The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 25

It was on this life, therefore, that the religious thoughts of the Babylonian were centred. And his view of his relation to the G.o.ds was a curious mixture of spirituality and the commercial instinct. On the one hand, it was a question of barter; if the man was generous in his gifts to the G.o.ds, if he did what they approved and abstained from what they condemned, above all, if the rites and ceremonies of religion were correctly fulfilled, the G.o.ds were bound to grant him all that his heart desired. On the other hand, if misfortune fell upon him, it was a proof that he had sinned against them. And as the centuries pa.s.sed the consciousness of sin sank more and more deeply into the heart of the Babylonian. At first, indeed, the sins were offences against the ritual rather than against the moral and spiritual code. The ghosts and spirits of the old Sumerian faith were non-moral; if some of them inflicted pain and disease upon man, it was because it was their nature to do so, and the only defence against them was in the charms of the sorcerer. But with the arrival of the Semite, and the consequent transformation of the goblin into a G.o.d and of the sorcerer into a priest, a new conception was introduced of the divine nature. The G.o.ds became human, and the humanity they put on was that of civilised man. They became moral agents, hating iniquity and loving righteousness, ready to help the creatures they had made, but chastising them for their offences as the father would his son.

"Father," in fact, is one of the commonest t.i.tles given to the G.o.d in the new age of Babylonian religion. It was only in the conception of Hades that the old ideas still maintained their influence, that the powers who ruled there still continued to be the malignant or non-moral monsters of an earlier belief, and that a common lot was believed to await in it all mankind, whatever might have been their conduct on this side of the grave.

In this world, on the contrary, the conviction that sin brought punishment with it became more and more p.r.o.nounced. And with the conviction came an increasing belief in the efficacy of prayer and repentance, and the necessity for purity of heart. The words supposed to have been put into the mouth of Merodach after his creation of man, late in date though they may be, testify clearly to the fact. I give them in Mr. King's translation(400)-

"Towards thy G.o.d shalt thou be pure of heart, for that is the glory of the G.o.dhead; Prayer and supplication and bowing low to the earth, early in the morning shalt thou offer unto him....

The fear of G.o.d begets mercy, offerings increase life, and prayer absolves from sin.

He that fears the G.o.ds shall not cry aloud [in grief], he that fears the spirits of earth shall have a long [life].

Against friend and neighbour thou shalt not speak [evil].

Speak not of things that are hidden, [practise] mercy, When thou makest a promise (to give), give and [hold] not [back]."

Already, in the age of Khammurabi, the author of the story of the Deluge makes it the punishment inflicted on mankind for their misdeeds, and the Chaldaean Noah is rescued from it by Ea on account of his piety. The penitential psalms and ritual texts are full of ill.u.s.trations of the same fact. It is true that the misdeeds are often merely involuntary violations of the ceremonial law or offences against the ritual, but the sense of guilt attaching to them is already profound. It required centuries before the Babylonian was able to distinguish between moral and ceremonial sin,-if, indeed, he ever succeeded in doing so,-but at an early period a consciousness of the heinousness of sin already lay heavily upon him, as well as of the need of repentance. A profound sense of his transgressions, and of the punishment they deserved, had grown up within him long before he had learnt to confine it to moral guilt. In this respect, again, he differed from the Egyptian: penitence and the consciousness of sin belonged to Babylonia; we look in vain for them in the valley of the Nile.

The light-hearted Egyptian was too contented to feel them; the G.o.ds he worshipped were, like himself, kindly and easy-going, and the pantheism of the upper cla.s.ses offered no place to a reproachful conscience.

But the G.o.ds of Babylonia, in the days when the Sumerian and the Semite had become one people, were stern judges. The theology of Eridu was coloured and darkened by that of Nippur; Ea might save Xisuthros from the waters of the Flood, but En-lil had doomed all men to destruction. And whether it was the sun-G.o.d who was worshipped, or the moon-G.o.d of Ur, it was still a judge who beheld and visited all the deeds of living men. In the sun-G.o.d the judge predominated, in the moon-G.o.d the father, but that was all. The father was also a judge, the judge was also a father, and the same word might be used to denote both.

But it must be remembered that the judgeship of the son-G.o.d and the fatherhood of the moon-G.o.d were confined to the present world. They were not dead G.o.ds like Osiris, whose tribunal was in another world. There was no postponing the evil day, therefore; a man's sins were visited upon him in this life, just as it was also in this life that his righteousness was rewarded. A death-bed repentance was useless; penitence, to be effective, must be manifested on this side of the grave.

Hence came the penitential ritual which forms so striking a feature in the service-books of Babylonia. It was reduced to a system, like the confessional in later days. The penitent was instructed by the priest what to say, and the priest p.r.o.nounced his absolution. For the exercise of priestly absolution was another essential feature of Babylonian religion.

Besides the consciousness of sin and the conception of repentance, the idea of mediation must also be traced to Babylonia. On the earliest seals the priest is represented as acting as a mediator between the worshipper and his G.o.d. It is only through the priest that the layman can approach the deity and be led into the presence of the G.o.d. This idea of mediation has a twofold origin. On the one side, it goes back to the beliefs which saw in the magician-the predecessor of the priest-the possessor of knowledge and powers that were hidden from the rest of mankind; on the other side, it has grown out of the doctrine that the priest was the vicegerent of the G.o.d. It was thus the result of the union of two conceptions which I believe to have been respectively Sumerian and Semitic. The deified king or pontiff necessarily took the place of the G.o.d on earth; Gudea, for instance, at Lagas was the representative of the G.o.d Inguri?a, and therefore himself divine. The fact that the G.o.ds were represented in human forms facilitated this conversion of the minister of the deity into his adopted son and representative; the powers and functions of the G.o.d were transferred to him, and, like the va.s.sal-prince in the absence of the supreme king, he acted in the G.o.d's place.

The Semitic Baal was a lord or king of human shape and pa.s.sions. He thus stood in marked contrast to the Sumerian ghost or spirit; and, as we have seen, the gulf between them is too deep and broad to be spanned by the doctrine of evolution. For the Sumerian the world outside man was peopled with spirits and demons; for the Semite it was a human world, since man was made in the image of the G.o.ds. The triumph of the G.o.ds of light and order over the monsters of chaos symbolised not only the birth of the present creation, but also the theological victory of the Semite over the Sumerian. And with the victory came a conception of the divine which was modelled on that of the organised State. As the human head of the State was himself a G.o.d, delegating his authority from time to time to his human ministers, so too in the world of G.o.ds there was a supreme Baal or lord who was surrounded by his court and ministers. Foremost among these were the _sukkalli_ or "angels," the messengers who conveyed the will of their lord to the dwellers upon earth. Some of them were more than messengers; they were the interpreters and vicegerents of the supreme deity, like Nebo "the prophet" of Borsippa. And as vicegerents they naturally became the sons by adoption of Bel; Asari of Eridu first takes the place of Ea, whose double he originally was, and then in the person of Merodach becomes his son; Nin-ip of Nippur, the messenger of En-lil, is finally transformed into his son, and addressed, like Horus in Egypt, as "the avenger of his father."(401) The hierarchy of the G.o.ds is modelled upon that of Babylonia, and the ideas of mediation and vicegerency are transferred to heaven.

Repentance, the consciousness of sin, and mediation are thus conceptions all of which may be traced back to Babylonia. And each of them leads naturally, if not inevitably, to other and cognate conceptions. Mediation, as I have pointed out, is partly dependent on a belief in a doctrine of vicegerency, which, in combination with a profound sense of sin, leads in turn to the doctrine of absolution. And mediation itself is given a wide meaning. The priest mediates between the layman and his deity; the lesser G.o.ds between mankind and the supreme Baalim. M. Martin aptly compares the intercession of Abraham for the doomed cities of the plain, and the doctrine of the intercession of the Saints in the Christian Church.(402)

The consciousness of sin, again, is similarly far-reaching. It extends to sins of ignorance and omission as well as to sins of commission. Time after time the penitential psalms ask forgiveness for sins the very nature of which was unknown to the penitent. "The sin that I have done I know not," he is made to say, "The transgression that I have committed I know not."

"An offence I have committed unwillingly against my G.o.d.

A sin against my G.o.ddess unwillingly have I wrought: O lord, my transgressions are many, manifold are my sins!"

The disease or misfortune that had overtaken him was a proof of the sin, even though it had been committed involuntarily or in ignorance that it was wrong. "When I was little I sinned," says another psalm, "yea, I transgressed the commandments of my G.o.d."(403)

Repentance has its corollary confession, whether public or private. And the ritual texts show that both public and private confession was practised in Babylonia. Indeed, private confession seems to have been the older and more usual method. The penitential psalms are in the first person singular, like the Hebrew psalms; in public confession the Babylonian probably believed that a man was more likely to think about the sins of others than about his own.

Penitence implies a need of absolution. It also implies a belief in the sinfulness of human nature and the purity of the divine. The purity, it is true, may be ceremonial rather than moral, and in the early days of Babylonian religion the ceremonial element almost obscured the moral. But as time went on the moral element grew ever stronger, and the ritual texts began to be superseded by prayers of a more spiritual character. The prayers addressed by Nebuchadrezzar to Merodach rise almost to the height of a pa.s.sionate faith in the absolute goodness and mercy of the G.o.d.

Speaking generally, then, we may say that the religion of Babylonia was essentially anthropomorphic, with all the faults and virtues of an anthropomorphic conception of the divine. But it was grafted on a primeval stock of Sumerian shamanism from the influences of which it never wholly shook itself free. It thus differed from Hebrew anthropomorphism, with which in other respects it had so much in common. Behind the lineaments of Hebrew anthropomorphism ghost or goblin are not to be found.

And yet between the religion of Babylonia and that of Israel there was much that was alike. It was natural, indeed, that it should be so. The Babylonians of history were Semitic, and Abraham the Hebrew had sprung from a Babylonian city. In the last lecture I drew attention to the similarity that existed between the temples of Babylonia and that of Jerusalem, a similarity that extended even to details. There was the same similarity between the Babylonian rituals and the Mosaic Law; the priesthood, moreover, was established on the same lines, and the prophets and seers of Israel have their a.n.a.logues in those of Chaldaea. The religious law and ritual of the Hebrews looks back like their calendar to the banks of the Euphrates.

The same lesson is taught by the literary traditions of the Hebrew people.

The cosmology of Genesis has its roots in the cosmology of Eridu, and the first home of mankind is placed by the Old Testament in Eden, "the plain"

of Babylonia, which was watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. The Babylonian story of the Deluge is the parent of that which is recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures, while it was at Babylon that the dispersal of mankind took place. The background of Hebrew history is as purely Babylonian as the background of Hebrew ritual.

And, as Gunkel has shown,(404) the old Babylonian traditions embodied in the Book of Genesis must have made their way to the West at the very beginning of Hebrew history. They enter into the web of the earliest Hebrew thought, and are presupposed by Hebrew literature. The cosmology which saw the primordial element in the watery deep, and told of the victory that had been won over Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, must have been already known in Canaan when the language and script of Babylonia were taught in its schools, and Babylonian literature studied in its libraries.

Long before the Mosaic age, the literary culture of Babylonia had profoundly affected the peoples of Syria, and had penetrated even to the banks of the Nile. Need we be surprised, then, if we find a "sea" in the temple of Solomon, the symbol of beliefs which had their origin on the sh.o.r.es of the Persian Gulf, or priestly ordinances which recall those of ancient Chaldaea?

The ordinances and temples were but the outward symbols of the ideas that had created them. The anthropomorphism of Semitic Babylonia is reflected in the anthropomorphism of the Israelites. The sense of sin and of the overwhelming power of the deity, the efficacy of penitence and the necessity of a mediator, are common to both Babylonia and Israel. Hence it is that the penitential psalms of the Babylonian ritual bear so striking a resemblance to the psalms of the Old Testament; hence, too, the individual element and deep spirituality that characterise them. Israel was indebted to Babylonia for something more than the seeds of a merely material civilisation.

It is true that there is a gulf, wide and impa.s.sable, between the Babylonian religion as we decipher it in the cuneiform tablets, and the religion of Israel as it is presented to us in the Old Testament. On the one side, we have a gross and grotesque polytheism; on the other, an uncompromising monotheism. Babylonian religion made terms with magic and sorcery, and admitted them in a certain degree to its privileges; they were not incompatible with polytheism; but between them and the worship of the one G.o.d there could be no reconciliation. It was the same with the sensualities that masqueraded at Erech in the garb of a religious cult; they belonged to a system in which the sun-G.o.d was Baal, and a G.o.ddess claimed the divided adoration of man. To Israel they were forbidden, like the necromancy and witchcraft with which they were allied.

But deep and impa.s.sable as may be the gulf which separated the Mosaic Law from the official religion of Babylonia, different as may have been the development of prophecy in Babylonia and Israel, the primordial ideas from which they started were strangely alike. The same relation that is borne by the religion of ancient Egypt to Christianity is borne by the religion of Babylonia to Judaism. The Babylonian conception of the divine, imperfect though it was, underlay the faith of the Hebrew, and tinctured it up to the end. The Jew never wholly freed himself from the dominion of beliefs which had their first starting-point in the "plain" of Babylonia; his religious horizon remained bounded by death, and the G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued to be the G.o.d of the living and not of the dead. It was in this world that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished; the world to come was the dreary shadow-land of Babylonian teaching, a land of darkness where all things are forgotten, but also a land where "the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."