

Introduction, but it is probable that it was derived from Nippur, where

En-lil was perhaps described as creating the heavens and earth in a

similar fashion. When the creative functions of En-lil were usurped by

Merodach, the old myth was transferred to the god of Babylon; and

accordingly, in the pæan which seems to form the end of the Epic, Bel of

Nippur is declared to have bestowed upon Merodach his name of “lord of the

earth,” and therewith the powers and functions which accompanied it.

The struggle between Tiamât, the dragon of darkness, and Merodach, the god

of light, must originally have symbolised the dispersion of the black

rain-cloud and raging tempest by the rays of the sun. But the author of

the poem evidently regards it from a cosmological point of view. For him

it is the victory of order over chaos, of the present creation over the

formless world of the past, and of fixed law over anarchy and confusion.

The conception of a law, governing the universe and unable to be broken,

lay deep in the Babylonian mind. Even the gods could not escape it; they

too had to submit to that inexorable destiny which distinguished the world

in which we live from the world of chaos. All they could do was to

interpret and reveal the decrees of fate; the decrees themselves were

unalterable. It was not Bel who issued them; they were contained in the

tablets of destiny which he wore on his breast as the symbol of his

supremacy, and which enabled him to predict the future. These were,

indeed, the Urim and Thummim which, like the high priest of Israel, he was

privileged to consult.(311) What they did was not to make him the arbiter

of fortune, but its interpreter and seer. He learned from them how the

laws of the universe were going to work, what destiny had in store for it,

and how, therefore, it was needful to act. It does not even seem that his

prevision extended beyond a year; at all events, when Bel of Nippur had

yielded up his rights to Bel of Babylon, we are told that the latter had

to sit each New Year’s day in the mystic “chamber of the fates,”

determining the destiny of mankind during the ensuing year.

The victory over Tiamât was followed by the assignment of particular posts

in the sky to Anu, Bel, and Ea. This again harmonises but ill with the

cosmology of the preface to the poem; but the astronomers had long since

divided the heaven between the gods of the Babylonian triad, and the

honour of first doing so is accordingly assigned to Merodach. Then comes

an account of the creation of the heavenly bodies—

“He prepared the stations of the great gods;

the stars corresponding to them he established as constellations;

he made known the year, and marked out the signs of the zodiac.

Three stars he assigned to each of the 12 months,

from the beginning of the year till (its) close.

He established the station of Jupiter that they might know their

bounds,

that they should not sin, should not go astray, any one of them.

The stations of Bel and Ea he fixed along with it.

He opened gates on both sides,

he strengthened (their) bolts on the left hand and the right;

in the middle he set a staircase.(312)

He made the moon appear illuminating the night;

he established it as the luminary of night that the days might be

known.”

Here it will be noticed that, as in Genesis, the heavenly bodies are

regarded as already in existence. What the creator did was to establish

them in their stations, and appoint them to mark and register time. In

fact, as soon as Ansar—the upper firmament—appeared, they appeared also,

though in an embryonic form. Merodach is thus an arranger rather than a

creator, the founder of astronomy and the calendar rather than the maker

of the stars. It is significant, however, that there is no reference to

the sun; the sun-god could hardly fix for himself the laws he had to obey.

It has usually been supposed that the account of the orderly arrangement

of the stars was followed by that of the creation of animals. But the

tablet on which the latter is found is a mere fragment, and Professor

Zimmern may be right in thinking that it belongs to a different story of

the creation. At any rate, the creation in it is assigned to “the gods”

generally “in their assembly” rather than to Merodach alone. On the other

hand, as we have seen, the author of the Epic did not hesitate to

introduce into it cosmological myths and ideas which agreed but badly

together, and it is not likely that he would have omitted to notice the

creation of animate things.

But a description of the creation of the world, or even of the great

struggle between the gods of light and the dragon of darkness, was not the

main purpose of the Babylonian poem. This was the glorification of the god

of Babylon. The story of the creation was introduced into it because it

was necessary that the supreme god of the universe should also be its

creator, and it was for the same reason that the overthrow of the powers

of darkness and anarchy was assigned to Merodach alone. He usurped and

absorbed the prerogatives and attributes of the older gods; their virtues,

as it were, passed to him along with their sovereignty and kingdom. The

fact is very plainly expressed in what appears to be the concluding tablet

of the Epic. Here the names, and therewith the essential natures, of the

other deities are formally handed over to Bel-Merodach of Babylon.

Henceforward he is acknowledged in heaven as well as in earth, the supreme

Bel or Baal of Semitic faith, the father of gods and men. Ea, the lord of

the deep, and Bel of Nippur, “the lord of the earth,” alike yield up to

him their powers; he assumes their names and titles; and, thanks to the

centralising influence of Babylon, Babylonian religion approaches

monotheism as nearly as its local character ever allowed it to do. The

creator alone could rightfully claim the worship of the creatures he had

made.

But it was an approach merely; the final step was never taken, even by the

more speculative theologians of Babylonia, which swept away the polytheism

of the local cults, and left Merodach without a rival.

Herein lies the great contrast between the Babylonian and the Hebrew

conceptions of the creation. The Hebrew cosmology starts from the belief

in one God, beside whom there is none else, whether in the orderly world

of to-day or in the world of chaos that preceded it. On its forefront

stand the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

There was chaos, it was true, but it was a chaos which had no existence

apart from God, who was its absolute master to carve and fashion as He

would. The deep, too, was there; but the deep was neither the

impersonation of Tiamât nor the realm of Ea; the breath of the one God

brooded over it, awaiting the time when the creative word should be

uttered, and the breath of God should become the life of the world. The

elements, indeed, of the Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the

creative word itself was a Babylonian conception, as the story of Merodach

has shown us; but the spirit that inspires the cosmology is the antithesis

of that which inspires the cosmologies of Babylonia. Between the

polytheism of Babylonia and the monotheism of Israel a gulf is fixed which

cannot be spanned.

The Babylonian Epic of the Creation, as we may continue to call it, sums

up and incorporates the various cosmological systems and fancies that had

been current in the country. They are thrown into a mythological form with

a philosophical introduction. We may therefore regard it as embodying the

latest and most fully elaborated attempt of the Babylonian mind to explain

the origin of things. It is probably not much older than the age of the

Second Assyrian empire, though the materials out of which it has been

composed go back to the earliest days of Babylonian antiquity. But it

exemplifies the three principles or fundamental ideas upon which

Babylonian cosmology rested—the belief that water is the primal element,

the belief in a lawless chaos from which the present world has, as it

were, been rescued after a long and fierce struggle between the powers of

darkness and light, and a belief in generation as the primary creative

force. The doctrine that in water we must see the source of all things—a

doctrine that made its way through the cosmologies of Phœnicia and Israel

into that of the Greek philosopher Thales—can be traced back to the days

when Eridu was the seaport of Babylonia, and its inhabitants reclaimed the

marshlands from the sea, and speculated on the origin of the soil on which

they dwelt. The belief in the two creations of darkness and light, of

confusion and law, may have arisen from the first contact between the

teaching of Nippur and that of Eridu, and the endeavour to reconcile the

antagonistic conceptions that underlay them, and the contrary systems of

creation which they presupposed. The belief, finally, in generation as a

motive force was part of the religious heritage that was common to the

Semitic race. Semitic religion centred in a divine family which

corresponded to the family of the worshipper on earth; the gods were

fathers and mothers, and begat children like the human parents, after whom

they were modelled. In so far, therefore, as the universe was divine, it

too must have been evolved in the same fashion; it was only when it ceased

to partake of the divine nature, and to assume its present form, that the

god could deal with the materials of which it consisted, as the potter

dealt with his clay; or could even create by the simple word of his mouth,

like the man who similarly created the names of things, and therewith the

things themselves which the names denoted. With the rise of philosophic

speculation the process of divine generation became a process of

emanation. The gods passed into mere symbols, or rather cosmic principles

and elements; they retained, indeed, their double nature as male and

female; but that was all. The human element that once was in them

disappeared, the concrete became the abstract. Mummu Tiamât was explained

as the world of immature ideas,—the simple “apprehension,” we might almost

say, of the Hegelian philosophy,—and the first of the “Æons” of the later

Gnosticism was thus started on its way. Babylonian religion had been

narrowly local and anthropomorphic; under the guidance of a cosmological

philosophy it tended to become an atheistic materialism. The poet who

wrote the introduction to the Epic of the Creation could have had but

little faith in the gods and goddesses he paraded on the scene; in the

self-evolved universe of the schools there was hardly room even for the

creator Merodach himself.

Lecture VII. The Sacred Books.

Every organised religion has had its sacred books. They have been as

indispensable to it as an organised priesthood; indeed, Mohammedanism is a

proof that the sacred book is more necessary to its existence than even a

priesthood. The sacred book binds a religion to its past; it is the

ultimate authority to which, in matters of controversy, appeal can be

made, for it enshrines those teachings of the past upon which the faith of

the present professes to rest. It remains fixed and permanent amid the

perpetual flow and ebb of human things; the generations of men pass

quickly away, rites and ceremonies change, the meaning of symbols is

forgotten, and the human memory is weak and deceitful; but the written

word endures, and the changes that pass over it are comparatively few and

slight.

Babylonia possessed an organised religion, a religion that was official,

and to a large extent the result of an artificial combination of

heterogeneous elements; and it too, therefore, necessarily possessed its

sacred books. But they differed essentially from the sacred books of

ancient Egypt. The Egyptian lived for the future life rather than for the

present, and his sacred books were Books of the Dead, intended for the

guidance of the disembodied soul in its journey through the other world.

The interest and cares of the Babylonian, on the contrary, were centred in

the present life. The other world was for him a land of shadow and

forgetfulness; a dreary world of darkness and semi-conscious existence to

which he willingly closed his eyes. It was in this world that he was

rewarded or punished for his deeds, that he had intercourse with the gods

of light, and that he was, as is often said in the hymns, “the son of his

god.” What he needed, accordingly, from his sacred books was guidance in

this world, not in the world beyond the grave.

The sacred books of Babylonia thus fall into three classes. We have,

first, the so-called magical texts or incantations, the object of which

was to preserve the faithful from disease and mischief, to ward off death,

and to defeat the evil arts of the witch and the sorcerer. Secondly, there

are the hymns to the gods; and, lastly, the penitential psalms, which

resemble in many respects the psalms of the Old Testament, and were

employed not only by the individual, but also in seasons of public

calamity or dismay. We owe the first discovery of this sacred literature

to the genius of François Lenormant; he it was who first drew attention to

it and characterised its several divisions. It was François Lenormant,

moreover, who pointed out that its nearest analogue was the Hindu Veda, a

brilliant intuition which has been verified by subsequent research.

Unfortunately our knowledge of it is still exceedingly imperfect. We are

dependent on the fragmentary copies of it which have come from the library

of Nineveh, and which resemble the torn leaves, mixed pell-mell together,

that alone remain in some Oriental library from vanished manuscripts of

the Bible and the Christian Fathers. Until the great libraries of

Babylonia itself are thoroughly explored, our analysis and explanation of

the sacred literature of the country must be provisional only; the

evidence is defective, and the conclusions we draw from it must needs be

defective as well.

Moreover, the purely ritual texts, which stand to the hymns in the same

relation that the Atharva-Veda stands to the Ṛig-Veda, have as yet been

but little examined. Their translation is difficult and obscure, and the

ceremonies described in them are but half understood. The ritual,

nevertheless, constituted an important part of the sacred literature, and

its rubrics were regarded with at least as much reverence as the rubrics

of the Anglican Prayer-book. Doubtless the actual words of which they

consisted did not possess the same magical or divine power as those of the

incantations and hymns, they were not—in modern language—verbally

inspired, but they prescribed rites and actions which had quite as divine

and authoritative an origin as the hymns themselves. They were,

furthermore, the framework in which the hymns and spells were set; and

they all formed together a single act of divine worship, the several parts

of which could not be separated without endangering the efficacy of the

whole.

That the incantations were the older portion of the sacred literature of

Chaldæa, was perceived by Lenormant. They go back to the age of animism,

to the days when, as yet, the multitudinous spirits and demons of Sumerian

belief had not made way for the gods of Semitic Babylonia, or the sorcerer

and medicine-man for a hierarchy of priests. Their language as well as

their spirit is Sumerian, and the _zi_ or “spirit” of heaven and earth is

invoked to repel the attack of the evil ghost, or to shower blessings on

the head of the worshipper. They transport us into a world that harmonises

but badly with the decorous and orderly realm of the gods of light; it is

a world in which the _lil_ and the _utuk_, the _galla_ and the _ekimmu_,

reign supreme, and little room seems to be left for the deities of the

Semitic faith. The gods themselves, when they are introduced into it, wear

a new aspect. Ea is no longer the creator and culture god, but a master of

magic spells; and his son Asari displays his goodness towards mankind by

instructing them how to remove the sorceries in which they have been

involved, and the witcheries with which they are tormented.

But it must be borne in mind that the incantations do not all belong to

the same age. The description I have just given holds good only of the

oldest part of them. The Sumerian population continued to exist in

Babylonia after the Semitic occupation of the country, and Sumerian

animism continued to exist as well. By the side of the higher Semitic

faith, with its gods and goddesses, its priesthood and its cult, the

ancient belief in sorcery and witchcraft, in spells and incantations, and

in the ghost-world of En-lil, flourished among the people. And as in

India, where Brahmanism has thrown its protection over the older cults and

beliefs of the native tribes, assimilating them as far as possible, or

explaining them in accordance with the orthodox creed; so too in ancient

Babylonia, the primeval animism of the people was tacitly recognised by

the religion of the State, and given an official sanction. There was no

declaration of hostility towards it such as was made by the religion of

Israel; on the contrary, the old incantations were preserved and

modernised, and the sanctity with which they had been invested allowed to

remain unimpaired. At the same time, they were harmonised, so far as could

be, with the official creed. The gods of the State religion were

introduced into them, and to these gods appeal was made rather than to

“the spirit of heaven” and “the spirit of earth.” The spirits and ghosts

of the night existed, indeed, but from henceforth they had to be

subservient to the deities of the official faith. It was no longer the

medicine-man, but the priest of the Semitic deity, who recited the

incantation for the suppliant and the sufferer.

We can almost trace the growth of what I will term the Book of

Incantations down to the time when it assumed its final form. It was no

Book, however, in the proper sense of the term, and it is doubtful whether

all the collections which might have been comprised in it were ever

combined together. But it is convenient to speak of it in the singular, so

long as we remember that this is merely a mode of speech.