“ Let the evil depart from me, so that I may be preserved with thee!
Let me have a propitious dream,
The dream which I dream, may it be propitious, yea, established be the dream which I dream!
The dream which I dream, turn it to good.
May the god Maḫir, the god of dreams, stand at my head!
Let me enter E-sagila, the temple of the gods, the house of life!
To Marduk, the merciful and compassionate, into his merciful hands deliver me!
So shall I do homage to thy greatness and extol thy godhead!
May the dwellers in my city glorify thy might . . . may mankind extol thee! ”

“ Deliverance for my troubled house, full of lamentation!
Deliverance for my spirit, full of sorrow and sighing!
O . . . Irnini, fierce lioness, may thy heart be appeased!
Raging wild ox, may thy heart be appeased! ”

“ Throughout thy land he has kindled conflagrations, and poured fire out like a column.
O my mistress, I am fast bound to misfortune,
O my mistress, thou hast beset me, and hast brought sickness upon me,
The mighty enemy has trodden me down as a reed.
I have no judgment, I have no wisdom.
Like a marsh (?) I wail day and night. ”

“ The term "penitential psalms" is, of course, purely general; but in view of the striking similarity which some of these compositions bear to certain Biblical psalms, both in tone and sometimes even in phraseology, the term on the whole constitutes a fairly apt designation of those Assyrian and Babylonian religious texts in which the keynote is a consciousness of sin and shortcoming on the part of the suppliant coupled with an appeal to a deity or deities for absolution.
We are chiefly indebted to Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh for the preservation of this branch of literature. ”

“ In the penitential psalms the suppliant, in many cases, was probably the king, as the disasters and misfortunes to which reference is made are of a national rather than personal character, and thus incidentally these texts form an exception to the otherwise more or less true generalisation that the Babylonian and Assyrian kings of those days, according to their own annals, never sustained a check or suffered a defeat. ”

“ The hard fact that some misfortune had befallen the suppliant irresistibly argued the anger of the deity as the cause thereof; hence the necessity of appeasing that anger in order to avert further disaster. ”

“ The lady is queen!
Irnini, the valiant daughter of Sin, hath no rival.
PRAYER OF THE RAISING OF THE HAND TO ISHTAR
This is the (magical) ritual; thou shalt kneel at the foot, a green bow shalt thou sprinkle with pure water; four bricks saḫḫu shalt thou set up;
A lamb shalt thou take; with ṣarbatu-wood shalt thou fill [the censer] , and thou shalt set fire [thereto] ; sweet-scented unguents, fine meal (?) and some cypress-wood,
Shalt thou heap thereon; a drink-offering shalt thou offer, but thou shalt not bow thyself down. This incantation before the goddess Ishtar. ”