it is needful to remark that Hasisadra's adventure is a mere episode in a
cycle of stories of which a personage, whose name is provisionally read
"Izdubar," is the centre. The nature of Izdubar hovers vaguely between the
heroic and the divine; sometimes he seems a mere man, sometimes {596}
approaches so closely to the divinities of fire and of the sun as to be
hardly distinguishable from them. As I have already mentioned, the tablet
which sets forth Hasisadra's perils is one of twelve; and, since each of
these represents a month and bears a story appropriate to the corresponding
sign of the Zodiac, great weight must be attached to Sir Henry Rawlinson's
suggestion that the epos of Izdubar is a poetical embodiment of solar
mythology.
In the earlier books of the epos, the hero, not content with rejecting the
proffered love of the Chaldaean Aphrodite, Istar, freely expresses his very
low estimate of her character; and it is interesting to observe that, even
in this early stage of human experience, men had reached a conception of
that law of nature which expresses the inevitable consequences of an
imperfect appreciation of feminine charms. The injured goddess makes
Izdubar's life a burden to him, until at last, sick in body and sorry in
mind, he is driven to seek aid and comfort from his forbears in the world
of spirits. So this antitype of Odysseus journeys to the shore of the
waters of death, and there takes ship with a Chaldaean Charon, who carries
him within hail of his ancestor Hasisadra. That venerable personage not
only gives Izdubar instructions how to regain his health, but tells him,
somewhat _a propos des bottes_ (after the manner of venerable personages),
the long story of his perilous adventure; and how it befell that he, his
wife, and his steersman came to dwell among the blessed gods, without
passing through the portals of death like ordinary mortals. {597}
According to the full story, the sins of mankind had become grievous; and,
at a council of the gods, it was resolved to extirpate the whole race by a
great flood. And, once more, let us note the uniformity of human
experience. It would appear that, four thousand years ago, the obligations
of confidential intercourse about matters of state were sometimes
violated--of course from the best of motives. Ea, one of the three chiefs
of the Chaldaean Pantheon, the god of justice and of practical wisdom, was
also the god of the sea; and, yielding to the temptation to do a friend a
good turn, irresistible to kindly seafaring folks of all ranks, he warned
Hasisadra of what was coming. When Bel subsequently reproached him for this
breach of confidence, Ea defended himself by declaring that he did not tell
Hasisadra anything; he only sent him a dream. This was undoubtedly sailing
very near the wind; but the attribution of a little benevolent obliquity of
conduct to one of the highest of the gods is a trifle compared with the
truly Homeric anthropomorphism which characterises other parts of the epos.
The Chaldaean deities are, in truth, extremely human; and, occasionally, the
narrator does not scruple to represent them in a manner which is not only
inconsistent with our idea of reverence, but is sometimes distinctly
humorous.[177] When the storm is at its height, he exhibits them flying in
a state of panic to Anu, the god of heaven, and crouching {598} before his
portal like frightened dogs. As the smoke of Hasisadra's sacrifice arises,
the gods, attracted by the sweet savour, are compared to swarms of flies. I
have already remarked that the lady Istar's reputation is torn to shreds;
while she and Ea scold Bel handsomely for his ferocity and injustice in
destroying the innocent along with the guilty. One is reminded of Here hung
up with weighted heels; of misleading dreams sent by Zeus; of Ares howling
as he flies from the Trojan battlefield; and of the very questionable
dealings of Aphrodite with Helen and Paris.
But to return to the story. Bel was, at first, excluded from the sacrifice
as the author of all the mischief; which really was somewhat hard upon him,
since the other gods agreed to his proposal. But eventually a
reconciliation takes place; the great bow of Anu is displayed in the
heavens; Bel agrees that he will be satisfied with what war, pestilence,
famine, and wild beasts can do in the way of destroying men; and that,
henceforward, he will not have recourse to extraordinary measures. Finally,
it is Bel himself who, by way of making amends, transports Hasisadra, his
wife, and the faithful Nes-Hea to the abode of the gods.
It is as indubitable as it is incomprehensible to most of us, that, for
thousands of years, a great people, quite as intelligent as we are, and
living in as high a state of civilisation as that which had been attained
in the greater part of Europe a few centuries ago, entertained not the
slightest doubt that Anu, {599} Bel, Ea, Istar, and the rest, were real
personages, possessed of boundless powers for good and evil. The sincerity
of the monarchs whose inscriptions gratefully attribute their victories to
Merodach, or to Assur, is as little to be questioned as that of the authors
of the hymns and penitential psalms which give full expression to the
heights and depths of religious devotion. An "infidel" bold enough to deny
the existence, or to doubt the influence, of these deities probably did not
exist in all Mesopotamia; and even constructive rebellion against their
authority was apt to end in the deprivation, not merely of the good name,
but of the skin of the offender. The adherents of modern theological
systems dismiss these objects of the love and fear of a hundred generations
of their equals, offhand, as "gods of the heathen," mere creations of a
wicked and idolatrous imagination; and, along with them, they disown, as
senseless, the crude theology, with its gross anthropomorphism and its low
ethical conception of the divinity, which satisfied the pious souls of
Chaldaea.
I imagine, though I do not presume to be sure, that any endeavour to save
the intellectual and moral credit of Chaldaean religion, by suggesting the
application to it of that universal solvent of absurdities, the allegorical
method, would be scouted; I will not even suggest that any ingenuity can be
equal to the discovery of the antitypes of the personifications effected by
the religious imagination of later ages, in the triad Anu, Ea, and Bel,
still less in Istar. Therefore, unless some plausible reconciliatory scheme
{600} should be propounded by a Neo-Chaldaean devotee (and, with
Neo-Buddhists to the fore, this supposition is not so wild as it looks), I
suppose the moderns will continue to smile, in a superior way, at the
grievous absurdity of the polytheistic idolatry of these ancient people.
It is probably a congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to
possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I am
not ashamed to share David Hume's want of ability to discover that
polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or permitted,
to judge the government of the world by human standards, it appears to me
that directorates are proved, by familiar experience, to conduct the
largest and the most complicated concerns quite as well as solitary
despots. I have never been able to see why the hypothesis of a divine
syndicate should be found guilty of innate absurdity. Those Assyrians, in
particular, who held Assur to be the one supreme and creative deity, to
whom all the other supernal powers were subordinate, might fairly ask that
the essential difference between their system and that which obtains among
the great majority of their modern theological critics should be
demonstrated. In my apprehension, it is not the quantity, but the quality,
of the persons, among whom the attributes of divinity are distributed,
which is the serious matter. If the divine might is associated with no
higher ethical attributes than those which obtain among ordinary men; if
the divine intelligence is supposed to be so imperfect {601} that it cannot
foresee the consequences of its own contrivances; if the supernal powers
can become furiously angry with the creatures of their omnipotence and, in
their senseless wrath, destroy the innocent along with the guilty; or if
they can show themselves to be as easily placated by presents and gross
flattery as any oriental or occidental despot; if, in short, they are only
stronger than mortal men and no better, as it must be admitted Hasisadra's
deities proved themselves to be--then, surely, it is time for us to look
somewhat closely into their credentials, and to accept none but conclusive
evidence of their existence.
To the majority of my respected contemporaries this reasoning will
doubtless appear feeble, if not worse. However, to my mind, such are the
only arguments by which the Chaldaean theology can be satisfactorily upset.
So far from there being any ground for the belief that Ea, Anu, and Bel
are, or ever were, real entities, it seems to me quite infinitely more
probable that they are products of the religious imagination, such as are
to be found everywhere and in all ages, so long as that imagination riots
uncontrolled by scientific criticism.
It is on these grounds that I venture, at the risk of being called an
atheist by the ghosts of all the principals of all the colleges of
Babylonia, or by their living successors among the Neo-Chaldaeans, if that
sect should arise, to express my utter disbelief in the gods of Hasisadra.
Hence, it follows, that I find Hasisadra's account of their share in his
adventure {602} incredible; and, as the physical details of the flood are
inseparable from its theophanic accompaniments, and are guaranteed by the
same authority, I must let them go with the rest. The consistency of such
details with probability counts for nothing. The inhabitants of Chaldaea
must always have been familiar with inundations; probably no generation
failed to witness an inundation which rose unusually high, or was rendered
serious by coincident atmospheric, or other, disturbances. And the memory
of the general features of any exceptionally severe and devastating flood,
would be preserved by popular tradition for long ages. What, then, could be
more natural than that a Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a
great catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such an
appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken in his audience the
tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is there for insisting that he
must have had some individual flood in view, and that his history is
historical, in the sense that the account of the effects of a hurricane in
the Bay of Bengal, in the year 1875, is historical?
More than three centuries after the time of Assurbanipal, Berosus of
Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great, wrote an account of the
history of his country in Greek. The work of Berosus has vanished; but
extracts from it--how far faithful is uncertain--have been preserved by
later writers. Among these occurs the well-known {603} story of the Deluge
of Xisuthros, which is evidently built upon the same foundation as that of
Hasisadra. The incidents of the divine warning, the building of the ship,
the sending out of birds, the ascension of the hero, betray their common
origin. But stories, like Madeira, acquire a heightened flavour with time
and travel; and the version of Berosus is characterised by those
circumstantial improbabilities which habitually gather round the legend of
a legend. The later narrator knows the exact day of the month on which the
flood began. The dimensions of the ship are stated with Munchausenian
precision at five stadia by two--say, half by one-fifth of an English mile.
The ship runs aground among the "Gordaean mountains" to the south of Lake
Van, in Armenia, beyond the limits of any imaginable real inundation of the
Euphrates valley; and, by way of climax, we have the assertion, worthy of
the sailor who said that he had brought up one of Pharaoh's chariot wheels
on the fluke of his anchor in the Red Sea, that pilgrims visited the
locality and made amulets of the bitumen which they scraped off from the
still extant remains of the mighty ship of Xisuthros.
Suppose that some later polyhistor, as devoid of critical faculty as most
of his tribe, had found the version of Berosus, as well as another much
nearer the original story; that, having too much respect for his
authorities to make up a _tertium quid_ of his own, out of the materials
offered, he followed a practice, common enough among ancient and,
particularly, among Semitic historians, of dividing {604} both into
fragments and piecing them together, without troubling himself very much
about the resulting repetitions and inconsistencies; the product of such a
primitive editorial operation would be a narrative analogous to that which
treats of the Noachian deluge in the book of Genesis. For the Pentateuchal
story is indubitably a patchwork, composed of fragments of at least two,
different and partly discrepant, narratives, quilted together in such an
inartistic fashion that the seams remain conspicuous. And, in the matter of
circumstantial exaggeration, it in some respects excels even the
second-hand legend of Berosus.
There is a certain practicality about the notion of taking refuge from
floods and storms in a ship provided with a steersman; but, surely, no one
who had ever seen more water than he could wade through would dream of
facing even a moderate breeze, in a huge three-storied coffer, or box,
three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, left to drift
without rudder or pilot.[178] Not content with giving the exact year of
Noah's age in which the flood began, the Pentateuchal story adds the month
and the day of {605} the month. It is the Deity himself who "shuts in"
Noah. The modest week assigned to the full deluge in Hasisadra's story
becomes forty days, in one of the Pentateuchal accounts, and a hundred and
fifty in the other. The flood, which, in the version of Berosus, has grown
so high as to cast the ship among the mountains of Armenia, is improved
upon in the Hebrew account until it covers "all the high hills that were
under the whole heaven"; and, when it begins to subside, the ark is left
stranded on the summit of the highest peak, commonly identified with Ararat
itself.
While the details of Hasisadra's adventure are, at least, compatible with
the physical conditions of the Euphrates valley, and, as we have seen,
involve no catastrophe greater than such as might be brought under those
conditions, many of the very precisely stated details of Noah's flood
contradict some of the best established results of scientific inquiry.
If it is certain that the alluvium of the Mesopotamian plain has been
brought down by the Tigris and the Euphrates, then it is no less certain
that the physical structure of the whole valley has persisted, without
material modification, for many thousand years before the date assigned to
the flood. If the summits, even of the moderately elevated ridges which
immediately bound the valley, still more those of the Kurdish and Armenian
mountains, were ever covered by water, for even forty days, that water must
have extended over the whole earth. If the earth was thus covered, anywhere
between 4000 and 5000 years ago, or, at any other time, since the {606}
higher terrestrial animals came into existence, they must have been
destroyed from the whole face of it, as the Pentateuchal account declares
they were three several times (Genesis vii. 21, 22, 23), in language which
cannot be made more emphatic, or more solemn, than it is; and the present
population must consist of the descendants of emigrants from the ark. And,
if that is the case, then, as has often been pointed out, the sloths of the
Brazilian forests, the kangaroos of Australia, the great tortoises of the
Galapagos islands, must have respectively hobbled, hopped, and crawled over
many thousand miles of land and sea from "Ararat" to their present
habitations. Thus, the unquestionable facts of the geographical
distribution of recent land animals, alone, form an insuperable obstacle to
the acceptance of the assertion that the kinds of animals composing the
present terrestrial fauna have been, at any time, universally destroyed in
the way described in the Pentateuch.
It is upon this and other unimpeachable grounds, that, as I ventured to say
some time ago, persons who are duly conversant with even the elements of
natural science decline to take the Noachian deluge seriously; and that, as
I also pointed out, candid theologians, who, without special scientific
knowledge, have appreciated the weight of scientific arguments, have long
since given it up. But, as Goethe has remarked, there is nothing more
terrible than energetic ignorance[179]; and there are, even yet, very {607}
energetic people, who are neither candid, nor clearheaded, nor theologians,
still less properly instructed in the elements of natural science, who make
prodigious efforts to obscure the effect of these plain truths, and to
conceal their real surrender of the historical character of Noah's deluge
under cover of the smoke of a great discharge of pseudoscientific
artillery. They seem to imagine that the proofs which abound in all parts
of the world, of large oscillations of the relative level of land and sea,
combined with the probability that, when the sea-level was rising, sudden
incursions of the sea, like that which broke in over Holland and formed the
Zuyder Zee, may have often occurred, can be made to look like evidence that
something that, by courtesy, might be called a general Deluge has really
taken place. Their discursive energy drags misunderstood truth into their
service; and "the glacial epoch" is as sure to crop up among them as King
Charles's head in a famous memorial--with about as much appropriateness.
The old story of the raised beach on Moel Tryfaen is trotted out; though,
even if the facts are as yet rightly interpreted, there is not a shadow of
evidence that the change of sea-level in that locality was sudden, or that
glacial Welshmen would have known it was taking place.[180] Surely it is
difficult to perceive the relevancy of bringing in something that happened
in the glacial {608} epoch (if it did happen) to account for the tradition
of a flood in the Euphrates valley between 2000 and 3000 B.C. But the date
of the Noachian flood is solidly fixed by the sole authority for it; no
shuffling of the chronological data will carry it so far back as 3000 B.C.;
and the Hebrew epos agrees with the Chaldaean in placing it after the
development of a somewhat advanced civilisation. The only authority for the
Noachian deluge assures us that, before it visited the earth, Cain had
built cities; Jubal had invented harps and organs; while mankind had
advanced so far beyond the neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage that
Tubal-cain was a worker in iron. Therefore, if the Noachian legend is to be
taken for the history of an event which happened in the glacial epoch, we
must revise our notions of pleistocene civilisation. On the other hand, if
the Pentateuchal story only means something quite different, that happened
somewhere else, thousands of years earlier, dressed up, what becomes of its
credit as history? I wonder what would be said to a modern historian who
asserted that Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and then tried to justify the
assertion by adducing evidence of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Yet the
attempt to save the credit of the Noachian story by reference to something
which is supposed to have happened in the far north, in the glacial epoch,
is far more preposterous.
Moreover, these dust-raising dialecticians ignore some of the most
important and well-known facts {609} which bear upon the question. Anything
more than a parochial acquaintance with physical geography and geology
would suffice to remind its possessor that the Holy Land itself offers a
standing protest against bringing such a deluge as that of Noah anywhere
near it, either in historical times or in the course of that pleistocene
period, of which the "great ice age" formed a part.
Judaea and Galilee, Moab and Gilead, occupy part of that extensive tableland
at the summit of the western boundary of the Euphrates valley, to which I
have already referred. If that valley had ever been filled with water to a
height sufficient, not indeed to cover a third of Ararat, in the north, or
half some of the mountains of the Persian frontier in the east, but to
reach even four or five thousand feet, it must have stood over the
Palestinian hog's-back, and have filled, up to the brim, every depression
on its surface. Therefore it could not have failed to fill that remarkable
trench in which the Dead Sea, the Jordan, and the Sea of Galilee lie, and
which is known as the "Jordan-Arabah" valley.
This long and deep hollow extends more than 200 miles, from near the site
of ancient Dan in the north, to the water-parting at the head of the Wady
Arabah in the south; and its deepest part, at the bottom of the basin of
the Dead Sea, lies 2500 feet below the surface of the adjacent
Mediterranean. The lowest portion of the rim of the Jordan-Arabah valley is
situated at the village of El Fuleh, 257 feet above the Mediterranean.
Everywhere else the {610} circumjacent heights rise to a very much greater
altitude. Hence, of the water which stood over the Syrian tableland, when
as much drained off as could run away, enough would remain to form a "Mere"
without an outlet, 2757 feet deep, over the present site of the Dead Sea.
From this time forth, the level of the Palestinian mere could be lowered
only by evaporation. It is an extremely interesting fact, which has happily
escaped capture for the purposes of the energetic misunderstanding, that
the valley, at one time, was filled, certainly within 150 feet of this
height--probably higher. And it is almost equally certain, that the time at
which this great Jordan-Arabah mere reached its highest level coincides
with the glacial epoch. But then the evidence which goes to prove this,
also leads to the conclusion that this state of things obtained at a period
considerably older than even 4004 B.C., when the world, according to the
"Helps" (or shall we say "Hindrances") provided for the simple student of
the Bible, was created; that it was not brought about by any diluvial
catastrophe, but was the result of a change in the relative activities of
certain natural operations which are quietly going on now; and that, since
the level of the mere began to sink, many thousand years ago, no serious
catastrophe of any description has affected the valley.