Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
The Sumerians and Akkadians were the first developed civilisations and religions with the Egyptians close behind. The Egyptians were blessed with the Nile flooding with clockwork regularity and the surroundings of harsh desert that inhibited invasion. The country developed essentially self-sufficient and uninterrupted so that unity as a nation was a logical early step.
Mesopotamia was quite different. The twin rivers were not anything like as regular and their were fierce tribes ready to invade from several directions. Unity was much harder to develop and the country evolved as a succession of city states which from time to time blossomed into empires. Their generally risky situation was perhaps mirrored in their gloomy religious outlook where life was a struggle against mischievous forces, while the gods were generally tyrants who humans had to fear as their slaves. Marduk made mankind and announced:
Let them be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe.
Egyptians were much more comfortable with their gods who generally had people at heart and tried to help. The Egyptians did not fear their gods and did not fear death.
In Mesopotamia, each city state had its own god who owned it, and, although other gods were admitted, they were always subordinate to the city god. Everyone had to belong to a temple, whatever rank they had in society. If they belonged to the temple of Marduk, they considered themselves the people of the God Marduk. The god was the lord and the people served him as slaves or at least as servants. Part of everyone's produce belonged to the god and had to be brought as a sacrifice. The land itself belonged to the god and had to be leased from him.
Gods have never been any good at signing agreements so the contracts were signed on his behalf by the priests. If all of this sounds rather like the set up in Jerusalem after the building of the second temple, so it should. The priestly practices used there were taken from Babylon. Zerubbabel—the prince who came with the High Priest, Joshua, to re-establish the temple—has a Babylonian name.
Since each city state had its own god and the balance of power of the different cities changed quite often, the dominant religion changed quite often. The non-Semitic Sumerians of Ur and Uruk (Erech) near the coast of the Persian Gulf (In 4500 years, the gulf has silted so much their ruins are now well inland) founded Mesopotamian civilisation. The Akkadians, in the centre of the valley, adapted the Sumerian lifestyle to their own needs and founded a powerful empire in about 2400 BC led by Sargon. Half a millennium later, the great lawgiver Hammurabi of Babylon ruled the empire of the two rivers. Then the dominant towns became Asshur, Nimrod and Nineveh in the north of Mesopotamia where lived the Semitic Assyrians.
With these changes the name of the dominant god changed but, just as the Romans were adept at identifying gods everywhere with their own, the gods of these states were identified and the overall religious culture was fairly stable. In Mesopotamia the universe was conceived by a goddess, a relic of the matriarchal period—Tiamat, the Mother of the Deep, who fashions all things from the primeval chaos. In the original Sumerian religion, which always remained in the background even when other religious fashions dominated, Anu, the sky god, god of Uruk, Enlil, god of air and storm, god of Nippur and Enki, the wise god of the waters, god of Eridu, comprised a Trinity. But also present was always, Ninhursag, the ancient Mother Goddess.
Sky gods are remote and seemed to get more remote until they become virtually transcendental and require lesser gods to intercede between them and the lowly humans who felt they needed them. Enlil took over and created mankind by breaking the soil with his pickaxe. The first humans emerged and, like newly hatched ducklings imprinted themselves on the god striking the earth and began to do the same. Later Enlil himself receded, although he also never disappeared, and was succeeded by the Semitic gods of the Assyrians and Babylonians.
Beneath the original Trinity of Creator gods, came a secondary heavenly Trinity of Sun, Moon and Venus. Firts was Nanna, the Moon, god of Ur, who was the son of Enlil. Curiously Utu, the sun god was the child of the moon god, seemingly showing a tendency to regard the more tenuous as the more important—thus Air, Moon, Sun are the first generations of the gods. In the south the sun might have been seen as a too punishing to have been a primary god. He was honoured mainly as a god of justice. Utu was also called Babbar and his temple was E-Babbara, the House of the Sun, perhaps the origin of the word Babylon. Last was Inanna, the Sumerian, Venus, goddess of love and fertility, plainly an identity of the displaced Great Mother.
The Semites to the north had their counterparts of the Sumerian gods. Sin was the Semitic moon god, Ishtar was Venus and Shamash was the sun god. The god of the city of Babylon was Marduk, who, though only a deputy of Enlil came to be the top god after the time of Hammurabi. The Semites saw the sun as the god of justice and Hammurabi, famous for his code of law, hailed Shamash as the great judge of heaven and earth. The code was engraved on a stela which showed the sun god enthroned handing the king the ring and staff of a law giver.
The main festival in Mesopotamia was the New year Festival held in spring or in autumn. Its significance was the renewal of the land through the sprouting of new buds or the end of the summer scorching. They were the precise equivalent of Easter and Christmas, annual death and rebirth. The divine drama in the valley of the two great rivers was so close to that of the Christians at Easter that the noted archaeologist and Christian professor A H Sayce wrote to The Times to say that God had sent the rituals to prophesy the passion of Christ! It is asking too much perhaps to expect a Christian to be objestive about his work but really the only remedy is to keep them away from any archaeological digs that might have anything to do with the formation of the Christian religion. Who knows what they have destroyed in protection of their absurd beliefs.
The drama possible goes back to before the bronze age patriarchs. The earth goddess conceived a handsome son who later became her lover and begat the next son—a ritual performed by the king and his consort or the head priest and priestess in a ritual coupling. The son died and everyone wailed but the new son was born and everyone rejoiced. In the tropics the vegetation died in the summer heat but in northern climates it died with the onset of the frosts, so the times were not necessarily the same. The Sumerian drama focussed on Dumuzi or Tammuz, the creative power of spring while the goddess was Inanna, the fertility of nature.
After the fall of Ur, 4000 years ago, the principal city was Isin where were found records of springtime cult festivals in which the king, Idin-Dagan, ritually married a priestess to represent the union of the god and goddess. Elsewhere the drama was heightened by an enactment of the battle of the creation when Tiamat was defeated by the creator god. The people of the two rivers wanted annual reassurance that chaos would not return.
In Babylon, Marduk had become the creator god. At the beginning of the festivities the god is declared dead—held captive in the underworld. The ceremony required the king to ritually abdicate and be humiliated before the god by the priest who strikes the king hard enough to draw tears from his eyes and strips him of his royal insignia. The king them humbly submits to the god in the Holy of Holies, saying:
I have not sinned, O lord of the lands,
I have not been negligent regarding thy divinity,
I have not destroyed Babylon...
The priests declares that the god has accepted the king's submission but strikes him again for good measure then returns the insignia of office. The king's position has been renewed for another year just as the year itself is, in the rebirth of the god. A week or so of ceremonial follows. Barges arrive from neighbouring cities with the priests and images of their gods and the battle of Marduk and Tiamat is enacted. The victory of marduk signifies his victory over chaos and death so he is arisen and celebrations occur. At the end of the week is the ritual coupling, perhaps on the top of the Ziggurat at the junction of heaven and earth.The depiction of the battle by Akkadian gem cutters on cylinder seals in the third century show Marduk being liberated from chaos with sun's rays rising from his shoulders.
Evidently Mardudk was a solar deity, the god of the spring sun, who took on additional duties because Enlil was too distant, and more practically, he was not, like Marduk, god of the top city. To assimilate the Sumerian pantheon Marduk took on the characteristics of the senior god. As a spring god he was identified with Tammuz and so became a solar god of fertility and creation, in contrast with Shamash who remained the solar god of justice. But since both were solar gods their features also merged so that Shamash also became linked with Tammuz, but in his winter form when he dwelt in the underworld. Of course, it seems quite natural that the vegetation god, Tammuz, should be seen to be associated with the sun god since the seasonal variation of the sun's position paralleled the cycles of vegetation. Ultimately the sun dominated and mesopotamian rulers identified themselves as the sun. Hammurabi declared:
I am the sun of Babylon which causes light to rise over the land of Sumer and Akkad.
Later the kings of the Assyrian Empire called themselves the sun of the whole of mankind, and their god, Assur, was a sun god, whose symbols were a winged solar disk and an eagle. He took on so many characteristics of the gods beneath him in the pantheon that he was virtually an absolute god. However since the Assyrians were a military people, their god had to have the aspect of a warrior and Assur was also shown as a bowman beside a solar disc.
Many scholars believe the first great historian, Herodotus, a Greek who travelled widely over the ancient world several centuries before the birth of Christ, visited the city of Babylon in its decline. He has left us a description of the city but, because he could not speak Babylonian, his remarkable statements must come largely from the lips of guides. Nevertheless, Herodotus affirmed no other city approached it in magnificence.
The city was built in a perfect square, one-half on each side of the river Euphrates, and the streets ran in straight lines, north to south and east to west, as in a modern American city. Two vast walls, three hundred and thirty-five feet in height and eighty-five feet broad at the top, enclosed the city, and they were, he says, fifty- six miles in circumference, so that the entire enclosed area would comprise nearly two hundred square miles! A hundred magnificent bronze gates pierced the walls and smaller walls, each pierced by twenty-five bronze gates at the end of the streets, shut the city from the river.
The walls and public buildings, constructed generally of sun-dried bricks—there is little stone in the region—were faced with glazed or enameled tile of brilliant colors. Nor was this artistic coating, which shone in the Mesopotamian sun, a monotonous surface of blue or yellow or white. The Babylonian artisans attained so high a pitch of art in enameling their clay that huge figures of bulls or lions or legendary animals stood out in relief from the bright surface. Great bronze figures of bulls and serpents guarded the gates. The houses which lined the streets were mostly three or four stories high.
One of the seven wonders of the world were certain hanging gardens, which seem to have been beautiful parks of trees and flowers in the topmost of a series of superimposed arches rising seventy-five feet above the ground. They were irrigated by an ingenious apparatus which brought up water from the river. The palaces of the rich added to the splendour.
The king's palace must have been a stupendous building for the mound of clay into which it has sunk in the course of time is seven hundred yards, or nearly half a mile, around. But the most impressive edifices were the great temples. That of the chief god, Marduk, rose about three hundred feet above the level of the city. Its seven stages were coated with pitch at the lowest level. Above they were faced with red, blue, orange or yellow enamelled tiles, or faced with gold or silver, in honour of the sun—gold, the moon—silver, and the five large known planets, with which the chief Babylonian gods were associated.
The furniture was as magnificent as the structure was imposing. Three great courts enclosed the area round the temple, and on the west side of the inner court, opposite the vast pyramid, was the temple of the god Marduk and his wife. Here was a gold statue of the god forty feet high, with a gold table, a gold chair, and a gold altar.
Outside was a stone altar on which animals were sacrificed, and an incredible quantity of incense was burned. Up the side of the seven-staged temple ran a winding stair, and at the top was the symbolical chamber of the god, with furniture of solid gold, awaiting the hour when he would descend to visit his priestess.
From the summit of the temple one would look for many miles over the great plain, in Babylonian, Edin, which sustained the millions of humbler folk who in turn sustained all this splendour.
Even the soil was a prodigy. The harvest was, Herodotus says, twice or thrice as bountiful as in other lands, the ears of wheat and barley growing to a phenomenal size. Rich groves of palm trees waved in the breeze all over the plain and so expert were the food growers that from the fruit of the palm they got bread, wine, and honey. From their scattered villages they looked with pride toward Babel—the Greeks called it Babylon—or The Gate of the God,a name which ignorant Hebrew scribes long afterwards connected with their own word for speech to confuse it and turn it into a myth.
Herodotus brings the very people before us in this enthusiastic account of Babylon in the first book of his history. They were clad in white linen tunics to the feet. Over this they wore a woollen tunic or robe and a white mantle. They had the full beards of the Semite, and wore their hair long, and both men and women copiously bathed themselves with perfumes. Men carried walking sticks, with fancily carved heads and they had seals, to seal the clay envelopes of their clay letters, dangling from their girdles. Women had strings of beads on their heads.
But how did they live? Here Herodotus begins to tell stories which, considering the high civilization of the Babylonians, are less easy to believe than his descriptions of the city.
They had no physicians, he says. The sick man was laid in one of the public squares with which the city abounded, and every passer by was compelled to ask his symptoms or his malady. If any had had the same malady, or knew another person who had been similarly afflicted, he told the patient what to do. And if the sick man died, he was buried in honey!
Marriage, he says, was by purchase or auction sale. On a certain day all the maids of a place were assembled and put up to the highest bidder. No parent was permitted otherwise to dispose of his daughter; and assuredly no daughter to dispose of herself. The price was pooled and equally divided in dowries, so that the prettier girls helped to endow the less favoured.
His famous statement about the morals of ancient Babylon is to the effect that every woman had once in her life to prostitute herself in what Herodotus calls the court of Venus, meaning no doubt, the court of the temple of the goddess Ishtar. There she was compelled to stand until some man threw her a coin, saying, The goddess Mylitta prosper thee, and taking her away to his couch. The ordeal—Herodotus is kind enough to represent it as an ordeal to them—was over at once for the prettier girls of Babylon but those who were not pretty might have to "wait three or four years in the precinct."
Herodotus is clear that Babylonian women shrank from the affront to which their priests exposed them, and adds that, once a woman has accepted the coin and discharged her debt, no gift, however great, will prevail with her. Most Christian preachers fond of illustrating the barbarity of pre-Christian civilisation say nothing of this moral sequel. It could not be said of many women in our modern cities. Another passage shows Babylonians as particularly delicate about sex. After intercourse, a husband and wife must sit on either side of a burning censer until dawn, and must then purify themselves by washing before they are allowed to touch anything.
Modern scholars have long suspected that the legend about the women of Babylon is an absurdity, and recent archaeological research has completely discredited it. The men and women of Babylon were at least as moral in sexual matters as, and probably more moral than, the inhabitants of any metropolis of our time.
Babylon was a mighty city, and all that Herodotus says about its beauty is confirmed by our discoveries. This is the city of Babylon which was known to the Jews of the sixth century BC. It had earlier been destroyed by the Assyrians and then had been rebuilt on a larger scale and lavishly decorated in the seventh century to avoid the curse of the patron god of the city, Marduk. This new and grander Babylon is the city of Herodotus and of the Old Testament.
Its circuit was nearer twelve miles than the fifty-six miles of the Greek historian, but its famous walls were huge, being actually about ninety feet broad at the top. Herodotus was well informed about this.
But in regard to its morals and its women he totally misunderstood his informants. There was no auction of wives in Babylon, and there was no such law as the prostitution of every woman at the temple of Ishtar. By that time, Ishtar was a patroness of virtue and the chief refuge of sinners. Women had in ancient Babylon a position of respect and prestige scarcely lower than they have won in modern times and the law of sexual purity was most drastically enforced upon both sexes.
The law is so severe in regard to sexual offenses, and religious literature ascribes to the gods and goddesses so stern a demand of sexual purity in their worshippers, that the story is now generally abandoned. We have even more positive disproof in the marriage-tablets of the women of Babylon, which habitually describe the bride as a virgin.
Modern learned commentators on Herodotus say marriage by auction was an ancient custom that had been abandoned ages before the time of Herodotus, and the Jewish Exile. It is absurd to think of it in connection with the vast city of more than a hundred square miles area which we have described. A proper reading of Herodotus suggests it was a custom of the past.
Discoveries showing us the Babylonian character remarkably vindicate Babylonian civilization and how Judaism and the Old Testament were indebted to it.
First is the discovery of the Babylonian code of laws compiled by King Hammurabi. The law of Moses had been regarded as the most just and original in ancient history. It was so wonderful for its age that many people thought it must have been inspired by God. A Babylonian code a thousand years older than the supposed date of Moses and sixteen centuries older than the Mosaic laws as we have them is the real source of the law of Moses. It is more than just the Mosaic code and implies a far higher degree of civilization.
Five or six thousand years ago, we find two very different races mingling on the great plain of Mesopotamia. One was a race of beardless men, in some respects like the Mongolians, whom we call the Sumerians. The other was the Semitic race, the Akkadians, who in the end became predominant. The Sumerians seem to have descended upon the plain from the mountains of the northeast—the direction of Asia—and it is clear that they drained the vast marshes, confined the rivers where necessary, irrigated the dry land, and built the first cities.
They also, like the Egyptians, Chinese, and Mexicans, developed hieroglyphics, picture-writing, which became in time the scrawls on clay tablets which we call the cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing of the Babylonians and Assyrians. The scribe used a slender square wooden pencil, and with this he made indentations on the clay. What had originally been a picture of a bird or a man became a few wedge-shaped lines standing for the same object.
The first cities of the Sumerians, such as Eridu and Nippur, the sites of which are now inland, once were sea-ports, the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, having silted up miles of the Gulf in the last six thousand years. Perhaps silting up suggested to the ancient Sumerians their version of the creation of the world, which is now the first verses of Genesis. The beginning was a watery waste, and the gods separated the land from the water.
The Sumerians were the great city-builders, agriculturists, and engineers. But from the earliest age we find the Semitic people, probably from Arabia, mingling with them and taking over the work of civilization. The people were gathered in a number of city-states and these were generally ruled by the priests. At last arose a monarch, Sargon, an Akkadian conqueror, who has a peculiar interest in connexion with religion.
One of the clay tablets covered with the cuneiform writing of the Babylonians and Assyrians refers to Sargon, the great king. His mother bore him in secret, perhaps because he was illigitimate. After the birth she made a little ark or boat of reeds or rushes, coated it with pitch, which is natural there. She placed the babe in it and she set it afloat on the river, doubtless expecting it to die but hoping it might be saved. The child was destined to be a mighty leader and the gods took care of him. A water-carrier found the ark and reared the child, until the goddess Ishtar saw and fell in love with the youth, and made him king over the land.
The story is retold applied to Moses in the Hebrew bible. Sargon, who founded Babylon and created the first Mesopotamian empire, lived over two thousand years before Christ and even a thousand years before the presumed time of Moses. Sargon's early empire collapsed, and small city-states replaced it. Until about 1800 BC, when King Hammurabi compiled a law to supersede the different laws of the states in his empire. He gathered the best of the ancient laws in one code.
This code was found carved on a black diorite column seven feet high in the ruins of Susa in 1901. A conqueror of Babylon about 1100 BC had stolen it and carried it off to the hills. On the upper part of it is a figure of Hammurabi in an attitude of worship before the sun-god, Shamash. The king says he made the code himself.
The sentiment of justice which inspires the code is remarkable. People who imagine that these pagan nations lived in darkness and the shadow of death will read the clauses of the code with astonishment. Every conceivable kind of injury or injustice has its separate clause, and the fine or other punishment is assigned in proportion to the delinquency. The relations of husbands and wives are regulated, in a series of forty clauses, with a sense of justice that wives never experienced in Christian Europe. Slaves are protected against injury, and the rights of the wife against a concubine are carefully prescribed.
Four thousand years ago this code of law laid down a minimum wage for every class of workers in the kingdom,in contrast to the indifference of Christian law to its workers in fifteen centuries. Every manual worker, skilled or unskilled, had his wage fixed by law. The agricultural workers were paid in corn, and the artisans had from four to six grains of silver.
It took the Papacy eighteen hundred years to declare that a worker had a right to a living wage which the Pope refused to define. Yet "wicked" Babylon did it two thousand years before Christ was born. The principle of a state law and some of its particulars in the law of Moses are simply borrowed from the Babylonian code, but are not as just.
Babylon, supposed to have been a sink of iniquity, in which chastity was unknown, followed these clauses in the Hammurabi Code of four thousand years ago:
If the wife of a man is found lying with another male, they shall be bound and thrown into the water; unless the husband lets the wife live, and the king lets his servant live.
If a man has forced the wife of another man, who has not known the male and who still resides in the house of her father, and has lain within her breasts, and he is found, that man shall be slain.
If a woman is accused by her husband of adultery and there is no evidence, "she shall swear by the name of god and return into her house." Clause 132 says that if she is accused by others of adultery, "she shall plunge for her husband into the holy river, or clear herself by ordeal."
If a man is taken prisoner, and his wife goes off with another man, though there is food for her in the house, she shall be drowned. If she does this because there is no food, "that woman bears no blame."
If a man who had deserted his wife returned and claimed her, though she had married again, she need not go back.
For incest with a daughter, the sentence was exile.
For adultery with one's daughter-in-law, if the son had had relations with her, a man was drowned. If the son had not yet had intercourse with the girl, the man was heavily fined, and the girl received her dowry back and was free to remarry.
In the case of incest of mother and son, "both of them shall be burned".
The reader will now perceive the full irony of the statement that is constantly being made from pulpits that we "are returning to the morals of ancient Babylon!" Any attempt in any modern civilization to enforce even an approach to the Babylonian law would result in rebellion. Every variety of sexual offense, which is either not punished at all or only visited with a few months' imprisonment in any Christian civilization, was in ancient Babylon punished with death. Babylon, indeed, could be more justly accused, not of looseness in sex-matters, but of savage puritanism. These old laws were probably not always enforced in all their rigor. But they are an eloquent testimony to the Babylonian's stern view of sexual irregularities. Fancy Chicago or New York or London, to say nothing of Rome, Paris, or Madrid, with such laws on its statute-books!
On the other hand, there was a very easy and just law of divorce or remarriage. When we read in one clause that a woman was divorced by the husband merely saying, "she is divorced," we may be inclined to suspect injustice. But other clauses restore the balance. A woman has only to refuse conjugal rights, which would lead to a judicial inquiry and, if the man is proven at fault, she takes her dowry and is free to marry again. Many clauses regulate her right to her dowry and other property, and protect her against the intrigues of concubines.
There are clauses referring to priestesses and other women serving the temples which throw light on the subject. Four types of sacred women are mentioned. Two of these are married priestesses, and the following two clauses show how irreproachable their lives had to be:
If a priestess who has not remained in the sacred building shall open a wine-shop, or enter a wine-shop for drink, that woman shall be burned.
If a man has pointed the finger against a priestess or the wife of another man unjustifiably, that man shall be thrown before the judge, and his brow shall be branded.
The other two types of sacred women were, apparently, not married. One is expressly called a virgin. The law regulates their dowry (which the father settles on them on devoting them to the temples) but never contemplates their having children. They were temporary nuns, leaving to marry after a time. Nowhere in the whole law is there the least allusion to sacred prostitution.
Such were the laws which king Hammurabi and his successors often administered in person at the gates of the temples. And were they enforced? A judge who gave an unjust verdict suffered the just or punishment increased twelve-fold, and then was deposed. Babylon seems unlike the scriptural place, and although it is possible that it had degenerated, it is also possible that the scriptural authors were using it metaphorically.
A collection of legal documents has also been recovered and show extraordinary engagements sealed with religious oaths, and marriage contracts that habitually describe the bride as a virgin. A collection of creation-myths and other legends is another source. But the main source is what is broadly called the temple literature, or ritual, a very large collection of written oracles or forecasts, of magical texts and incantations, and of hymns and prayers.
Clay tablets preserve even letters from man or wife, marriage tablets, business contracts, and so on, For the sacred literature and the semi-sacred epics we have the further advantage that great collections of these tablets were made in libraries. Asurbanipal, the greatest king of Assyria, and a most zealous patron of science and letters, formed (about 650 BC) an enormous library of tens of thousands of tablets, and we have had the good fortune to recover a large part of this.
As a rule the incantations or exorcisms, the charms or spells with which the priests drove out the devils or combated their influence, are more interesting from the religious than the moral point of view. But some of these incantations are closely allied to prayers. The earliest are mere charms. God is invoked to drive out the devil, the good spirit is asked, in semi-magical formulae, to smite the evil spirit. But as time went on the idea grew that a man's sins had brought the evil upon him, and confession of sin became a condition of recovery.
Priests drew up lists of sins—much like what you will find in Roman Catholic prayer books today—and one of these was read by the priest to the worshipper, so that he might recognize and confess his transgression. They therefore give us the Babylonian moral code. One of them begins as follows:
Has he sinned against a god?
Is his guilt against a goddess?
Is it a wrongful deed against his master?
Hatred towards his elder brother?
Has he despised father and mother?
Insulted his elder sister?
Has he given too little? [short weight]
Has he withheld too much?
Has he for "no" said "yes"?
For "yes" said "no"?
Has he used false weights?
Has be possessed himself of his neighbour's house?
Has he approached his neighbour's wife?
Has he shed the blood of his neighbour?
Robbed his neighbour's dress?
This code is couched in dry official language. In the prayers and psalms it so closely approaches ours, or corresponds so wholly to ours, that for use in a modern church very little alteration would be needed. One class of psalms, known as the Penitential Psalms, and probably recited by priest and penitent when the sin had been confessed, is of particular interest:
Oh that the wrath of my Lord's heart return to
its former condition!
The sin I have committed I know not.
Food I have not eaten;
Clean water I have not drunk.
This fasting of the penitent is frequently mentioned, apparently as a constant religious practice of the Babylonians. The Roman Catholic may find that fact as disturbing as the confession of sins to the priest, the imploring of the intercession of the Queen of Heaven, or the annual celebration of the death and resurrection of a god.
One of their hymns recalls to our minds the Lord's Prayer, and it is still more strongly recalled by the following prayer which King Nebuchadnezzar, on his accession to the throne of Babylon six hundred years before the birth of Christ, or in 604 BC, addressed to the great sun-god Marduk:
O eternal ruler, Lord of the universe!
Grant that the name of the king whom thou lovest,
Whose name thou hast mentioned, may flourish as seems good to thee.
Guide him on the right path.
I am the ruler who obeys thee, the creation of thy hand.
It is thou who hast created me,
And thou hast entrusted to me sovereignty over mankind.
According to thy mercy, O Lord, which thou bestowest upon all,
Cause me to love thy supreme rule.
Implant the fear of thy divinity in my heart.
Grant to me whatsoever may seem good before thee, Since it is
thou that dost control my life.
If these Babylonian hymns and prayers had been translated into English by the translators the Old Testament, we should hear no more about the superiority of the latter.
There are hundreds of such hymns, scores to Shamash as well as Marduk. Here is one that might have been taken as the very model of the Lord's Prayer, yet the Rev. Professor Sayce, who translates and reproduces it, tells us that it was chanted in the temple of Sin at Ur as long ago as 2500 BC:
Father, long-suffering and full of forgiveness, whose hand
upholds the life of all mankind!
First born, omnipotent, whose heart is immensity, and there is
none who may fathom it!
In heaven, who is supreme? Thou alone. ...
On earth, who is supreme? Thou alone. ...
As for thee, thy will is made known in heaven, and the angels bow their faces.
As for thee, thy will is made known upon earth, and the spirits below kiss the ground.
He is the source of all light and life and strength, the creator and merciful farther of all. One prayer runs:
The law of mankind dost thou direct.
Eternally just in the heavens art thou;
Of faithful judgment towards all the world art thou.O Shamash, supreme judge of heaven and earth art thou.
O Shamash, on this day cleanse and purify the king, the son of his God.
Whatsoever is evil within him, let it be taken out.
The constant reference in these prayers to the supremacy of the one or the other god raises the question of Monotheism. The whole people of Babylonia never believed in only one god, but each city god was supreme for those city dwellers. It was exactly the same for the Hebrew tribes. They believed their own god was supreme, but in Canaan they met and some worshipped others. Certainly during nearly the whole period covered by the Old Testament the Jews did not deny the existence of other gods. They merely insisted that Yehouah was supreme and alone worthy of worship.
So it was, at different periods of Babylonian history, with Sin, Shamash, or Marduk. A god becomes unique only when political circumstances enable his priests to suppress his rivals. That was possible in the little kingdom of Judea. It was not possible in a land where great cities, three thousand years old, with special deities and powerful priesthoods, rivaled the metropolis.
But we have found proof that the educated Babylonians were monotheistic four thousand years ago. We have discovered a tablet of about 2000 BC—the period when the rise of Babylon made Marduk supreme—in which the other gods are represented as merely different aspects of Marduk. Thirteen of the chief deities of Babylonia (Bel, Sin, Nebo, Nergal, etc.) are thus explained, and the list goes no farther only because the tablet is broken. Monotheism was thus the religion of educated Babylonians seven centuries before Moses, and of educated Egyptians, not much later.
Babylonia was a land of gods and goddesses but it was also a land of innumerable devils. It was the source of the weird belief in legions of malignant spirits which, through Judaism, passed on into Christianity. And this side of Babylonian life must be considered here because it is intimately connected with the virtue of the Babylonian people. No one who is acquainted with it can doubt that if, as we saw, adultery was a vice in ancient Babylon, there were more urgent incentives to avoid it than there are in Christendom.
Had, then, the Babylonians a worse hell than that of the Christian Church? No other religion surpasses Christianity in its threats of torture in hell. The Babylonians in their latest days—under Persian influence—adopted a belief in punishment and reward after death. Before, they believed that people would be punished in this world for their sins, an effective deterrent.
Babylonians believed that the mental part of a man survived the body, but in a dim cave under the earth, Arabu, or the House of Arabu. In the legend of Ishtar, who descended into hell, it is said:
To the land whence there is no return, the land of darkness,
Ishtar, the daughter of Sin, turned her mind,
The daughter of Sin turned her mind;
To the home of darkness, the dwelling of Irhalla,
To the house whence no one issues who has once entered it,
To the road from whence there is no return, when once it has
been trodden,
To the house whose inhabitants are deprived of light,
The place where dust is their nourishment, their food clay,
They have no light, dwelling in dense darkness,
And they are clothed, like birds, in a garment of feathers,
Where, over gate and bolt, dust is scattered.
Here again Babylonians taught the Jews. In the Old Testament the dead usually pass underground to Sheol, the land of darkness. Sheol is a variant of a Babylonian name for the home of the dead, Shuala. Only later under Persian influence did the Jews began to talk of the spirit returning to God who made it.
The Babylonians dreaded this lower world. Their priests avoided mention of it. It was felt that the dead were soured by their gloomy prison underground, and would harm the living. This was one of the primitive roots of the belief in malignant spirits and it leads us on to the next basis of Babylonian character—the belief that the gods allowed legions of devils to torment the sinner in this life.
One large class of the Babylonian devils has the express title shades of the dead. Other and more powerful demons are clearly gods of an earlier generation whom a more successful religion has turned into devils. Alongside of the elaborate religion, the virtual Monotheism, of the priests and the educated, Babylonia had plenty of religion in its more primitive stages: spirits of the river, the tree, the field, and countless legions of evil spirits warring against men.
Christianity owes to Babylon the belief in legions of devils, There were countless numbers of them, arranged by the priests in classes for the purpose of exorcism. They lurked by day in dark places, old ruins or groves, or in the desert, at night they set out to torture humanity. Every evil, from a tornado to a toothache, came from them. Most dreaded of all were the night spirits, Lilu and his wife Lilitu, who evolved into Lilith, the screech owl and the night monster of the Jews, the vampire or blood-sucker of the Arabs and modern horror films.
The army of demons was responsible for every disease and misfortune of the Babylonians. Was an adolescent girl anaemic? Lilu or Lilitu had been draining her blood at night. Did a man or woman have an erotic dream leaving him or her excited and unsatisfied? It was Ardat Lili. Headaches, toothaches, stomach aches—every organ of the body had its demonic tormentors—plagues, fevers and pestilences were all their work. They were ferocious beings with animal head and human body, the prototypes of our devil pictures. They were lesser gods. The book of Job is thoroughly Babylonian.
Sorcerers and witches were very common. They turned on or turned away the evil eye, gave magical and often poisonous potions, made clay or pitch images of your enemies to injure or killed them. Christian Europe believed and did these things until modern times. Late in the Middle Ages cardinals sought to kill a pope by getting a sorcerer to make a wax image of him!
The cure was to appeal to more powerful spirits, the gods. The priests responded with more powerful spells, incantations, and exorcisms. The gods were conjured to drive out the devils. Then the ethical note slowly entered. The gods were the fathers of all men, full of love and mercy. Why, then, did they permit these demons to torture their children? Men had offended the gods by their sins.
The idea of sin is a morbid illusion. It is the basis of the fear that the gods will punish people. It is as old as the priests who devised it to control and exploit the simple.