Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations Part 10

Babylonia and a.s.syria were both administered by a bureaucracy, but whereas in a.s.syria the bureaucracy was military, in Babylonia it was theocratic. The high-priest was the equal and the director of the king, and the king himself was a priest, and the adopted child of Bel. In a.s.syria, on the contrary, the arbitrary power of the monarch was practically unchecked. Under him was the Turtannu or Tartan, the commander-in-chief, who commanded the army in the absence of the king.

The Rab-saki, Rab-shakeh, or vizier, who ranked a little below him, was the head of the civil officials; besides him we hear of the Rab-sa-resi or Rabsaris, "the chief of the princes," the Rab-mugi or Rab-Mag, "the court physician," and an endless number of other officers. The governors of provinces were selected from among the higher aristocracy, who alone had the privilege of sharing with the king the office of _limmu_, or eponymous archon after whom the year was named. Most of these officers seem to have been confined to a.s.syria; we do not hear of them in the southern kingdom of Babylonia. There, however, from an early period royal judges had been appointed, who went on circuit and sat under a president. Sometimes as many as four or six of them sat on a case, and subscribed their names to the verdict.

The main attention of the a.s.syrian government was devoted to the army, which was kept in the highest possible state of efficiency. It was recruited from the free peasantry of the country--a fact which, while it explains the excellence of the a.s.syrian veterans, also shows why it was that the empire fell as soon as constant wars had exhausted the native population. Improvements were made in it from time to time; thus, cavalry came to supersede the use of chariots, and the weapons and armour of the troops were changed and improved. Engineers and sappers accompanied it, cutting down the forests and making roads as it marched, and the commissariat was carefully attended to. The royal tent was arranged like a house, and one of its rooms was fitted up as a kitchen, where the food was prepared as in the palace of Nineveh. In Babylonia it was the fleet rather than the army which was the object of concern, though under Nebuchadrezzar and his successors the army also became an important engine of war. But, unlike the a.s.syrians, the Babylonians had been from the first a water-faring people, and the ship of war floated on the Euphrates by the side of the merchant vessel and the state barge of the king.

Such then were the kingdoms of Babylonia and a.s.syria. Each exercised an influence on the Israelites and their neighbours, though in a different way and with different results. The influence of a.s.syria was ephemeral.

It represented the meteor-like rise of a great military power, which crushed all opposition, and introduced among mankind the new idea of a centralised world-empire. It destroyed the northern kingdom of Samaria, and made Palestine once more what it had been in pre-Mosaic days, the battle-ground between the nations of the Nile and the Tigris. On the inner life of western Asia it left no impression.

The influence of Babylonia, on the other hand, was that of a venerable and a widely reaching culture. The Canaan of the patriarchs and the Canaanitish conquest was a Canaan whose civilisation was derived from the Euphrates, and this civilisation the Israelites themselves inherited. Abraham was a Babylonian, and the Mosaic Law is not Egyptian but Babylonian in character, wherever it ceases to be specifically Israelite. The influence of Babylonia, moreover, continued to the last.

It was the Babylonish Exile which changed the whole nature of the Jewish people, which gave it new aims and ideals, and prepared it for the coming of the Messiah. The Babylonian influence which had been working in the West for four thousand years received, as it were, a fresh impulse, and affected the religion and life of Judah in a new and special manner. Nor has the influence of Babylonian culture vanished even yet. Apart from the religious beliefs we have received from Israel, there is much in European civilisation which can be traced back to the old inhabitants of Chaldaea. It came through Canaanitish hands; perhaps, too, through the hands of the Etruscans. At all events, the system of augury which Rome borrowed from Etruria had a Babylonian origin, and the prototype of the strange liver-shaped instrument by means of which the Etruscan soothsayer divined, has been found among the relics of a Babylonian library.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

Our task is finished. We have pa.s.sed under review some of the facts which have been won by modern discovery from the monuments of the nations who helped to create the history of Israel. That history no longer stands alone like a solitary peak rising from the plain. Egypt, Babylonia, and a.s.syria have yielded up their dead; Canaan and even Arabia are now beginning to do likewise. The Oriental world of the past is slowly developing before our eyes; centuries which were deemed pre-historic but a few years ago have now become familiar to us, and we can study the very letters written by the contemporaries and predecessors of Abraham, and read the same books as those that were read by them. A new light has been poured upon the Old Testament; its story has been supplemented and explained; its statements tested and proved.

The Israelites were but one out of many branches of the same family.

Their history is entwined around that of their brethren, their characteristics were shared by others of the same race. The Canaan they occupied was itself inhabited by more than one people, and after the first few years of invasion, its influence became strong upon them. In race, indeed, the Jew was by no means pure; at the outset a mixture of Israelite and Edomite, he was further mingled with Moabite and Philistine elements. The first king of Judah as a separate kingdom had an Ammonite mother, and bore an Ammonite name, while the portraits which surmount the names of Shishak's conquests in southern Palestine show that the old Amorite population was still predominant there. It was religion and history that made the Jew, not purity of race.

That Egypt must have exercised an influence upon Israel has long been known. The Israelites were born as a nation in the land of Goshen, and the Exodus from Egypt is the starting-point of their national history.

But it is only since the decipherment of the Egyptian inscriptions that it has been possible to determine how far this influence extended, and to what extent it prevailed. And the result is to show that it was negative rather than positive; that the regulations of the Mosaic Code were directed to preventing the people from returning to Egypt and its idolatries by suppressing all reference to Egyptian beliefs and customs, and silently contradicting its ideas and practices. Even the doctrine of the future life, and the resurrection of the body, which plays so prominent a part in Egyptian religion, is carefully avoided, and the Ten Commandments have little in common with the ethical code of Egypt.

But while the influence of Egypt has thus been shown to be negative rather than positive, the influence of Babylonia has proved to be overwhelming. Perhaps this is one of the greatest surprises of modern research, though it might have been expected had we remembered that Abraham was a native of Babylonia, and that Israelites and Semitic Babylonians belonged to the same race. We have seen that the early culture of western Asia was wholly Babylonian, and that Babylonian influence continued undiminished there down to the days of the Exodus.

The very mode of writing and the language of literature were Babylonian; the whole method of thought had been modelled after a Babylonian pattern for unnumbered generations. Israel in Goshen was no more exempt from these influences than were the patriarchs in Canaan.

Babylonian influence is deeply imprinted on the Mosaic laws. The inst.i.tution of the Sabbath went back to the Sumerian days of Chaldaea; the name itself was of Babylonian origin. The great festivals of Israel find their counterparts on the banks of the Euphrates. Even the year of Jubilee was a Babylonian inst.i.tution, and Gudea, the priest-king of Lagas, tells us that when he kept it the slave became "for seven days the equal of his master." It was only the form and application of the old inst.i.tutions that were changed in the Levitical legislation. They were adapted to the needs of Israel, and a.s.sociated with the events of its history. But in themselves they were all of Babylonian descent.

There is yet one more lesson to be learnt from the revelations of the monuments. They have made it clear that civilisation in the East is immensely old. As far back as we can go we find there all the elements of culture; man has already invented a system of writing, and has made some progress in art. It is true that by the side of all this civilisation there were still races living in the lowest barbarism of the Stone Age, just as there were Tasmanians who employed stone weapons of palaeolithic shape less than sixty years ago; but between the civilised man of the Babylonian plain and the barbarians around him there existed the same gulf that exists to-day between the European and the savage. The history of the ancient East contains no record of the development of culture out of savagery. It tells us, indeed, of degeneracy and decay, but it knows of no period when civilisation began.

So far as archaeology can teach us, the builders of the Babylonian cities, the inventors of the cuneiform characters, had behind them no barbarous past.

APPENDICES

I

EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY

Egypt was originally divided into several independent princ.i.p.alities.

Eventually these became the kingdoms of Northern (or Lower), and Southern (or Upper) Egypt. Among the kings of Northern Egypt were (1) Pu, (2) Ska, (3) Katfu (?), (4) Tau, (5) Thesh, (6) Nenau (?), and (7) Mekha; among the kings of Southern Egypt was Besh.

The two kingdoms were united by Men or Meni (Menes), king of This, who builds Memphis and founds the First dynasty of the united monarchy.

DYNASTY I. (THINITE).

1. Meni.

2. Teta I.

3. Atotha.

4. Ata.

5. Husapti.

6. Mer-ba-pa, 73 years.

7. Samsu, 72 years.

8. Qabhu, 83 years.

DYNASTY II. (THINITE).

1. Buzau or Bai-neter, 95 years.

2. Kakau.

3. Ba-neter-en, 95 years.

4. Uznas, 70 years.

5. Send, 74 years.

6. Per-ab-sen or Ka-Ra (?).

7. Nefer-ka-Ra, 70 years.

DYNASTY III. (MEMPHITE).

1. Nefer-ka-Sokar (2) 8 years, 4 months, 2 days.

2. Hu-zefa, 25 (?) years, 8 months, 4 days.

3. Babai.

4. Zazai, 37 years, 2 months, 1 day.

5. Neb-ka-Ra, 19 years.

6. Zoser, 19 years, 2 months.

7. Zoser-teta, 6 years.

8. Sezes.

9. Nefer-ka-Ra I., 6 years.

10. Huni, 24 years.

DYNASTY IV. (MEMPHITES).

1. Snefru, 24 years.

2. Sharu.

3. Khufu (Cheops), 23 years.

4. Ra-dad-f, 8 years.

6. Kha-f-Ha (Chephren).

6. Men-kau-Ra (Mykerinos).

7. Shepseskaf.

DYNASTY V. (ELEPHANTINES).

1. User-ka-f, 28 years.

2. Sahu-Ra, 4 years.