the question of all others at which the Hebrew leaders strictly drew the
line of intercourse and good-fellowship; the more stubbornly that their
people were naturally much inclined to such unions, since they came and
went freely among their hosts, and their daughters went out, unhindered,
"to see the daughters of the land." Now all the race of Canaan followed
religions very similar to that of Chaldea, only grosser still in their
details and forms of worship. Therefore, that the old idolatrous habits
might not return strongly upon them under the influence of a heathen
household, the patriarchs forbade marriage with the women of the
countries through which they passed and repassed with their tents and
flocks, and themselves abstained from it. Thus we see Abraham sending
his steward all the way back to Mesopotamia to seek a wife for his son
Isaac from among his own kinsfolk who had stayed there with his brother
Nahor, and makes the old servant solemnly swear "by the Lord, the God of
heaven and the God of earth": "Thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of
the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell." And when Esau,
Isaac's son, took two wives from among the Hittite women, it is
expressly said that they were "a grief of mind unto Isaac and Rebekah;"
and Isaac's most solemn charge to his other son, Jacob, as he sends him
from him with his blessing, is: "Thou shalt not take a wife of the
daughters of Canaan." Whithersoever the Hebrews came in the course of
their long wanderings, which lasted many centuries, the same twofold
prohibition was laid on them: of marrying with native women--"for
surely," they are told, "they will turn away your heart after their
gods," and of following idolatrous religions, a prohibition enforced by
the severest penalties, even to that of death. But nothing could keep
them long from breaking the law in both respects. The very frequency
and emphasis with which the command is repeated, the violence of the
denunciations against offenders, the terrible punishments threatened and
often actually inflicted, sufficiently show how imperfectly and
unwillingly it was obeyed. Indeed the entire Old Testament is one
continuous illustration of the unslackening zeal with which the wise and
enlightened men of Israel--its lawgivers, leaders, priests and
prophets--pursued their arduous and often almost hopeless task, of
keeping their people pure from worships and practices which to them, who
had realized the fallacy of a belief in many gods, were the most
pernicious abominations. In this spirit and to this end they preached,
they fought, they promised, threatened, punished, and in this spirit, in
later ages, they wrote.
12. It is not until a nation is well established and enjoys a certain
measure of prosperity, security and the leisure which accompanies them,
that it begins to collect its own traditions and memories and set them
down in order, into a continuous narrative. So it was with the Hebrews.
The small tribe became a nation, which ceased from its wanderings and
conquered for itself a permanent place on the face of the earth. But to
do this took many hundred years, years of memorable adventures and
vicissitudes, so that the materials which accumulated for the future
historians, in stories, traditions, songs, were ample and varied. Much,
too, must have been written down at a comparatively early period. _How_
early must remain uncertain, since there is unfortunately nothing to
show at what time the Hebrews learned the art of writing and their
characters thought, like other alphabets, to be borrowed from those of
the Phoenicians. However that may be, one thing is sure: that the
different books which compose the body of the Hebrew Sacred Scriptures,
which we call "the Old Testament," were collected from several and
different sources, and put into the shape in which they have descended
to us at a very late period, some almost as late as the birth of Christ.
The first book of all, that of Genesis, describing the beginnings of the
Jewish people,--("_Genesis_" is a Greek word, which means
"Origin")--belongs at all events to a somewhat earlier date. It is put
together mainly of two narratives, distinct and often different in point
of spirit and even fact. The later compiler who had both sources before
him to work into a final form, looked on both with too much respect to
alter either, and generally contented himself with giving them side by
side, (as in the story of Hagar, which is told twice and differently, in
Chap. XVI. and Chap. XXI.), or intermixing them throughout, so that it
takes much attention and pains to separate them, (as in the story of the
Flood, Chap. VI.-VIII.). This latter story is almost identical with the
Chaldean Deluge-legend included in the great Izdubar epic, of which it
forms the eleventh tablet. (See Chap. VII.) Indeed, every child can see,
by comparing the Chaldean cosmogonic and mythical legends with the first
chapters of the Book of Genesis, those which relate to the beginnings
not so much of the Hebrew people as of the human race and the world in
general, that both must originally have flowed from one and the same
spring of tradition and priestly lore. The resemblances are too staring,
close, continuous, not to exclude all rational surmises as to casual
coincidences. The differences are such as most strikingly illustrate the
transformation which the same material can undergo when treated by two
races of different moral standards and spiritual tendencies. Let us
briefly examine both, side by side.
13. To begin with the Creation. The description of the primeval chaos--a
waste of waters, from which "the darkness was not lifted," (see p.
261)--answers very well to that in Genesis, i. 2: "And the earth was
without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The
establishment of the heavenly bodies and the creation of the animals
also correspond remarkably in both accounts, and even come in the same
order (see p. 264, and Genesis, i. 14-22). The famous cylinder of the
British Museum (see No. 62, p. 266) is strong presumption in favor of
the identity of the Chaldean version of the first couple's disobedience
with the Biblical one. We have seen the important position occupied in
the Chaldean religion by the symbol of the Sacred Tree, which surely
corresponds to the Tree of Life in Eden (see p. 268), and probably also
to that of Knowledge, and the different passages and names ingeniously
collected and confronted by scholars leave no doubt as to the Chaldeans
having had the legend of an Eden, a garden of God (see p. 274). A better
preserved copy of the Creation tablets with the now missing passages may
be recovered any day, and there is no reason to doubt that they will be
found as closely parallel to the Biblical narrative as those that have
been recovered until now. But even as we have them at present it is very
evident that the groundwork, the material, is the same in both. It is
the manner, the spirit, which differs. In the Chaldean account,
polytheism runs riot. Every element, every power of nature--Heaven,
Earth, the Abyss, Atmosphere, etc.--has been personified into an
individual divine being actively and severely engaged in the great work.
The Hebrew narrative is severely monotheistic. In it GOD does all that
"the gods" between them do in the other. Every poetical or allegorical
turn of phrase is carefully avoided, lest it lead into the evil errors
of the sister-nation. The symbolical myths--such as that of Bel's mixing
his own blood with the clay out of which he fashions man,(see p.
266)--are sternly discarded, for the same reason. One only is retained:
the temptation by the Serpent. But the Serpent being manifestly the
personification of the Evil Principle which is forever busy in the soul
of man, there was no danger of its being deified and worshipped; and as,
moreover, the tale told in this manner very picturesquely and strikingly
points a great moral lesson, the Oriental love of parable and allegory
could in this instance be allowed free scope. Besides, the Hebrew
writers of the sacred books were not beyond or above the superstitions
of their country and age; indeed they retained all of these that did not
appear to them incompatible with monotheism. Thus throughout the Books
of the Old Testament the Chaldean belief in witchcraft, divination from
dreams and other signs is retained and openly professed, and astrology
itself is not condemned, since among the destinations of the stars is
mentioned that of serving to men "for signs": "And God said, let there
be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the
night; and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and
years" (Genesis, i. 14). Even more explicit is the passage in the
triumphal song of Deborah the prophetess, where celebrating the victory
of Israel over Sisera, she says: "They fought from heaven: the stars in
their courses fought against Sisera" (Judges, v. 20). But a belief in
astrology by no means implies the admission of several gods. In one or
two passages, indeed, we do find an expression which seems to have
slipped in unawares, as an involuntary reminiscence of an original
polytheism; it is where God, communing with himself on Adam's trespass,
says: "Behold, the man is become _as one of us_, to know good and evil"
(Gen. iii. 22). An even clearer trace confronts us in one of the two
names that are given to God. These names are "Jehovah," (more correctly
"Yahveh") and "Elohim." Now the latter name is the plural of _El_,
"god," and so really means "the gods." If the sacred writers retained
it, it was certainly not from carelessness or inadvertence. As they use
it, it becomes in itself almost a profession of faith. It seems to
proclaim the God of their religion as "the One God who is all the
gods," in whom all the forces of the universe are contained and merged.
14. There is one feature in the Biblical narrative, which, at first
sight, wears the appearance of mythical treatment: it is the familiar
way in which God is represented as coming and going, speaking and
acting, after the manner of men, especially in such passages as these:
"And they heard the voice of the Lord God _walking in the garden in the
cool of the day_" (Gen. iii. 8); or, "Unto Adam also and to his wife did
the Lord God _make coats of skins and he clothed them_" (Gen. iii. 21).
But such a judgment would be a serious error. There is nothing mythical
in this; only the tendency, common to all mankind, of endowing the Deity
with human attributes of form, speech and action, whenever the attempt
was made to bring it very closely within the reach of their imagination.
This tendency is so universal, that it has been classed, under a special
name, among the distinctive features of the human mind. It has been
called ANTHROPOMORPHISM, (from two Greek words _Anthropos_, "man," and
_morphê_, "form,") and can never be got rid of, because it is part and
parcel of our very nature. Man's spiritual longings are infinite, his
perceptive faculties are limited. His spirit has wings of flame that
would lift him up and bear him even beyond the endlessness of space into
pure abstraction; his senses have soles of lead that ever weigh him
down, back to the earth, of which he is and to which he must needs
cling, to exist at all. He can _conceive_, by a great effort, an
abstract idea, eluding the grasp of senses, unclothed in matter; but he
can _realize_, _imagine_, only by using such appliances as the senses
supply him with. Therefore, the more fervently he grasps an idea, the
more closely he assimilates it, the more it becomes materialized in his
grasp, and when he attempts to reproduce it out of himself--behold! it
has assumed the likeness of himself or something he has seen, heard,
touched--the spirituality of it has become weighted with flesh, even as
it is in himself. It is as it were a reproduction, in the intellectual
world, of the eternal strife, in physical nature, between the two
opposed forces of attraction and repulsion, the centrifugal and
centripetal, of which the final result is to keep each body in its
place, with a well-defined and limited range of motion allotted to it.
Thus, however pure and spiritual the conception of the Deity may be,
man, in making it real to himself, in bringing it down within his reach
and ken, within the shrine of his heart, _will_, and _must_ perforce
make of it a Being, human not only in shape, but also in thought and
feeling. How otherwise could he grasp it at all? And the accessories
with which he will surround it will necessarily be suggested by his own
experience, copied from those among which he moves habitually himself.
"Walking in the garden in the cool of the day" is an essentially
Oriental and Southern recreation, and came quite naturally to the mind
of a writer living in a land steeped in sunshine and sultriness. Had the
writer been a Northerner, a denizen of snow-clad plains and ice-bound
rivers, the Lord might probably have been represented as coming in a
swift, fur-lined sleigh. Anthropomorphism, then, is in itself neither
mythology nor idolatry; but it is very clear that it can with the utmost
ease glide into either or both, with just a little help from poetry and,
especially, from art, in its innocent endeavor to fix in tangible form
the vague imaginings and gropings, of which words often are but a
fleeting and feeble rendering. Hence the banishment of all material
symbols, the absolute prohibition of any images whatever as an accessory
of religious worship, which, next to the recognition of One only God, is
the keystone of the Hebrew law:--"Thou shalt have no other gods before
me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of
anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or
that is in the water under the earth.--Thou shalt not bow down thyself
to them, nor serve them" (Exodus, xx. 3-5).
But, to continue our parallel.
15. The ten antediluvian kings of Berosus, who succeed the apparition of
the divine Man-Fish, Êa-Oannes (see p. 196), have their exact
counterpart in the ten antediluvian patriarchs of Genesis, v. Like the
Chaldean kings, the patriarchs live an unnatural number of years. Only
the extravagant figures of the Chaldean tradition are considerably
reduced in the Hebrew version. While the former allots to its kings
reigns of tens of thousands of years (see p. 196); the latter cuts them
down to hundreds, and the utmost that it allows to any of its
patriarchs is nine hundred and sixty-nine years of life (Methuselah).
16. The resemblances between the two Deluge narratives are so obvious
and continuous, that it is not these, but the differences that need
pointing out. Here again the sober, severely monotheistic character of
the Hebrew narrative contrasts most strikingly with the exuberant
polytheism of the Chaldean one, in which Heaven, Sun, Storm, Sea, even
Rain are personified, deified, and consistently act their several
appropriate and most dramatic parts in the great cataclysm, while Nature
herself, as the Great Mother of beings and fosterer of life, is
represented, in the person of Ishtar, lamenting the slaughter of men
(see p. 327). Apart from this fundamental difference in spirit, the
identity in all the essential points of fact is amazing, and variations
occur only in lesser details. The most characteristic one is that, while
the Chaldean version describes the building and furnishing of a _ship_,
with all the accuracy of much seafaring knowledge, and does not forget
even to name the pilot, the Hebrew writer, with the clumsiness and
ignorance of nautical matters natural to an inland people unfamiliar
with the sea or the appearance of ships, speaks only of an _ark_ or
_chest_. The greatest discrepancy is in the duration of the flood, which
is much shorter in the Chaldean text than in the Hebrew. On the seventh
day already, Hâsisadra sends out the dove (see p. 316). But then in the
Biblical narrative itself, made up, as was remarked above, of two
parallel texts joined together, this same point is given differently in
different places. According to Genesis, vii. 12, "the rain was upon the
earth forty days and forty nights," while verse 24 of the same chapter
tells us that "the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty
days." Again, the number of the saved is far larger in the Chaldean
account: Hâsisadra takes with him into the ship all his men-servants,
his women-servants, and even his "nearest friends," while Noah is
allowed to save only his own immediate family, "his sons, and his wife,
and his sons' wives" (Genesis, vi. 18). Then, the incident of the birds
is differently told: Hâsisadra sends out three birds, the dove, the
swallow, and the raven; Noah only two--first the raven, then three times
in succession the dove. But it is startling to find both narratives more
than once using the same words. Thus the Hebrew writer tells how Noah
"sent forth a raven, which went to and fro," and how "the dove found no
rest for the sole of her foot and returned." Hâsisadra relates: "I took
out a dove and sent it forth. The dove went forth, to and fro, but found
no resting-place and returned." And further, when Hâsisadra describes
the sacrifice he offered on the top of Mount Nizir, after he came forth
from the ship, he says: "The gods smelled a savor; the gods smelled a
sweet savor." "And the Lord smelled a sweet savor," says Genesis,--viii.
21--of Noah's burnt-offering. These few hints must suffice to show how
instructive and entertaining is a parallel study of the two narratives;
it can be best done by attentively reading both alternately, and
comparing them together, paragraph by paragraph.
17. The legend of the Tower of Languages (see above, p. 293, and
Genesis, xi. 3-9), is the last in the series of parallel Chaldean and
Hebrew traditions. In the Bible it is immediately followed by the
detailed genealogy of the Hebrews from Shem to Abraham. Therewith
evidently ends the connection between the two people, who are severed
for all time from the moment that Abraham goes forth with his tribe from
Ur of the Chaldees, probably in the reign of Amarpal (father of
Hammurabi), whom the Bible calls Amraphel, king of Shineâr. The reign of
Hammurabi was, as we have already seen (see p. 219), a prosperous and
brilliant one. He was originally king of Tintir (the oldest name of
Babylon), and when he united all the cities and local rulers of Chaldea
under his supremacy, he assorted the pre-eminence among them for his own
city, which he began to call by its new name, KA-DIMIRRA (Accadian for
"Gate of God," which was translated into the Semitic BAB-IL). This king
in every respect opens a new chapter in the history of Chaldea.
Moreover, a great movement was taking place in all the region between
the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf; nations were forming and
growing, and Chaldea's most formidable rival and future conqueror,
Assyria, was gradually gathering strength in the north, a fierce young
lion-cub. By this newcomer among nations our attention will henceforth
mainly be claimed. Let us, therefore, pause on the high place to which
we have now arrived, and, casting a glance backward, take a rapid survey
of the ground we have covered.
18. Looking with strained eyes into a past dim and gray with the
scarce-lifting mists of unnumbered ages, we behold our starting-point,
the low land by the Gulf, Shumir, taking shape and color under the rule
of Turanian settlers, the oldest known nation in the world. They drain
and till the land, they make bricks and build cities, and prosper
materially. But the spirit in them is dark and lives in cowering terror
of self-created demons and evil things, which they yet believe they can
control and compel. So their religion is one, not of worship and
thanksgiving, but of dire conjuring and incantation, inconceivable
superstition and witchcraft, an unutterable dreariness hardly lightened
by the glimmering of a nobler faith, in the conception of the wise and
beneficent Êa and his ever benevolently busy son, Meridug. But gradually
there comes a change. Shumir lifts its gaze upward, and as it takes in
more the beauty and the goodness of the world--in Sun and Moon and
Stars, in the wholesome Waters and the purifying serviceable Fire, the
good and divine Powers--the Gods multiply and the host of elementary
spirits, mostly evil, becomes secondary. This change is greatly helped
by the arrival of the meditative, star-gazing strangers, who take hold
of the nature-worship and the nature-myths they find among the people to
which they have come--a higher and more advanced race--and weave these,
with their own star-worship and astrological lore, into a new faith, a
religious system most ingeniously combined, elaborately harmonized, and
full of profoundest meaning. The new religion is preached not only in
words, but in brick and stone: temples arise all over the land, erected
by the _patesis_--the priest-kings of the different cities--and
libraries in which the priestly colleges reverently treasure both their
own works and the older religious lore of the country. The ancient
Turanian names of the gods are gradually translated into the new
Cushito-Semitic language; yet the prayers and hymns, as well as the
incantations, are still preserved in the original tongue, for the people
of Turanian Shumir are the more numerous, and must be ruled and
conciliated, not alienated. The more northern region, Accad, is, indeed,
more thinly peopled; there the tribes of Semites, who now arrive in
frequent instalments, spread rapidly and unhindered. The cities of Accad
with their temples soon rival those of Shumir and strive to eclipse
them, and their _patesis_ labor to predominate politically over those of
the South. And it is with the North that the victory at first remains;
its pre-eminence is asserted in the time of Sharrukin of Agadê, about
3800 B.C., but is resumed by the South some thousand years later, when a
powerful dynasty (that to which belong Ur-êa and his son Dungi)
establishes itself in Ur, while Tintir, the future head and centre of
the united land of Chaldea, the great Babylon, if existing at all, is
not yet heard of. It is these kings of Ur who first take the
significant title "kings of Shumir and Accad." Meanwhile new and higher
moral influences have been at work; the Semitic immigration has
quickened the half mythical, half astronomical religion with a more
spiritual element--of fervent adoration, of prayerful trust, of
passionate contrition and self-humiliation in the bitter consciousness
of sin, hitherto foreign to it, and has produced a new and beautiful
religious literature, which marks its third and last stage. To this
stage belong the often mentioned "Penitential Psalms," Semitic, nay,
rather Hebrew in spirit, although still written in the old Turanian
language (but in the northern dialect of Accad, a fact that in itself
bears witness to their comparative lateness and the locality in which
they sprang up), and too strikingly identical with similar songs of the
golden age of Hebrew poetry in substance and form, not to have been the
models from which the latter, by a sort of unconscious heredity, drew
its inspirations. Then comes the great Elamitic invasion, with its
plundering of cities, desecration of temples and sanctuaries, followed
probably by several more through a period of at least three hundred
years. The last, that of Khudur Lagamar, since it brings prominently
forward the founder of the Hebrew nation, deserves to be particularly
mentioned by that nation's historians, and, inasmuch as it coincides
with the reign of Amarpal, king of Tintir and father of Hammurabi,
serves to establish an important landmark in the history both of the
Jews and of Chaldea. When we reach this comparatively recent date the
mists have in great part rolled aside, and as we turn from the ages we
have just surveyed to those that still lie before us, history guides us
with a bolder step and shows us the landscape in a twilight which,
though still dim and sometimes misleading, is yet that of breaking day,
not of descending night.