The following psalm for remission of sins is remarkable alike for its
deeply spiritual tone and for its antiquity. As it is written in Accadian,
its composition must be referred to a date anterior to the seventeenth
century B.C., when that language became extinct. An Assyrian interlinear
translation is attached to most of the lines; some, however, are left
untranslated. The tablet is unfortunately broken in the middle, causing a
lacuna in the text. Similarities will be noticed between the language of
the psalm and that of the Psalms of the Old Testament, and one passage
reminds us strongly of the words of Christ in St. Matthew xviii. 22.
Seven, it must be remembered, was a sacred number among the Accadians.
Accadian poetry was characterized by a parallelism of ideas and clauses;
and as this was imitated, both by the Assyrians and by the Jews, the
striking resemblance between the form of Accadian and Hebrew poetry can be
accounted for.
Some of the lines in the middle of the psalm have been previously
translated by Mr. Fox Talbot, in the "Transactions of the Society of
Biblical Archæology," Vol. II, p. 60, and Prof. Schrader in his
"_Hollenfahrt der Istar_," pp. 90-95.
A copy of the text is given in the fourth volume of the "Cuneiform
Inscriptions of Western Asia," plate 10.